Understanding Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy: Breaking the Myths
There’s a reasonable argument that the word “hypnosis” has done more damage to the field than any stage show. It comes from the Greek hypnos - sleep - and even though James Braid, who coined it, admitted within a few years that he’d got it wrong, the name stuck. Along with the name came a set of assumptions that have proved equally difficult to shift.
Most people who come to see me have already done some Googling. Many have also half-watched a stage show, sat through a film involving a swinging watch, and worried they might end up saying something they don’t want to say out loud. This blog post is to address those myths, not just to reassure, but because believing them can get in the way of the work.
Myth 1: Hypnosis is a trance or a “special altered state”
❌ Myth: Hypnosis puts you into a mysterious, altered state that’s completely different from normal consciousness, which is only accessible while hypnotised.
✅ Fact: The research says otherwise. What we call hypnosis looks a lot more like focused imagination than anything exotic and that’s actually why it works.
This is the big one, and where the science is most interesting.
The dominant model in research - the sociocognitive model developed by Barber and Spanos and extended by Irving Kirsch - argues that hypnosis isn’t a special state at all. What we call hypnosis is better understood as focused imagination, shaped by expectation and motivation. There is no trance switch; what changes is your attention and your own willingness to engage your imagination in a particular direction.
EEG studies do show neurological shifts during hypnosis. These are in the activity of regions associated with attention and mental imagery, but this looks nothing like sleep. They look like absorption, the same kind you experience when you’re reading something that makes you forget you’re on a train.
Why does this matter? If hypnosis is a function of imagination and expectation, then the question in a session isn’t whether you went “deep enough” but what I ask is how engaged you are and how motivated you are.
Myth 2: Hypnosis is something done to you
❌ Myth: The hypnotherapist has the power. You’re the subject.
✅ Fact: All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. The word “hypnotised” is grammatically passive, but what actually happens isn’t at all.
Notice the word “hypnotised.” Grammatically, you are the object; something is being done to you by someone else. That framing is embedded in the language, and it’s wrong.
All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. A hypnotherapist provides structure - conditions that make it easier for you to direct your own attention. Nothing I do in a session bypasses your agency. You can reject any suggestion that doesn’t fit, change them into your own words, or accept them as they are (most likely because we have fully agreed on what they should be). You remain entirely yourself.
Stage hypnosis has compounded this myth. The image is of a performer with power, a subject emptied temporarily of their own will. What’s actually happening in those shows is that a skilled entertainer selects the most extroverted, suggestion-responsive people in the room and gives them social permission to do something silly in public. That’s social psychology, not mind control.
Clinical hypnotherapy is a collaboration. If you arrive expecting to be “done to” that expectation itself can be an obstacle to the success of therapy, one which I will dispel.
Myth 3: It’s a quick fix
❌ Myth: You sit back, close your eyes, and wake up changed.
✅ Fact: Hypnotherapy is often faster than other approaches, but faster isn’t the same as passive. The work still requires you.
Hypnotherapy is often faster than other psychological therapies and research suggests around 4–5 sessions on average, compared to considerably more for CBT alone.
But faster is not the same as being a passive recipient and immediate change. You don’t sit back, close your eyes, and open them fixed.
One of the central ideas in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy is that chronic negative thinking is itself a form of self-hypnosis. You’ve been practising a particular internal narrative - about your abilities, your safety, your worth - for years, often so automatically that it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. The work is about learning to notice and redirect that. The sessions give you the tools; what happens between sessions, where you can put new skills into practice, is where the important change happens.
Myth 4: Not everyone can be hypnotised
❌ Myth: Some people just can’t be hypnotised - if it doesn’t work, that’s why.
✅ Fact: Responsiveness varies, but “can’t be hypnotised” is almost always the wrong reason for what’s actually getting in the way.
Hypnotic responsiveness genuinely varies. Research shows a roughly normal distribution - most people in the middle range, a small number who are highly responsive, a small number who find it difficult.
But “can’t be hypnotised” is almost always the wrong framing. What usually underlies it is one of three things: a misunderstanding of what hypnosis is supposed to feel like (waiting for the trance that isn’t coming); anxiety about losing control, which keeps the nervous system in an alert, watchful state; or a mismatch between the client’s expectations and the approach being used.
In my experience, the people who arrive saying “I don’t think this will work on me” are often the ones who, once they understand what we’re actually doing, take to it well. And the scepticism is useful, it means you’re not going to mistake imagination for magic.
Myth 5: Hypnosis can recover accurate memories
❌ Myth: Hypnosis unlocks the past and is a way to access what you’ve buried or forgotten.
✅ Fact: It does the opposite of what you’d want for recall. The same quality that makes it therapeutically useful makes it unreliable as a memory tool.
Hypnosis increases imaginative involvement - that’s part of why it’s useful therapeutically. It also increases the risk of confabulation, where the mind fills in gaps in a way that feels entirely true but isn’t. The research on this is consistent: hypnosis does not improve factual recall. It can in-fact increase confidence in false memories.
Responsible hypnotherapists don’t use hypnosis for memory recovery. If anyone offers to help you retrieve specific past events under hypnosis as a route to healing, treat that with real caution.
Myth 6: You can get stuck and in the wrong hands, be controlled
❌ Myth: Hypnosis puts you at the mercy of the hypnotist. You could get stuck, or worse, be made to do things against your will.
✅ Fact: You can’t get stuck. The control myth has a specific cultural origin — and understanding where it came from tells you something important about what hypnosis actually isn’t.
You can’t get stuck. If I fell silent mid-session, you would either open your eyes and wonder what had happened, or drift into natural sleep and wake up in your own time. There is no mechanism that holds you in hypnosis indefinitely.
The control version of the myth is more interesting, because it didn’t emerge from nowhere. It has a specific cultural moment.
The Manchurian Candidate - novel in 1959, film in 1962 - gave the Western imagination its most vivid image of hypnotic control: a soldier returned from Korea, reprogrammed through a combination of conditioning and hypnosis to act as a political assassin, triggered by a playing card. It was a Cold War horror story about the vulnerability of the individual mind to external manipulation, arriving at exactly the moment when “brainwashing” had entered the popular vocabulary and the CIA’s MKUltra programme was testing, in real life, just how far that manipulation might go.
The fear was real, even if the hypnosis was fiction. And that image of the helpless subject and the controlling operator lodged itself in the culture in a way that decades of clinical research has never quite dislodged.
What’s striking is that serious hypnotherapy research was moving in precisely the opposite direction at the same time. Andrew Salter, whose influence on the field is [considerably larger than his name recognition suggests, something I’ll come back to in a later post], had already argued in the late 1940s that the therapeutic problem wasn’t too much external control, it was too much internal inhibition. The goal of therapy was to restore natural expressiveness and agency, not to override it. The clinicians and the filmmakers were working from completely different models of what a human mind was and what it needed.
The Cold War mind-control version of hypnosis was always a cultural projection, not a clinical description. Adverse reactions to hypnotherapy are rare and minor with the most reported side effects being occasional drowsiness, rarely a brief headache. The risk profile is no different from any other psychological conversation.
The irony is hard to overstate. Condon didn’t just draw vaguely on the cultural fear of hypnotic control he sourced his villain’s methodology from the clinical literature directly. In his personal copy of Salter’s work, he inscribed it to Salter as “the person without whom the novel could not have been written.”
So what is it, then?
Hypnosis is the deliberate use of focused attention and imagination to make psychological change easier. It’s a learnable skill - yours, not mine - that you take away from the sessions and keep.
Ready to Experience the Facts for Yourself?
Now that we’ve cleared away the myths regarding swinging watches and mind control, you might be wondering how clinical hypnotherapy can actually help you.
The reality is that hypnotherapy is a powerful, evidence-based tool for change. Whether you are struggling with anxiety and stress, looking to overcome a specific phobia, or simply want to build your workplace confidence, you don't need magic—you just need the right mindset.
In my practice, I combine Hypnosis with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you take back control.
Don't let the misconceptions hold you back.
If you are in Leicester, Hinckley, Nuneaton, or looking for support Online, let’s have a chat. I offer a free initial consultation where we can discuss your needs—no pressure, no hard sell, and definitely no "clucking like a chicken."
References and Further Reading
Hartland's Medical & Dental Hypnosis (Fourth Edition, by Heap and Aravind)
The Practice of Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (by Robertson D., 2012)
Essentials of Clinical Hypnosis: An Evidence-Based Approach (by Kirsch I & Lynn S.J., 2006)
Hypnotism, Imagination & Human Potentialities (by Barber, T. X., Spanos, N. P., & Chaves, J. F., 1974)
Integrative CBT for anxiety disorders: an evidence-based approach to enhancing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with mindfulness and hypnotherapy (by Assen Alladin, 2016)
About Martin Middleton
Martin Middleton is a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist based near Leicester and Hinckley, specialising in anxiety, shame, and confidence building. He combines Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Hypnotherapy, drawing on Donald Meichenbaum's resilience framework, supporting clients in moving from surviving to thriving. Martin offers judgment-free sessions online across the UK and in person.
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