Does hypnotherapy work?

[KatCha]

Has anyone tried this before? What about erasing things from the past? I am curious if anything other than amnesia can guide the human brain through memory removal. This should be a real medical practice if it is not already one for any patients who seek to remove trauma from their lives.

[Sunlight72]

Has anyone tried this before? What about erasing things from the past? I am curious if anything other than amnesia can guide the human brain through memory removal. This should be a real medical practice if it is not already one for any patients who seek to remove trauma from their lives.

Sorry I didn't see this post sooner.

 

Yes, I've recently tried hypnotherapy. I did not try it to remove things from the past - my impression is it won't work for that. A good way to think of it is like a guided meditation. It seems to be good for someone who wants to make a behavioral change (like stop feeling fear before speaking in public, or before meeting family, or stay on a healthy diet or enjoy practicing a musical instrument instead of getting frustrated with the process).

 

For me I would say one of every two sessions was effective. I was having social anxiety, and this did really help. The first session was really powerful - I didn't feel any more social anxiety, and felt really relaxed and content in the social settings that came up for 4 or 6 days. Then it sort of faded back into anxiety.

 

Second session - due to a mix up I went to the wrong office, then called, found out, rushed to the right office, wasn't relaxed for the session. When I left it was rush hour, and a couple tense brushes on the drive home apparently erased the positive effects.

 

Third session - worked pretty well, not as dramatic as the first one. Haven't been back since then. These three were over a 3 month period.

 

Since the first session with a real therapist worked so well, I searched the internet and decided to pay to download hypnotherapy sessions from uncommonknowledge. Of course they turned out to not be as powerful or personal as the hypnotherapist sessions, but instead of $100 they were like $15, and I could listen to them repeatedly. I think they helped a little - but actually I think the main benefit over listening to them fairly regularly for 4 or 5 weeks was that I was just more relaxed generally.

 

The beginning of each recording helps you relax, in slightly different ways, and I think this helped me have a more general feeling of peace in my life. Not sure if they helped with specific issues - but also I will admit I jumped around from things like "sieze the day" to "be the life of the party" to "fall asleep more easily". If I'd stuck with just one of them for maybe 2 weeks I could see if it helped that one issue more specifically.

[Sunlight72]

...This should be a real medical practice if it is not already one for any patients who seek to remove trauma from their lives.

In reference to this - I could picture it helping relegate the feelings associated with the trauma to the further background. I doubt it would "make" you forget what happened, but I think it could work with your own will power to melt the sharp edges off the emotions, and help leave the sense of harm in the past.

[Ronni_W]

What about erasing things from the past?

No, other than surgery or a physical brain injury, there isn't anything that can erase or delete memory - as Sunlight72 said.

Overcoming trauma requires finding a different perspective or point of view from which to look at the event or collection of events that caused the trauma.

 

The major stumbling block is that, especially in the West, we do not have the advantage of also considering past-life events as playing any part in current-life traumas,

so we generally do not see what our trauma is supposed to help us resolve -- it just seems totally random, and disconnected and unrelated, so we end up blaming something or someone else,

or putting it down to Destiny or Fate.