Clinical Hypnosis is

“A state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion.”

— The Society of Psychological Hypnosis, Div 30 of the American Psychological Association

Ways clinical hypnosis can improve trauma recovery.

  • Ego-strengthening

    Ego-strengthening supports self-esteem, confidence, efficacy, and mastery. Trauma can impede ego development. Clinical hypnosis helps access positive emotions and alleviate negative ones, essential for behavioral change, self-care, and trauma processing.

  • Absorption & Deepening

    Clinical hypnosis helps calm our conscious mind, letting it take a backseat while still maintaining control. This allows the creative and imaginative parts of our mind to come forward.

  • Focus & Insight

    Clinical hypnosis can access our inner resources and wisdom, often beyond our cognitive awareness. This may enhance problem-solving abilities and resolve internal conflicts and tension.

  • Readiness for Change

    Clinical hypnosis can enhance work across all change stages. Techniques like hypnoprojective, desensitizing, elaboration, amplification, bridge-work, and ideomotor signaling support pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, change, and maintenance.

Five Steps of Basic Clinical Hypnosis

  • The goal of induction is to narrow down and focus one's attention to the internal experience. This gives space for the cognitive mind to quiet down allowing the unconscious mind to step forward.

  • The goal of this step is to progressively fall deeper into a state of relaxation, deeper into the internal experience and higher attunement to the subconscious.

  • The goal of this stage is to implement agreed upon interventions that promote one's goals. Typical goals for clinical hypnosis are ego strengthening, feelings of safety and security, holding positive self-regard, decreasing desire for undesired habits and negative thinking, exploration, etc.

  • This goal of this stage is to bring one's mind and senses to reorient to current environment. One will become more and more realert and back to accessing the cognitive mind.

  • The goal of this stage is to make sure one is fully alert and oriented into the physical space. Time will be spent discussing one's experience and insights from the hypnotic process.

Phenomenology of Clinical Hypnosis

Default Mode Network (DMN) is a brain network more active at rest, lacking goal-oriented behavior or external stimuli. It handles internal attention, self-referential thoughts, autobiographical memories, and mind wandering. Clinical hypnosis modulates the DMN.

Executive Control Network (ECN) is a brain network more active during focused attention, working memory, and task engagement. Clinical hypnosis seeks to decouple the DMN and the ECN.

Salient Network is a brain network active in integrating, detecting, and filtering relevant somatic interoception and exteroceptive information, responsible for emotion and autonomic nervous system activation.

Increased Attention

  • There will be an increase in focused attention of the subconscious (i.e. background state of consciousness).

  • There will be an increase in absorption, acceptance and automaticity and relaxed condition of mental and physical ease.

  • There will be changes in subjective experience induced by suggestions of the subconscious mind.

  • There will be a greater access to affect/memory/unconscious material.

  • There will be a sense of timelessness/time distortion.

  • There will be an increased ego-receptivity and heightened suggestibility.

Decreased Attention

  • There will be a decreased attention to external stimuli. There will be a fading of your orientation of general reality.

  • There will be an immediate spatial and temporal environments, where these components become irrelevant.

  • There will be a reduced active attention associated with the monitoring and censoring of the cognitive mind.

  • There will be reduced tension between the conscious (explicit) mind and the subconscious (implicit) mind.

What Clinical Hypnosis is not

  • Like Deep Sleep

    Clinical hypnosis is not like sleep; you remain fully awake and engaged with the clinician, who encourages you to share your experiences during the session.

  • Like Being Unaware

    Clinical hypnosis does not cause a loss of self-awareness or control. You can maintain control and stop whenever you wish.

  • Like Being Mentally Trapped

    Clinical hypnosis is not a state to get stuck in; you can open your eyes and be oriented at any time. After the experience, the clinician ensures you are alert and awake.

  • Like Accurate Memory Recall

    Clinical hypnosis does not ensure memory accuracy. Memory is inherently imperfect, reconstructive, and malleable. Hypnotic recall does not guarantee accuracy.

  • LIke Weakness in Thinking

    Clinical hypnosis is not a weakness. Some people are more hypnotizable due to their brain's decoupling of the executive control and default mode networks.

  • Like Truth Serum

    Hypnosis is not a truth serum; it doesn't eliminate discretion. You control what to share from your experience.

Research

“Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”

- Sir Kenneth Robinson