Here’s what to expect from your hypnosis-assisted psychotherapy session: whether it’s conducted as an online psychotherapy session, or in-person, the structure remains the same.
Part of the benefit of keeping the structure consistent is that you learn what to expect at each stage and, if you end up conducting multiple hypnotherapy sessions, you might find yourself instinctively taking these steps on on your own, without even being prompted.
This is one of the key long-term benefits of this type of work – the goal is to help teach lifelong skills and self-regulation techniques that can serve you far after the treatment sessions are over. Repeating the steps each session helps ingrain them as habit. For example, I like to tell people that relaxation is a skill, and the more you do it the better you get at it.
Session Structure
Session length is the first thing that sets our approach apart: a typical hypnosis-assisted psychotherapy session lasts for 90 minutes. This is longer than the typical 50-60 minutes you’ll find in most psychotherapy sessions, and it’s deliberate. Both psychological research and our anecdotal experience shows us that having longer sessions let’s you achieve insight faster and makes the process far more effective. In many cases where cost is an issue we would recommend that people come to us for 90 minutes twice a month instead of 60 minutes a week.
Initial Conversation
You’ll typically start a session with a few minutes of chatting, to discuss how you’re currently doing and review any goals you might have for a session. If you don’t have any specific goals, that’s fine too, topics to be worked on typically emerge pretty early on once the hypnosis part of the session begins.
Some psychotherapists on our team like to have a longer conversation during the first meeting to review your intake forms, discuss any issues in more depth, and disclose any necessary disclaimers before the sessions begins. You can always ask them about their preferred approach during your 15 minute intro call.
Guided Relaxation
Once you’re ready to start the hypnosis part of the session, you’ll be invited to get extra comfortable, close your eyes, and engage in a guided relaxation. (Hypnosis can be done from anywhere, clients often do it in their own bed! Here’s an article on how to get the most out of an online hypnotherapy session.)
During this stage, the therapist will guide you to relax your body and your mind using a variety of techniques. A common one we often use is a body scan, where we relax each part of the body separately.
Whether you’re in person or a video call, the therapist will be adjusting their instructions based on how your body language. We don’t use scripts; each process is customized live to your specific situation.
If it’s your first time, or if you’re feeling particularly stressed, anxious, or activated, you might spend longer on the relaxation stage, typically 10 to 15 minutes. Once you get used to entering into this trance state more easily, you might spend only a few minutes on the relaxation stage.
From here on out your eyes will usually stay closed for the remainder of your session. This is another thing that makes our session different than a typical counseling therapy session. By keeping your eyes closed, you can focus your awareness deeper into your own experience of what’s going on in your mind and body without any external distraction.
It’s worth noting that you will have the freedom to open your eyes, move around freely, and even get up and use the bathroom if you wish. Keeping your eyes closed is simply our recommendation, albeit one that can feel very relaxing!
Congrats. You are now hypnotized. It’s that simple, and that easy.
Resource Building
This stage comes after the relaxation, and it’s simple: you spend a few minutes using guided imagery and the power of your imagination to mentally transport yourself into a scenario that feels good for you. It can be a relaxing beach, an enchanting forest, or a positive memory from your past. Ultimately you’ll be the one to choose the space that feels right to you.
Spending a few minutes on a positive memory or image has several benefits:
- First, it helps you relax further. The first guided relaxation step helps you relax your body, this step helps your mind relax further as well.
- Second, it gets you into a more positive headspace. You might be dealing with some pretty significant things in your life in general or leading up to that specific session. Spending a few minutes entering a more positive headspace will make the rest of the session feel more hopeful, instilling a sense of possibility into situations that might have felt quite hopeless or stuck before.
- Third, it can be useful as a resource for you to come back to, during the session, or later on in life. Sometimes therapy sessions, or life, can bring up overwhelming emotions. Preparing in advance with a mental space that you can go to where you feel safe, relaxed, or empowered, can help you process emotions and memories with more confidence.
- Finally, you’ll be learning a valuable technique around emotional regulation: although it’s impossible to directly control our emotions, by shifting our thoughts and imagery to specific areas, we can actually influence our mood in significant ways. Regaining control of our emotional state is itself a very empowering resource.
This stage of resource building often only takes 5 to 10 minutes, but can really set the tone for the remainder of the session.
Want to experience these two initial stages right away? Our free guided meditations can give you a taste of the type of prompts you’ll experience in a session. Of course nothing beats a live human who adjusts to your feedback and needs, but it’s still a great place to start. Hypnosis recordings is how I first got a taste for hypnotherapy.
The Work
Once you’ve completed relaxation and resource building, you’re ready to move on to the main feature of the session, which we call “The Work”. Although we call it that, the work is not always effortful. In fact, one of the main things we preach is that personal growth is best achieved through relaxation! Nevertheless, sometimes that topics that emerge can be intense, especially when exploring past traumatic experiences. Your therapist is by your side to support you and make sure you feel safe in your journey of healing.
We call this stage The Work primarily because it’s where you explore the thing you are working on – typically a behavior or pattern that you’d like to stop doing (for example, drink or smoke less), or something you’d like to do more of (like have more confidence or better relationships).
Reading a transcript of this part of the session might not look that different from a therapy session: it’s all about exploring the deeper subconscious motivations that influence why you do what you do. This is often a typical psychotherapist might explore with you as well; we find that engaging in this process while a state of hypnotic trance (which you achieved through the previous two steps) can often lead to deeper insight and more significant feelings of “letting go” or “moving on” from the things that were holding you back.
This stage often occupies the bulk of the session, up to 60 minutes or so. This is why the sessions are longer, so you have the time to relax and build resources and still dive in to the topic at hand for a significant period of time. There is a cumulative effect to this exploration, sometimes it can a little while for the insights to begin to emerge. In fact, we often find that it’s at the last 15 minutes of the session, long after a typical psychotherapy session would be completed, that clients have a significant breakthrough around the topic being explored.
Reflection
The last few minutes of the hypnosis session are spent reflecting on the insights you gained and setting goals for the future, while still in a state of trance. This stage metaphorically ties the rest of the session together with a bow. It invites you to explore the broad themes uncovered in the session and establish concrete takeaways you’d like to bring into the future. These can be specific behaviors, insights, or ideas that you want to integate into your life, and your hypnotherapist might actually conduct some exercises with you to help deepen these resolutions for the future.
Coming Out
To bring your session to a close, the hypnotist will typically count back up from 1 to 5 and invite you to come back to “full awareness”. You also sometimes feel dazed, like you have woken from a nap (their eyes have been closed for a while, it’s true!). Here’s a whole other article on what a hypnosis session can feel like.
The session typically ends here without too much additional conversation, allowing you to stay in the relaxed calm and insights of the session as you return back to your daily life. Here’s an article with some recommendations on things to do after your hypnosis session to help with your integration.
It’s worth noting that one of the key indicators of hypnosis is an altered sense of time, and so even though it can last for 90 minutes, clients often feel like it passed in a flash. “Has it really been an hour and half?” is a common reflection we hear.
Want to try a hypnosis-assisted psychotherapy session for yourself? Book a free intro call today to see if it’s a good fit for you.
