By: Karina Margit Erdelyi
Last Updated: Oct 8, 2020
Hypnosis comes from the Greek word hypnos — which means sleep — and has been used in some form by nearly all ancient cultures from Persia, China, Sumer, and India. In Egypt and Greece, the sick often went to healing centers known as sleep or dream temples to be cured by hypnosis. How is this age-old healing modality used today and is it a legit treatment for mental health conditions?
You’ve likely heard about people who’ve quit smoking or lost weight with the help of hypnosis but if you’re envisioning staring at a swinging pocket watch or being magically compelled to kick the habit, that’s not what we’re talking about. People clucking like chickens or drinking hot sauce thinking it’s orange juice is the stuff of late-night TV and is known in the field as stage hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy is a well-studied treatment modality 1,2 with quite a bit of clinical data to support it. In fact, Milton H. Erickson, MD, the psychiatrist who introduced hypnosis to the American Psychological Association back in the 1950s, had more than 10,000 case studies.
When delivered by a licensed practitioner, hypnotherapy can be an effective and complementary therapeutic tool for a host of issues ranging from anxiety, stress, and pain to weight loss and yes, smoking cessation. (Some psychologists and therapists receive training, too, finding it a useful add-on to more traditional forms of therapy.)
To better understand how hypnotherapy works, Psycom connected with Susan Holman, a seasoned clinical hypnotherapist and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) trainer who has been practicing in New York City since 2005.
What is hypnosis anyway?
Hypnosis is a technique that enables people to experience a heightened state of attention and focus that can aid them in changing their behavior. While often described as sleep-like, people in a hypnotic trance state aren’t asleep or zombie-like at all. They are actually highly-focused and hyper-aware.
Hypnotherapy—or guided hypnosis—is a form of psychotherapy that uses relaxation, hyper-focused attention, and intense concentration to achieve a heightened sense of consciousness that allows access to parts of the mind that are generally left untapped and underutilized, making real change possible.
The idea is to utilize one’s mind to alleviate or reduce a variety of issues, from phobias (generally defined as irrational fears rooted in anxiety), debilitating habits like smoking, overeating, and other unhealthy behaviors.
While myths and misconceptions about hypnosis persist, it has real medical and therapeutic benefits and has even been shown in some studies to reduce the symptoms of dementia.3
How does hypnotherapy work?
Hypnotherapy involves speaking to a person’s unconscious mind to facilitate and encourage positive behavioral change.
The type of hypnotherapy I use helps people use their unconscious mind to look at the “how” instead of the “why” behind a problem behavior. For instance, say you’re depressed, rather than ask why you’re depressed, I ask how you do that thing called depression so we can examine the underlying behaviors.
By carefully observing how a person communicates—their tone, tempo, body language, etc—and examining the internal representations of what is being shared, that individual’s experience and process are revealed and together we’re able to create new neural pathways to address the presenting problem.
Hypnosis is NOT mind control. Believe it or not, you are far more in control of your mind than you may think but remember it wasn’t so long ago that literature on the topic was relegated to the witchcraft section of bookstores!
