Hypnosis FAQ

When most people hear the word “hypnosis,”  they think of swinging watches and hypnotists telling someone to bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken on command. While that kind of hypnosis does exist, it is for the sole purposes of entertainment that you would find on the stages of a Las Vegas show.

This is very different from clinical hypnotherapy. You are completely alert and in full control of your mind and body while in the hypnotic state. You can hear, speak, and even walk around. Your body is relaxed and comfortable. You will never be asked to disclose any secrets or do anything you do not want to do. I use hypnosis strictly as a healing tool.

Absolutely. In recent years, hypnosis and hypnotherapy have become accepted medical treatments to address a wide variety of issues and conditions. Researchers and professors at universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Penn State, just to name a few, have conducted clinical studies on hypnosis and found that hypnosis does in fact alter the brain and can be used for a multitude of conditions. Hypnotherapy is an extremely powerful and effective tool, and its results are long-lasting.

When you are in a hypnotic state, your conscious mind has been relaxed. This allows the hypnotherapist to work directly with your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind holds all of our “programming,”  much like a computer. You can “know” in your conscious mind that you want to make a change and be determined to make that change, but if your computer is programmed” to keep doing what you are doing, it will be nearly impossible to make lasting change unless you change the programming. That’s precisely what hypnotherapy will accomplish. When you change the subconscious programming, the behavior follows.

There is a very high likelihood that hypnotherapy will work for your issue. It is almost impossible to list all the possible uses of hypnotherapy, but here is a very complete list of the issues I would be happy to assist you with.

Hypnosis is a very comfortable, peaceful, and pleasant feeling. Your body is extremely relaxed, but your mind is aware. You will feel a sense of rejuvenation and feel refreshed after a hypnotherapy session.

Absolutely not! Hypnotherapy is a way of giving you more control, not less. You cannot be hypnotized unwillingly, and you cannot be prompted to do something that is outside of your moral code or say or reveal anything you do not want to.

No, you are able to come out of hypnosis any time you wish. You can no more get “stuck” in hypnosis than you can get “stuck” awake or “stuck” asleep. For practical reasons, as hypnotherapists, we do explicitly end our clients’ trances, but if we didn’t, the clients would naturally either return to full alertness or fall asleep. ​

The first session is the longest, lasting 70–90 minutes, and consists of the following four main components:

1. In-depth consultation to understand what specific challenges you are currently dealing with, what you feel the blocks are (if known), and what your desired outcome is from our hypnotherapy sessions together. ​
2. Detailed description of how hypnotherapy works in the human mind for your specific issue and what you should expect to feel and experience while in hypnosis.
3. Suggestibility Testing: In order to best create the most significant and powerful changes in mental programming, it is of the utmost importance to understand how you personally take in suggestions and information. This testing allows us to know exactly what type of hypnotic suggestions can make the most impactful positive changes in your subconscious mind.
4. The last part of the first session is the hypnotherapy itself, in which your subconscious programming will begin to change.