For people who are highly susceptible to hypnosis, this treatment might just do the trick. At the basic level, hypnosis is a state of focus and relaxation; a place where it is easy to reduce the pains of anxiety and fear.
Hypnosis works in five different levels:
1. Hypnotic Induction: In this beginning stage, the therapist might ask the patient to close their eyes and start focusing on the little things within their surrounds. Such as, “Notice how your feet are planted on a wooden floor,” or “Feel how your hair is pushed back from the fan.” The therapist will start going deeper, “Feel your chest rise and fall with each breath.” This stage brings the patient into a comfortable state.
2. Deepening: In this phase, patients are encouraged to relinquish their analytical thinking and instead wonder about relaxing scenarios, a common one being “descending a stairway.” (Daitch, 2011). The purpose of this stage is to get the patient into a relaxed state making it easy to access their memories.
3. Therapeutic Suggestion: Once the therapy reaches this point in the process, the patient is in a completely comfortable, relaxed, and focused state making it possible to lend suggestions. At this phase the patient has more capacity to change and grow with compatible suggestions; increase impulse control, increase the ability to calm oneself, and learn to control emotions better.
4. Post-Hypnotic Suggestion: In this stage the therapist will inform the patient where to apply the techniques he suggested in the previous phase. Even if the technique is a simple one, knowing when to apply it might get difficult. Also within this stage, the therapist might encourage increased responsiveness to hypnosis so that the patient can enter into it more quickly each time.
5. Alerting: In this phase the therapist must slowly bring the patient back into a fully conscious mind. There will be a transitional phase where they must prepare their patients for what is to come and then they will tell them to either count up or down (most common).
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