Clinical hypnotherapy

Clinical hypnotherapy uses a focused, deeply relaxed state — sometimes called trance — as the setting for therapeutic work. A clinician guides you into it with speech, usually by settling your attention on your breathing or on a described scene, and once your attention has narrowed you work together on something specific that was agreed before the session started: a habit, a physical tension pattern, a reaction that fires faster than thought.

What the state actually is, is ordinary. It is closer to being absorbed in a book, or to the last few minutes before sleep, than to anything theatrical. You can hear the room. You can speak. You can open your eyes and stop, and you would not do anything in it that you would refuse to do outside it. A session is a conversation with the volume of the outside world turned down, not a suspension of who you are.

What it is not — and this matters more here than on any other page on this site. It is not stage hypnosis, and it has nothing in common with it beyond the word. It is not mind control, and nobody is made to reveal anything. It is not a technique for recovering memories that are not already there, and a clinician trained properly will not attempt that, because memory does not work the way that premise requires. It is not sleep. It is not a substitute for medical care, and it is not a substitute for the rest of a treatment plan. It is also not something you are given before anyone has worked out what is going on.

At PHC, hypnotherapy is used alongside therapy and assessment, not instead of them. Whether it is indicated for you is a clinical decision made after an initial session, not a choice you have to make from a website.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the second of the two specialist interventions PHC names, and it is described here in the same plain terms. NLP is a set of techniques concerned with the language people use about themselves and the mental patterns that language sits on — noticing a habitual frame, trying a different one, and observing what changes. At PHC it is used as an adjunct inside a wider plan, in the same way hypnotherapy is, and never as a treatment in its own right. It is not a diagnostic method and it does not replace assessment.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. Nobody begins hypnotherapy here because they asked for it by name — they begin it because an initial session found it was a reasonable part of what the situation called for.

1. An initial session.We ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you. Nothing is administered before this conversation. Where the picture needs more than a conversation, emotional assessment and symptom screening decides which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted.
2. A clinician matched to what that found.Clinicians at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit — and for hypnotherapy specifically, on being trained to deliver it. If the fit is not right, tell us and we will move you to someone else.
3. 50-minute sessions, in clinic or online.A standard session is 50 minutes. The first session is usually spent on explanation and on establishing what the work is for, before any induction is attempted. If a session runs beyond 50 minutes and your clinician has the time, you can extend by an hour at an extra fee — you are told what that is before it happens. Minor overruns of one to five minutes are not charged.
4. Reviewed as it goes, and used alongside.Hypnotherapy at PHC generally accompanies another piece of work rather than standing alone — most often CBT. It is also one of the components of the Hypno-yoga at the DHA clinic, which runs as a group four days a week and combines mindful yoga, relaxation techniques, breathwork, guided imagery and hypnotherapy-based therapeutic interventions.

At PHC, hypnotherapy is used with adults and, at a clinician's judgement, with older adolescents. Some people do not enter a focused state easily and some find it uncomfortable rather than restful; neither is a failure, and if that is you, your clinician will say so and change the plan rather than persist with it.

There are also presentations where a trained clinician will decline to use it. Where screening points to a picture that needs psychiatric input, where there is unprocessed trauma that should be approached through a trauma protocol rather than through relaxation, or where a medical cause needs ruling out first, you will be told that. Hypnotherapy is not started for the sake of starting something.

• Quitting smoking

Quitting smoking is the condition page on this site that names hypnotherapy as a modality that may be indicated. Hypnotherapy is also one component of the group programme at DHA. Which therapy applies to you is decided at the initial session. See every condition we work with.

Hypnotherapy at PHC is delivered by Prof. Dr. Tahira Yousaf, who the practice tells us "specialises in the treatment of Borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and OCD through hypnotherapy". That is PHC describing their own founder rather than a line from the areas of practice she has published — those are two different things, and you are entitled to know which one this is.

We name a clinician on this page only where PHC have put them to this work or their own supplied credentials name it, and we tell you which of the two it is. Who you would see is decided at the initial session.

PHC's own affiliations include a Certified Hypnotherapist credential from the National Guild of Hypnotists (NGH), which is one of the eight professional memberships displayed on the practice's site today. See every psychologist at PHC.