I’d prefer they see a qualified psychiatrist. Hypnotherapy is nothing more than modern day voodoo and found to be totally unreliable.
Anyone practicing or defending hypnotherapy as a legitimate form of treatment is out of their freaking mind.
The Hill’s were abducted alright, by a “hypnotherapist”. It doesn’t matter if the hypnotherapist “leads” or not, people under hypnotherapy pull stories from their fantasy life, their readings, movies they’ve watched, etc.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help people with weight loss, stopping smoking, athletic performance, etc. without all the dangers and unreliability of hypnosis. There is no need for hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy has been consigned to the dustbin of quackery and is now mainly the realm of New Age “therapists”, past life regression “therapists”, and other charlatans and profiteers.
Your info is more than a little flawed.
1. I gather you’ve never studied Milton Erickson of Phoenix.
2. I don’t use hypnosis mostly for spiritual/religious reasons.
3. Most research about most hypnosis asserts that it’s primarily intense focused attention.
4. I certainly prefer cognitive behavioral therapy over a lot of other options.
Milton once cured a very very wealthy industrialist who’d been in analysis for 11 years; spent thousands on several other therapists . . . all without much help at all in overcoming his phobia about driving beyond the city limits.
Milton cured him in 15 minutes . . . using elements of hypnosis in giving him his instructions and convincing him he had to follow his instructions to the letter.
He basically instructed the man to put on his most expensive silk suit . . . take his Rolls and drive it 10 feet beyond the city limits . . . pull over on the side of the road, get out of the car, go on the other side of the car, lie down in the bar ditch and recite MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB . . . get back in his car . . . drive another 10 feet
repeat
get back in his car . . .
repeat
repeat
repeat
repeat
etc.
How was he cured?
At some point, he got so angry, he got in his car and angrily just drove and drove and drove
and never had another tweak of fear about driving beyond the city limits.
Milton was famous for curing the incurable.
Sometimes I regret not going with my classmates for training sessions with him. But on the whole, that’s not my style and I certainly don’t go in for formal hypnosis, regardless of my excellent training in it.