What a Hypnotherapy Session Actually Feels Like

I was twenty-two, freshly out of university and desperate to travel. The relationship I had been in for years did not survive the plan, and I found myself with a broken heart and no map. My confidence was somewhere near the floor. Within a few weeks I started having panic attacks — the kind where your body decides something before your mind has caught up, and you feel entirely out of control of both.

A friend who had been struggling with anxiety mentioned he had been seeing a cognitive hypnotherapist and that it had made a real difference. I was sceptical. Like most people, I assumed hypnotherapy was for giving up smoking or getting over a fear of spiders.

What it is, minus the stage act

Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy has almost nothing in common with the version most of us picture. Nobody swings anything. You are not unconscious, you do not lose control, and you can stop at any point.

It borrows its thinking from cognitive behavioural therapy — the idea that thoughts, feelings and behaviours reinforce one another, and that the loops get worn into grooves over time. The hypnotherapy part is simply a way of arriving at a calm, focused state first, on the reasoning that a settled mind is more open to considering a different version of a familiar story.

In practice it feels a lot like the moment before sleep, when you are aware of the room but not especially interested in it.

The session itself

Some years after that first experience, I went to see Camilla Ross, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist, at her home in Gerrards Cross. The room was warm and lamplit and I relaxed almost immediately, which I suspect is not an accident.

She began by asking what I wanted from the session, then talked me down into a state of deep relaxation using her voice and some straightforward breathing. There was no drama. At no point did I feel I had handed anything over.

Because of my age and where my hormones had got to, we spent the session on menopause — using guided visualisation and grounding to change the way I was meeting certain thoughts rather than trying to argue with them. I left feeling as though something had been set down.

"In my third session years ago, I recognised how completely my own inner critic had been running the show. I left, walked to a travel agent, and booked a one-way ticket to Australia."

What changed

That earlier course of sessions was short. I never needed to go back after the third. Something that had been keeping me stuck simply loosened, and I could move again.

I am wary of telling that story as though it is what happens to everyone, because it is not. Some people need considerably longer. Some find it does very little for them. What it did give me, permanently, was a sense of how much of my experience was being shaped below the level I could see — and how much of that was open to being revisited.

Whether it might suit you

Hypnotherapists work with a wide range of things — anxiety, phobias, habits people want to change, confidence, sleep, the emotional side of menopause. Many, Camilla included, also see children and teenagers.

A few things worth knowing before you book. Hypnotherapy is not a statutorily regulated profession in the UK, so check your practitioner is registered with a recognised professional body and ask what training they have done. Ask how many sessions they would expect, and what they send you away with between them — the take-home tools were, for me, as useful as the sessions themselves. And if you are dealing with something serious, keep your GP in the picture alongside it.

What stayed with me was not the technique. It was the discovery that the story I had been telling myself about what I could and could not do was only a story — and that with the right person in the room, it could be told another way.