Can I Be Hypnotised? And Other Things Your Brain Wants to Know

Hypnotherapy is one of those things people seem to have a very specific picture of before they’ve ever experienced it.

Someone swings a pocket watch in front of your face, counts backwards from ten and suddenly you’re unconscious while they rummage around inside your brain. Or you wake up twenty minutes later convinced you’re a chicken.

Which, to be fair, would make my working day considerably more interesting, however, the reality is much less mysterious.

When I first speak to women who are considering hypnotherapy, one of the things I hear most often is some version of, “What if I can’t be hypnotised?”

Usually followed by, “My brain never shuts up.”

Perfect. Neither does mine.

A woman is seated in a dimly lit room, entranced by the rhythmic swing of a pocket watch used for hypnosis.

You don’t need to empty your mind, stop thinking or possess some magical ability to fall into a trance. Hypnosis is a state of focused attention, and it’s something we naturally move in and out of far more often than people realise.

Think about driving somewhere familiar and suddenly realising you barely remember part of the journey because your mind was elsewhere. Or becoming so absorbed in a film that, for a while, you stop noticing everything happening around you.

You weren't unconscious or out of control.

Your attention was simply focused somewhere else.

Hypnotherapy uses that focused state intentionally.

So... Am I Still In Control?

1000% Yes.

This is probably the biggest misconception I come across.

Hypnosis doesn’t hand me control of your mind, and I can’t make you reveal your deepest secrets or convince you to do something completely against your will. You can hear me. You can think, speak, move if you need to, and if at any point you decided you’d had enough and wanted to open your eyes, you could.

Some people experience hypnosis as a very deep state of relaxation. Other people remain much more aware of the room around them. Some see vivid imagery while others don’t really “see” anything at all.

There isn’t one correct way to experience it.

And this matters because I’ve had women worry that they weren’t hypnotised simply because they could still hear me and knew what was happening.

That’s completely normal.

The aim isn’t to knock you unconscious. I actually want you involved in the process.

What Are We Actually Doing In There?

This is where my approach to hypnotherapy becomes very personal.

I’m not interested in giving every woman who comes to me the same script and telling her subconscious that she is confident, worthy and enough while she lies there listening to relaxing music.

I want to understand why the belief she currently holds makes sense to her.

If you come to me and tell me that you completely lose yourself in relationships, we could spend an hour talking about boundaries, self-worth and all the things you logically know you should do differently.

But you may already know all of that.

What interests me is what happens underneath the behaviour.

Maybe asking for what you need has become associated with conflict. Maybe somebody becoming distant triggers an immediate fear that you’ve done something wrong.

Perhaps being useful became so closely connected with feeling valued that somebody not needing you feels strangely uncomfortable.

We follow that.

I ask questions and you tell me what comes up. We explore memories, feelings, associations and experiences that your mind connects with what you’re experiencing now.

Sometimes the connection is obvious.

Sometimes it makes absolutely no sense at first.

Those are often my favourite ones.

Because your subconscious isn’t organising your experiences according to whether they would make a convincing PowerPoint presentation. It makes connections through meaning, emotion and association, and sometimes something that seems completely insignificant to you now played a much bigger role in how you learned to see yourself at the time.

Finding The Evidence Behind The Belief

This is probably the simplest way I can explain how I work.

We follow the feeling to the belief, then we look at the evidence that taught you to believe it.

If part of you believes:

If I’m not needed, I’ll be forgotten.

There will usually be a reason that belief exists.

Your mind didn't pluck it out of thin air one Tuesday afternoon for entertainment.

There may have been experiences where being helpful brought connection. Times when your needs seemed inconvenient. Relationships where you felt safest when you were giving something. Moments where somebody withdrawing felt like evidence that you weren't enough.

Over time, those experiences can start building a pretty convincing case.

The problem is that once we believe something, we become incredibly good at noticing evidence that supports it while overlooking evidence that doesn’t.

So part of our work is looking at the whole case.

I’m not there to tell you that everything you believe is wrong. I want you to question whether the evidence you've been using tells the whole story.

Have there been people who stayed when you said no?

Times you were loved when you had nothing to offer?

Moments somebody else's mood had absolutely nothing to do with you?

Experiences where expressing yourself actually brought you closer to somebody?

Often, those memories exist too. They just haven't been given the same weight.

And when you begin finding the holes in an old belief yourself, we have somewhere very different to work from.

What If Something Emotional Comes Up?

It might.

We’re exploring experiences and beliefs that can carry emotion, so I’m never going to promise you’ll float through every session feeling like you’ve spent 75 minutes at a spa.

You might cry. You might laugh. You might swear. You might suddenly remember something you haven't thought about for years and wonder why on earth that has just appeared.

You’re allowed to have whatever response you have.

My job isn’t to drag you through every painful memory you’ve ever experienced in the name of “healing”. We work with what comes up, at a pace that allows us to explore it without turning the session into an endurance test.

There can also be moments that are unexpectedly funny. Human minds are weird, wonderful places and sometimes the thing that appears when we follow an association leaves both of us wondering how the hell we got there.

Then it makes sense.

That's part of what I love about this work.

What Happens Afterwards?

This is another part I think people underestimate.

The session ending doesn't necessarily mean the process has finished.

You might notice something differently afterwards. Catch yourself before an automatic reaction. Remember another experience that suddenly seems relevant. Find that something which usually consumes your thoughts doesn't have quite the same grip.

You might also need time to sit with what came up.

This is why I care so much about integration after a session. Depending on what we explore, I may give you something to notice, a resource to use, an audio to listen to or simply suggest that you give yourself a few days without trying to analyse every bloody thing that happened.

After my Gateway Sessions, I also send you a reflection of what we uncovered and the next steps we discussed, so you don't have to walk away trying to remember everything.

You have enough going on inside your head already.

Do You Have To Believe In Hypnotherapy?

No.

I’m not asking you to believe in anything mystical.

You can be sceptical. You can ask questions. In fact, I would much rather you ask me the awkward questions than sit there pretending you're completely comfortable when your brain is screaming, WHAT IF SHE MAKES ME CLUCK LIKE A CHICKEN?

Hypnotherapy is collaborative.

I bring my training, questions and understanding of subconscious patterns into the room. You bring the internal world that only you have lived inside.

Neither of us can do the work properly without the other.

And I think that’s what gets lost when hypnotherapy is presented as something a practitioner does to you.

That isn’t how I see it at all.

I’m walking through your internal world beside you, helping you notice connections, question old evidence and begin creating something that fits the person you are now rather than the version of you who first needed that belief.

Curious About What Your Mind Has Been Holding Onto?

If you've been thinking about hypnotherapy but haven't known what to expect, my Gateway Hypnotherapy Session was created to give us somewhere to begin.

We spend the first part of the session talking about what’s happening for you and what you want support with. From there, the hypnotherapy itself follows your experiences, feelings and beliefs rather than a predetermined script.

You don't need to know where the problem started.

You don't need to know the right thing to say.

And you definitely don't need to be good at being hypnotised.

[Explore the Gateway Hypnotherapy Session]

If you take nothing else from this article, I hope you take away some of the mystery.

Hypnotherapy isn't about giving somebody else control of your mind. For me, it's almost the opposite. It's about becoming curious about your own mind, understanding why certain patterns made sense in the first place, and giving yourself the opportunity to decide whether they still deserve the power they once had.

There is something incredibly special about watching somebody realise that their mind wasn't working against them all these years. It was working with the information it had.

Sometimes it just needs some new evidence.

Sending Love,