What can be treated with clinical hypnotherapy?

Hypnosis has been present within our civilisations for many thousands of years and the arrival of modern medicine and physiology has given us a framework for understanding this incredibly powerful technique. It is a less well known fact that early pioneer psychologist Sigmund Freud began his career as a practitioner of hypnosis.

Clinical hypnosis is now accepted by many medical and psychology professionals as an excellent intervention with tangible results. For a jargon free explanation of how hypnotherapy works click through the bold lettering.

Hypnotherapy gets your unconscious mind – which controls everything from a blink to your healing processes – to switch on and off various functions.

So you ask – what can be treated with clinical hypnotherapy?

If you think about it like being able to access all the ‘stuff’ that we do unconsciously this reveals the answer to your question.

Anything that your unconscious has control over hypnotherapy can influence

That might seem a little over confident – and where is the evidence you might ask?

Some areas of clinical hypnosis are well documented; smoking, irritable bowel syndrome, panic attacks and anxiety. You can google any of these and find articles from pop-psychology magazines to full blown PhD and MSc theses supporting the intervention.

The match between practitioner and patient really is key – without the trust and rapport it’s unlikely that your unconscious is going to let a relative stranger anywhere near your core ‘stuff’. This in turn places the world of clinical hypnosis in a tricky spot. It does not lend itself particularly well to the evidence based (double blind randomised) studies that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy seems to do so well in.

In some ways, the ‘evidence’ is dependent on the testing model. Therefore if the emphasis of the testing model is sympathetic to the process of the intervention model – bingo – you have an ‘evidence based practice’. You can see how it might appear that certain interventions such as CBT can seem to have most of the answers.

Trainee Policeman who needed a normal range blood pressure reading to pass his physical – he got in! (six sessions)

Senior civil servant who got the job – he came for confidence at interviews (two sessions)

Woman with Dystonia – a rare form of repetitive muscle convulsion – who wanted to get pregnant – she did (three sessions and then a referral)

Consultant Project manager overcame his crippling childhood bullying to resign from his abusive job and find a really great new role (twelve sessions)

Really talented journalist that had been unemployed for two years and off with depression – he went back into industry (twelve sessions)

Freelance cameraman whose dyslexia got his directors instructions to pan right and left mixed up (when he was live) – he was very frustrated after years of this. (Resolved after eight sessions)

Woman who was almost frightened to go out of the house because her panic attacks had become so bad (resolved after three sessions)

Special Forces person who came for handling the pressure of critical high level decisions (five sessions)