If you’ve booked a hypnotherapy session or are thinking about making an appointment, you may be having mixed feelings. But congratulations are in order for taking the first step! Over the years, our ideas of hypnosis have changed as research emerges that there are benefits to hypnotherapy and hypnosis. Understandably, you probably still have questions about what you can expect at your session. I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know about your first hypnotherapy session.

The first question you may have is, “What is hypnotherapy?” Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are often confused, even though they go hand in hand. Depending on where you look, you will find different definitions. In simple terms, hypnosis is being guided into a trance, relaxed, or altered state where someone is receptive to suggestion. Hypnotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses hypnosis. Another question that gets asked often is, “Does hypnotherapy work?” Both the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society say it does. The APA acknowledged that hypnotherapy is an “effective therapeutic technique.” The success rate is up to you. If you walk into your session with an open mind and a yearning to experience the benefits hypnotherapy offers, then you will have a higher success rate. Example:

There is approximately a 90.6% success rate for hypnosis-based smoking cessation. The smoker wanted to quit and had an open mind, so the technique worked in an overwhelming number of cases. If you are only going to your hypnotherapy session because a spouse, partner, etc. is “making you,” well, it may not be successful for you. Hypnotherapy is an accepted treatment for: PTSD, depression, migraines, performance, anxiety, addictions, weight problems, anxiety, stress, OCD, grief, sleep, dementia, phobias, etc.

It can be used as suggestion therapy or for patient analysis.

This is What Happens During the Session

I will likely give you some tips about what to expect. I may even go over some of the things I'll want you to do to prepare. Make sure you listen to all the suggestions!

What is hypnosis like?

Many people don't know what to expect the first time they go into a trance. Remember:

Hypnosis is safe and enjoyable.

You will be aware of what is going on at all times

You cannot be persuaded to do anything against your own values You will be able to come out of hypnosis any time you want to. You are always in control of what you say and do.

You will not experience mental fireworks or get touched by some cosmic energy. What you will feel is amazingly relaxed; you will feel totally detached, that nothing really matters right now, that you could do anything you wanted but you can't be bothered, and that you just want to go on lying there and enjoying this amazing feeling. At the end of the session, you will feel deeply relaxed and refreshed.

 The Introduction-

Most clinical hypnotherapists agree that you are in control. Not the hypnotist. Not the therapist. You, the client, You will start your session by sharing what you want to do. I will ask you questions and observe you while you give the answers. You need to be honest with your hypnotherapist about your fears and what led you to be there in the first place. I need to know what you are trying to achieve before the hypnosis can begin. Some hypnotherapists may explain what happens to your brain in hypnosis. They may ask about your boundaries. They will explain your suggestibility and assess your suggestibility. 

The Induction

The induction is the relaxation part of the process that leads to hypnosis. You will be aware of everything around you and will hear everything I'm saying. What I use in the induction depends on the details and answers you gave in the introduction. I will use techniques that are safe but may entail many different types of language. I will be trying to find what works best for you, so it may take a few minutes. The induction can happen quickly or take up to 20 minutes. There are no cookie-cutter hypnotherapy sessions! Everyone is unique to the client.

After the induction is complete,I will ask a series of questions to determine the state of hypnosis you’re in. The Session- During the actual therapeutic session, the work takes place. 

Led by your answers and responses you gave in the beginning, I will begin with the changes you want to make. The language used will be specific to the change you described. You won’t want to run around the block without clothes or bark like a dog. You won’t have an urge to rob a bank. If you are seeking help to quit smoking, you won’t become a vegetarian when the session is over. 

Those myths are some of the misconceptions people have about hypnosis. The truth is, your hypnotherapist is a caring individual who is guiding you through your specific change process in your subconscious mind. With your permission only and when appropriate, I will give you a post-hypnotic suggestion (PHS) that is a trigger that specifies an action after you leave. PHS is a benefit to you for when your session ends or to use between sessions. Again, it won’t trigger you into robbing a bank or quack like a duck (unless that’s what you want it to do). 

Transition to Awakeness 

When I feel you have explored your subconscious mind and completed your change work, I will start to bring you out of the trance. It will be a gentle and slow process. You won’t “snap awake” like you see in movies. I will be watching you closely to make sure you are coming out of the trance without any issues. Don’t worry, the issue that hypnotherapists encounter is that their clients are so relaxed and in a pleasant state that they don’t want to come back! If this happens to you, I will gently help you with your process until you are fully out of the trance. I will then assess your mood and ask you some more questions. You will feel relaxed, and the change you made will start to manifest. 

After the session, I may suggest you schedule another session or provide you with more tools to use at home. I will explain what I did and the techniques I used to make you feel safe and comfortable. It’s important to do any post-session work that I ask you to do or schedule another session if you aren’t confident your hypnotherapy went the way you liked. Remember, you’re in control.

The history of Hypnotherapy

The earliest references to hypnosis date back to ancient Egypt and Greece. Indeed, ‘hypnos’ refers to the god pictured and is the Greek word for sleep , although the actual state of Hypnosis is very different from that of sleep. Both cultures had religious centres where people came for help with their problems. Hypnosis was used to induce dreams, which were then analysed to get to the root of the trouble. There are many references to trance and hypnosis in early writings. In 2600 BC the father of Chinese medicine,Wong Tai, wrote about techniques that involved incantations and passes of the hands. the Hindu Vedas written around 1500 BC mention hypnotic procedures. Trance-like states occur in many shamanistic, druidic, voodoo, yogic and religious practices.

Hypnotic Pioneers

The modern father of Hypnosis was an Austrian physician, Franz Mesmer (1734 – 1815), from whose name the word ‘mesmerism’ is derived. Though much maligned by the medical world of his day, Mesmer was nevertheless a brilliant man. He developed the theory of ‘animal magnetism’ – the idea that diseases are the result of blockages in the flow of magnetic forces in the body. He believed he could store his animal magnetism in baths of iron filings and transfer it to patients with rods or by ‘mesmeric passes’.

The mesmeric pass must surely go down in history as one of the most interesting, and undoubtedly the most long-winded, ways of putting someone into a trance. Mesmer would stand his subjects quite still while he swept his arms across their body, sometimes for hours on end. I suspect that this probably had the effect of boring patients into a trance, but it was certainly quite effective. Mesmer himself was very much a showman, conveying by his manner that something was going to happen to the patient. In itself this form of indirect suggestion was very powerful. Mesmer was also responsible for the popular image of the hypnotist as a man with magnetic eyes, a cape and goatee beard. His success fuelled jealousy among many of his colleagues and this eventually led to his public humiliation. looking back, it is quite incredible that hypnosis survived in these early years, because the medical world was so dead set against it.

Another forward thinker was John Elliotson (1791 – 1868), a professor at London University, who is famous for introducing the stethoscope into England. He also tried to champion the use of mesmerism, but was forced to resign. He continued to give demonstrations of mesmerism in his own home to any interested parties, and this led to a steady increase in literature on the subject.

The next real pioneer of Hypnosis in Britain appeared in the mid-nineteenth century with James Braid (1795 – 1860). Primarily a Scottish eye doctor, he developed an interest in mesmerism quite by chance. One day, when he was late for an appointment, he found his patient in the waiting room staring into an old lamp, his eyes glazed. Fascinated, Braid gave the patient some commands, telling him to close his eyes and go to sleep. The patient complied and Braid’s interest grew. He discovered that getting a patient to fixate upon something was one of the most important components of putting them into a trance.

The swinging watch, which many people associate with hypnosis, was popular in the early days as an object of fixation. Following his discovery that it was not necessary to go through all the palaver of mesmeric passes, Braid published a book in which he proposed that the phenomenon now be called hypnotism.

Meanwhile, a British surgeon in India, James Esdaile (1808 – 59), recognised the enormous benefits of hypnotism for pain relief and performed hundreds of major operations using hypnotism as his only anaesthetic. When he returned to England he tried to convince the medical establishment of his findings, but they laughed at him and declared that pain was character-building (although they were biased in favour of the new chemical anaesthetics, which they could control and, of course, charge more money for). So hypnosis became, and remains to this day, an ‘alternative’ form of medicine.

The French were also taking an interest in the subject of Hypnosis, and many breakthroughs were made by such men as Ambrose Liébeault (1823 – 1904), J.M. Charcot (1825 – 93) and Charles Richet (1850 – 1935).

The work of another Frenchman, Emile Coué (1857 – 1926), was very interesting. He moved away from conventional approaches and pioneered the use of auto-suggestion. He is most famous for the phrase, ‘Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.’ His technique was one of affirmation and it has been championed in countless modern books.

A man of enormous compassion, Coué believed that he did not heal people himself but merely facilitated their own self-healing. He understood the importance of the subject’s participation in hypnosis, and was a forerunner of those modern practitioners who claim, ‘There is no such thing as hypnosis, only self-hypnosis.’ Perhaps his most famous idea was that the imagination is always more powerful than the will. For example, if you ask someone to walk across a plank of wood on the floor, they can usually do it without wobbling. However, if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine the plank is suspended between two buildings hundreds of feet above the ground, they will start to sway.

In a sense Coué also anticipated the placebo effect – treatment of no intrinsic value the power of which lies in suggestion: patients are told that they are being given a drug that will cure them. Recent research on placebos is quite startling. In some cases statistics indicate that placebos can work better that many of modern medicine’s most popular drugs. It seems that while drugs are not always necessary for recovery from illness belief in recovery is!

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) was also interested in hypnosis, initially using it extensively in his work. He eventually abandoned the practice – for several reasons, not least that he wasn’t very good at it! He favoured psychoanalysis, which involves the patient lying on a couch and the analyst doing a lot of listening. He believed that the evolution of the self was a difficult process of working through stages of sexual development, with repressed memories of traumatic incidents the main cause of psychological problems. This is an interesting idea that has yet to be proved.

Freud’s early rejection of Hypnosis delayed the development of hypnotherapy, turning the focus of psychology away from hypnosis and towards psychoanalysis. However, things picked up in 1930s in America with the publication of Clark Hull’s book, Hypnosis and Suggestibility.

In more recent times, the recognised leading authority on clinical hypnosis was Milton H. Erickson, MD (1901-80), a remarkable man and a highly effective psychotherapist. As a teenager he was stricken with polio and paralysed, but he remobilized himself. It was while paralysed that he had an unusual opportunity to observe people, and he noticed that what people said and what they did were often very different. He became fascinated by human psychology and devised countless innovative and creative ways to heal people. he healed through metaphor, surprise, confusion and humour, as well as hypnosis. A master of ‘indirect hypnosis’, he was able to put a person into a trance without even mentioning the word hypnosis.

It is becoming more and more accepted that an understanding of Hypnosis is essential for the efficient practice of every type of psychotherapy. Erickson’s approach and its derivatives are without question the most effective techniques.

Over the years hypnosis has gained ground and respectability within the medical profession. Although hypnosis and medicine are not the same, they are now acknowledged as being related, and it is only a matter of time before hypnosis becomes a mainstream practice, as acceptable to the general public as a visit to the dentist