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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

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.

I know of hypnosis practical uses and gross misuses.

Using it to fill in “memory gaps” is a gross misuse, as in the case of the Hills or anyone else for that matter, it has been proven that people are susceptible to using the imagination to fill in the gaps. The profiteers are nothing more than “mind manglers”, using hypnotherapy over and over on these people and the stories become increasingly fantastic.

Want to use clinical hypnosis to calm a golfer who’s got the “yips” (jerky hand movement) with his putter under pressure or to have a smoker recall the dangers of smoking before he lights up? Fine, but really that’s where it SHOULD end.

Preferably, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy should be used, there is little to no use for hypnosis, and like I mentioned has been mostly abandoned to New Age Quacks, Past Life Regression Therapists and “UFO Abductee groups”.

No “recovered memory” is worth the time of day, these people were not Cleopatra or Caeser, their parents did not slaughter babies in their basements and rape their children daily and people were not abducted and anally probed by aliens, they all originate from sessions with “hypnotherapists”

No Dr. worth his salt puts a scintilla of credibility in “recovered memories”.