A Hypnotherapist's Struggle to Define Her Work, or, What Even is Hypnotherapy?

A little over one year ago, I began training as a hypnotherapist. Now, it's my full-time gig, and I fucking love it.

In my runner-up essay for Vocal's #200 Challenge, Vocal Made Me a Poet, one of my resolutions was to write and share about this powerful, anciently rooted, and woefully misunderstood method of change work. I wrote:

The Vocal community has shown me that here, I can share things I'm only just beginning to explore, myself, and grow that much faster by having conversations with thoughtful, supportive, kind fellow artists. I'd really like to delve even deeper into this resource.

Although I now have many hundreds of hours of experience to separate the woman who wrote that and the one who's writing this, the fresh feeling that hypnosis is something I am "just beginning to explore" still lives in me. I hope that feeling never goes away. I enjoy a good probing mystery, relishing in the sense that I could do something I love 10,000 times and it would unfold in 10,000 different ways. I suspect this will always be true of a hypnosis session, because what is more unique and surprising and mysterious than the deep exploration of individuated consciousness?

And yet, I have learned a bit more since then. I've recently found myself itching to weave all of my learnings and experiences of hypnotherapy into something more concrete, via the medium of writing.

(Plus, it's bad luck to renege on a resolution).

I decided to probe this unfolding by asking myself an obvious first question: What is hypnotherapy? To write about something, it's best to define it, but answering this question is more difficult, even for a hypnotherapist, than one might think.

In my essay at the start of the year, I loosely defined it as:

Therapeutic hypnosis is a lot like poetry. It has this intangible, blurry quality to it. It's most effective when you're feeling feelings fully, and sometimes, the more you try to make sense of it, the less you understand. It’s meant to be that way—to exist partly beyond conscious reach, so that it can change you.

In many ways this still feels true to me, but I do acknowledge there was a bit of a beginner's mind at work, here. Lately, the more I make sense of it, the more I actually make sense of it. What a relief.

Hypnotherapy can be broadly defined as the guided process of using a trance state to make a desired change. But this feels kind of... boring to me. It hardly encapsulates the astonishing insight and freedom I see unfold for so many during and after a structured experience of hypnotic self-inquiry. So let's unpack it.

When you read the words “trance state,” you might conceive of a sleepy state of semi-awareness, but I’d consider it the opposite.

Therapeutic trance is a door to heightened awareness. It’s a means of waking up.

Here’s the thing—we’re all already in a kind of sleepy trance. Not the Hollywood version with spirals and clocks, but a subtler one, crafted by years of social conditioning that began as soon as we were born. Not because there’s something nefarious at play, necessarily, but because this is just the way the mind of a human, and especially a child, works. We’re social creatures wired for culture, so when we are young, we take in information from our families and communities, often unquestioningly, and create adaptations to fit in and make sense of ourselves in relationship to the people and the world around us.

As we age, we do start to question and clarify some things—the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, and maybe we don’t need permission from an adult to go pee, after all—but some of our “adaptations” from childhood become what I would call subconscious trances of limitation, or:

The beliefs we hold, often unknowingly, about ourselves and the world that perpetuate the suffering in our lives.

For example, one client presenting with people-pleasing tendencies and a low libido uncovered a childhood dynamic, through a hypnotic regression, wherein their well-meaning parents urged them to participate in events and extracurriculars that they never enjoyed. This person took on the trance-limitation of, “What I want doesn’t matter,” and as an adult, they were still playing out the story of "What I want doesn't matter" in myriad ways that led to decades of shame, guilt, anxiety, and interpersonal conflict.

But their conscious, analytical, reasoning mind didn't know this answer. Only through therapeutic trance, through a state of heightened awareness, was this person able to find and alter the trance of limitation that had been wreaking such havoc on their life, and begin immediately carving new grooves into their ways of being to make room for the belief that "What I want is important and I am worthy to pursue it."

Trances of limitation come up in my work over and over again. A person who grew up in a household where everything was a joke took on the trance-limitation of, “Expressing emotion isn't nice because it brings people down,” and their body was riddled with chronic muscle tension from decades of held-in sadness as a result. In hypnosis, they wept the fat, authentic tears of a seven-year-old, and had their first adult experience of creating space for emotion without being consumed by it. I followed up weeks after their final session, and their neck pain hadn't returned.

I've seen a handful of clients with trance limitations of "I'm not good enough," or "I'm valuable as long as I achieve more," that were all rooted in early childhood experiences with an education system that conditions children to equate their self-worth with external measures of achievement, ranking them against each other through grades and performance.

It's been fascinating to see that trances of limitation aren’t just born from trauma. I would even say, from my admittedly still limited experience, that they aren't usually born from trauma. I’ve witnessed hypnotic subjects with self-described "healthy" and "traumatic" childhoods alike uncover trances of limitation from experiences that were fairly mundane, especially in comparison to what they might've judged as their worst memories.

I think this sort of benign quality to these identity-shaping experiences is what makes our trances of limitation so good at staying undetected. Most of us with conscious memories of big-"T" Trauma have probably spent a fair bit of time sifting through those memories, analyzing our stories, searching consciously and artistically for ways to heal and recover. But we don't usually dwell on that time we got a D on our math test and cried the whole car-ride home.

Why would we? As an adult, we know that D in 3rd grade didn't follow us for the rest of our lives. Except, maybe it did. As a kid, that was absolutely the end of the world; the crummiest, most intense feeling of being not good enough. And you know what? There were 100's of other times your child-brain felt that same, end-of-the-world, crummy, most-intense feeling over a mountainous molehill—and those got locked in there, too.

These trances of limitation, together with all of the beliefs we have that support our concept of self, form a rigid loop that runs a person’s life on autopilot. Every thought, emotion, reaction and behavior a person has is informed by that loop.

Whatever stories are generating your trance of limitation, hypnotherapy is the process of undoing all that crap. Fast. In a brain-wave state that is more conducive to forming new neural pathways. So you get to decide what you want to believe about yourself and the world. So you get to design your own loop—one that supports you in a life that feels happier, freer, and more purposeful.

Sometimes this loop-reforming occurs purely through metaphor, or even through somatic felt-sense—muscle twitches, spasms, sensations that move from place-to-place in the body. It's totally wild. Those are the times I really have to encourage a person, and honestly, even myself, to trust the process and not overthink it.

One recent session involved a client and me passing these symbolic, sometimes archetypal images back and forth—a galaxy expanding and contracting, a galaxy punctured by solar flares, a conductor guiding an orchestra to the crescendo, a jellyfish that was both spiky and soft. Metaphoric, metamorphic pictures that they couldn't distinctly relate back to their goal, and yet, 3 days later they texted me and said: "I'm noticing the change. It's working."

I feel compelled to mention that this person is a secular, career-minded, high-achieving professional. They’re wonderfully intelligent, but not particularly artistic and not at all into metaphysics or esoterica, so to witness this mythopoetic experience emerge from them was extra cool, for me.

Other times, the loop re-forming occurs through the more accessible and tangible process of logical reframing—holding up the uncovered trance of limitation in hypnosis and asking, is this true? How is it false? What would I rather believe, instead?

One of my favorite hypnotherapists, Marissa Peer, has a book called Tell Yourself a Better Lie. I love this cheeky title. It, ironically, encapsulates the truth perfectly—that our identities, our perceived limitations, and the beliefs that define us are mostly made-up stories. Upon shining a light on them, we discover how illusory and changeable they are.

I liken this phenomenon to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. For those who may not be familiar, the story is an allegorical dialogue narrative, wherein two philosophers discuss a theoretical group of prisoners who are chained up inside of a cave. Their necks are immobilized, and they are only able to look upon the inner cave wall. Behind and unbeknownst to them is a fire, and a puppet show between, casting shadows where they gaze.

The prisoners' entire concept of reality is based upon those shape-shifting shadows on the cave wall. They make meaning of the shadows—to them, the truth is nothing but shadows of images—until one prisoner frees himself to discover that all the horrifying things he thought were real...

…were actually vague shadows projected upon the cave wall by a fire and a bunch of weird puppets he never knew were behind him that whole time.

When the ex-prisoner was able to turn his attention away from the creepy shadow of a marionette show (note the layers of “not true”)…

…to the light and the color of the world outside…

He discovered the truth was bigger and brighter than he ever could’ve imagined.

But when he tried to tell the other prisoners about the world outside, they didn’t believe him. Why? Because their necks and bodies were still locked in chains, forced to face the shadows on the wall, lost in their trances of limitation.

That's the tricky thing about trances of limitation. Sometimes, in our singularly focused effort to dissect and analyze and make meaning of those shadows on the wall—we forget to consider the dire role of the chains. It's often only obvious in hindsight.

I've decided what follows could be my answer to the question, "what is hypnotherapy?"

Hypnotherapy is the guided process of de-hypnosis to break trances of limitation and awaken resources of self-empowerment.

Yet, everything that's missing is still scratching at me. I’m really only honing in on therapeutic memory regression and belief reframing, here… and that hardly encapsulates the experience fully, I fear. I'll keep noodling on it.

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By the way, was this interesting to you? Would you like me to share more reflections and insights about my work? Please do let me know. :)