Can You Be Hypnotised To Forget Trauma?

I am often asked by people who have survived trauma if I can hypnotise them to forget traumatic memories. It's a good question, but not good therapy.

Trauma is not what you have been through, trauma is the meaning that you have made of it. If you are trying to forget memories, then you are telling yourself that those memories are a threat to you. You are telling yourself that those memories are almost as bad as the traumatic events themselves. If I help someone forget memories, which will be possible for some people for a while at least, I am supporting the story that the memories are a threat to them.

I like to work with people's memories, and help them understand in an embodied way that the memories are not the past events. When you are reacting to memories as if they are happening then it is a form of self-hypnosis – you are reacting to something in the imagination as if it is real.

Memories are words and pictures and your mind and cannot harm you. Once the whole mind body system understands this, the memories are no longer threatening so they do not cause an anxiety or stress response, which means the brain starts to de-prioritise them so they do not come up very often if at all.

Your life is a story that you tell yourself. You are a story that you tell yourself. The way you tell that story can change between the morning to afternoon so that you feel different about yourself or your life when you go to bed than you did getting up that morning, better or worse. Trauma tends to focus this story on details of your life that caused you harm and distress. The mind focusses on what was wrong, what is wrong, and what might go wrong, but in most cases there is a lot of good stuff in your story that is not getting enough attention because you do not need to be protected from it.

So,can you be hypnotised to forget trauma? Maybe, at least for a while, but that does not actually resolve any issues. My hypnosis audio to rewrite your life story explores these ideas in order to assist you in the process of doing just that in your mind, so that you and your life begin to look better in your mind. It is how to use self-hypnosis for trauma in a more productive way.