Hypnosis can be a powerful tool for change. Different people come out of a hypnosis session, especially a longer Hypnosis Assisted Healing session, which can last up to 90 minutes long, in different states.
Sometimes they are energized, with a clear vision around the next steps to take in their life, and a sense of feeling unstuck from what might have been holding them back.
Sometimes they might feel more introspective, having encountered new insights and experiences that they want to further digest and explore.
Sometimes they might be left feeling tired, after an intense experience that might include strong emotions or cathartic, somatic expression of feelings.
The process of healing, especially from traumatic experiences can even involve feeling worse before you feel better. This is because our mind might numb our feelings around certain things (usually with negative side effects) and opening ourselves up to heal them can at times entail diving into them.
Do What Feels Right
Our advice to clients after their sessions is to listen to their intuition. Trust your body to guide you to do what is right for you in the moment.
No one knows what you need as well as you do. And the process of listening to your body, and learning to trust your urges, is itself an important part of healing (a common trauma response is not trusting yourself, we can talk more about this in another post).
This is also why usually don’t prescribe to clients exactly when to come back for another session. It’s up to you to decide if and when you need additional sessions, based on your own feelings.
Even just pondering your session is a topic for debate – some hypnotists encourage clients to listen back to their sessions if they were recorded, with the thought that this will help them deepen the impact through repetition. Others deliberately discourage it, feeling that it reflects a period of time that’s already in your past, you may have already moved on and don’t’ need to be dwelling further on the topic.
Just as with the different schools of hypnosis, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and we encourage you to do what feels right for you.
Some Ideas for After Your Hypnosis Sessions
With all that said, here are some general ideas that you can use to process and integrate after a session, think of it as a menu and pick what feels right for you.
- Journal
- Go for a walk or hike, especially in nature
- Exercise or do yoga
- Dance
- Take a warm shower
- Take a cold shower
- Meditate gently – especially on things like kindness, compassion, or forgiveness
- Talk to a friend
- Talk to a therapist – talk therapy can be a good way to further process what has come up in your therapy sessions. We recommend all clients also work with a good therapist who can get to know them and provide a mirror to their thoughts and feelings, especially around interpersonal interactions.
- Listen to your hypnosis recording – see the note above about the pros and cons around this.
The key idea behind all of this is be kind on yourself. In the work that we do, less is more, we grow by not trying, and we relax as a key method to personal growth.
So trust the the process has already been set in motion, your subconscious is already busy implementing the insights you’ve gained, and all the remains to do is to stay open to clues that change is already happening in your life.
