How Hypnotherapy Helps Trauma Recovery

Hypnotherapy can support rapid trauma healing by calming the nervous system and helping the brain reprocess distressing memories—without revivifying them. Learn how hypnotherapy works, why it’s faster for many people than talk therapy, and what to expect in a session.

What Trauma Does to the Brain

Trauma puts your brain into survival mode. Your brain isn’t able to file away the overwhelming experience into memory like other experiences because it can’t handle the memory and drops it. The memory shatters into fragments that are still in the present tense, not the past tense like other memories. These memories are intrusive, they have more control over you than you do of them because these fragments have not been filed away in the past tense into memory so they pop up into consciousness as intrusive thoughts and intense feelings.

Even if the event is in the past, your system keeps reacting like it’s still happening. Your brain and body didn’t get the memo that war is over. So your body stays stuck in hopelessness, anxiety, feeling triggered AF.

Why Talk Therapy Isn’t Always Enough

Talk therapy can help some people some of the time, but it’s not the way to resolve trauma because of the way it was processed or rather wasn’t processed. Because trauma is so overwhelming, it doesn’t get processed by the logical, verbal, narrative parts of the brain. Therefore, trying to talk about what happened revivifies the trauma causing you you to feel like it’s happening again, in the present tense. Not cool.

You’re desperately trying to get away from the intrusive thoughts and intense feelings, not revivify them but this is what we know. So even though we might leave a talk therapy sessions feeling a little worse and overwhelmed, it’s the reason we keep going back. Because it’s really all we know. Talk therapy has helped with other issues but we need to understand that trauma is different.

Don’t get me wrong. I love therapy. When I caught my ex cheating, and realized he was more committed to cheating and lying than he was to me, I went to therapy three times a week but talking about it wasn’t helping so I talked to my friends, family, anyone who would listen. But I was lost in all the intense emotions, thoughts and overwhelming feelings in my body.

How Hypnotherapy Helps

Hypnosis helps create a focused state. Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need to be calm and relaxed for hypnosis to work. If you were calm and relaxed, you probably wouldn’t need hypnotherapy. Instead of calm, just be authentic, however you’re feeling, anxious, hopeless, stuck.

We can connect with your subconscious and rewire your brain for healing. We work with the part of your mind that holds the trauma—not by talking it out, but by being led by your subconscious to do whatever it needs to do. Your superconscious knows everything about you, even better than you, or especially me. So we follow its lead.

This is why you don’t have to tell me the personal, painful details about your trauma. You don’t have to re-live anything. You just notice what shifts.

What a Session Feels Like

You will be guided to follow your superconscious. You might notice body sensations, emotions, or images. These are signs your brain is at work. Clients feel lighter, calmer, have more clarity, and a newfound sense of safety and hope. Memories of trauma lose their emotional charge as the past gets filed away into the past, where it belongs.

Why Hypnotherapy Works Faster

When your superconscious guides the session, healing happens faster. Hypnotherapy helps your nervous system settle so your brain can reprocess the trauma, like it should have in the first place.

You’re not trying to fix your trauma by talking about it, trying to understand it and figure it out —you’re moving it out of your mind and body into the past.

Is Hypnotherapy Right for You?

If you’ve tried talk therapy and still feel stuck, hypnotherapy might be the better solution to the intrusive thoughts and intense emotions of the trauma. Remembering is not recovering.

Accelerated Hypnotherapy works with the part of your mind that is stuck in the past, to enable you to move forward to a whole new future. It can help you feel more in control, less reactive, and find safety and hope to move forward into the future.

Let’s connect.