Clinical Hypnosis

Why do hypnosis?

Use of hypnosis in the context of psychotherapy can be a potent means for facilitating movement towards a more empowered and satisfying life. Clinical hypnosis can help to change outdated beliefs and to gain control over undesired behaviours. Hypnosis can enhance the efficacy of other treatment methods.

Hypnosis in psychotherapy can be used in at least four general ways:

• To suggest symptom relief.
• To access and mobilise personal resources for enhanced problem-solving.
• To teach specific cognitive, behavioural, relational or emotional skills to enhance self-regulation og improve management of situations.
• To create associations and dissociations that allow for greater connection to or distancefrom aspects of one’s experience.

Some of the most common evidence-based uses of hypnosis are: acute and chronic pain,trauma / PTSD, anxiety, depression, insomnia / improving sleep quality, habit control, IBS, headaches and migraines. Hypnosis is also used to enhance performance.

What is hypnosis?

A precise definition of hypnosis has yet to be established, a difficulty arising from the factthat hypnosis is a highly subjective experience that varies in quality from individual toindividual. Some of the defining characteristics of hypnotic experience:

Hypnosis involves an experiential absorption, a powerful focus on some stimulus (such as a thought, a feeling, a memory, an expectation, a sensation, the words of the therapist, or any specific aspect of experience).

Hypnosis can be described as a form of heightened focus and concentration where one becomes more receptive to learning. Selective attention and dissociation from otheraspects of ones awareness allow for meaningful responses to be generated beyond one’s awareness. Responses such as mood alterations or anxiety reduction in response to suggestion can occur without conscious effort to produce them. It’s this quality called “automaticity” that helps make hypnosis so intriguing: positive responses seem to “just happen.”

Hypnosis is a cognitive experience not far removed from many every day life phenomena. A hypnotic state, also called trance, is similar to what we experience when we daydream, or become so engrossed in watching a film, or reading a book that we lose track of place and time. You can laugh heartily, cry, or sit in suspense as if on pins and needles, even though you know it’s just a film. Such is the experience of trance, on one level one is aware of what’s happening but one accepts the experience that the hypnosis provides.

People respond to hypnosis in different ways. Some describe the experience as a state of heightened consciousness, while others experience hypnosis as a state of relaxed calm and focused attention. Generally people experience hypnosis as a comfortable and relaxing state.

I have completed a one-year introductory course held by The Norwegian Association for Clinical Evidence-based Hypnosis, as well as Yapko ́s 100-hour Clinical Hypnosis & Strategic Psychotherapy Training. I’m a member of The Norwegian Association for Clinical Evidence-based Hypnosis (NFKEH).

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