“What if I Can’t be Hypnotized?”

By Cynthia Horacek, M.S., M.F.T.

I get phone calls from people looking for help to feel better.  Often the people who call want to know about hypnosis, and many times they have misconceptions about it, and those misconceptions seem to be pretty common.

Last week a gentleman called looking for a therapist for his wife who has IBS – Irritable Bowel Syndrome.   We talked for a bit, I answered his questions to the best of my ability, and his wife followed up with a call a little bit later.  She had been suffering with IBS for a few years, had been to dozens of doctors, tried several medications and some alternative treatments, including “colon cleansing,” or colon irrigation – another term for enemas.  But that’s a whole other article…

Can I be hpnotized?

The first thing the caller said regarding hypnosis was “I don’t think I can be hypnotized.”  A lot of people, even though they want hypnosis, have this concern.  The truth about hypnosis is that if you let yourself, anyone can be hypnotized.  Hypnosis is nothing more than a very deep state of relaxation.  We all spend some of our awake time in a hypnotic trance – like when you’re driving on the freeway and you’re so “entranced” that you miss your exit, or you’re doing things that you do every day on automatic – like brushing your teeth – sometimes you can’t remember if you did them.  Your mind is elsewhere; in effect, you are in a trance.  The best definition I once read was: “Hypnosis is a natural psychophysiological state of aroused, attentive and receptive focal concentration with a corresponding relative suspension of peripheral awareness.” Basically, that means that in a state of hypnosis, your mind is focused on one thing, and everything else sort of fades away (H. Spiegel and Spiegel, 1987, in Trauma, Dissociation and Hypnotizability by Maldonado and Spiegel, 1998).

The next question the caller asked was: “How will I know what you’re doing?”  Most people are aware of what is going on around them while in a trance.  If you are in a therapeutic hypnosis session, you will usually know what the therapist is doing because you will hear them.  You will hear what they are saying, hear them moving around the room, hear their voice if it is closer or further from you, etc.  Then she asked me, “What is it like – will I just go to sleep and the next thing I know wake up?”  That part is very individual.  Again, most people remember everything. And hypnosis is different from sleep in several ways. The therapist can even give you a suggestion to remember everything – or not.  There is a very small percentage of the population that will be amnesic for the period that they were in a trance – but this is very unusual.  Of course, if you don’t want to remember anything, you probably won’t.

Trust for the therapist is a very important part of hypnosis.  I will never use hypnosis with a client in a first session, for example.  For one thing, the chances of a successful outcome are probably nil.  (There are always exceptions to every rule, and there is nothing is always 100 %.) Second, I need to get information, history, assess the client and the usual therapeutic stuff we do in therapy.  But most importantly, the client needs to feel comfortable and be able to trust the therapist in order to relax enough and let go of control enough to enter a trance.   I’m sure there are therapists and  lay hypnotists (people who are trained to practice hypnosis but are not licensed therapists) who will do hypnosis in a first session.  And that is their prerogative.
Some people are great subjects for hypnosis – they are what we call “suggestible.”   Some people resist hypnosis, and find that they either can’t get relaxed enough to allow themselves to go into a trance, or it’s a control issue or a trust issue.  If the trust isn’t there, or the “chemistry” between the therapist and the client isn’t right, it probably isn’t to happen.

There are many common myths about hypnosis, and there are many questions that people have that I have not discussed here.  Stage hypnosis is not “real” therapeutic hypnosis, and in my humble opinion, it gives hypnosis a bad name, frightens people who may otherwise benefit from pursuing therapeutic hypnosis because they think they may be made to quack like a duck, and misleads the public.  Hypnotists who perform stage hypnosis owe it to the profession and the public to use the opportunity to educate people about hypnosis and the good it can do.

By Cynthia Horacek, M.S., M.F.T.
© Cynthia Horacek, May, 2009