There’s a common belief about hypnotherapy that I want to address – because if it’s putting you off seeking help, that matters.
The idea goes something like this: to get better, you need to find the original moment that caused the problem. Go back to the source, uncover the wound, and then healing can begin.
I understand why that sounds logical. It’s the narrative we’ve absorbed from films and TV – the dramatic moment of revelation where everything suddenly clicks into place.
But in reality, that’s not how the mind works. And chasing that moment can actually cause harm.
Memory isn’t a recording
Decades of research into false memory have shown something important: memory is not a neutral playback system. Every time you recall something, you’re reconstructing it. That reconstruction is shaped by how you’re feeling right now, what questions you’ve been asked, what you expect to find, and the authority of the person guiding you.
When a therapist takes a client into deep hypnosis to “find the root cause,” they may genuinely believe they’re uncovering a buried truth. But the mind is highly responsive to suggestion in that state – which is, of course, why hypnosis works at all.
Here’s the problem I have with that approach: if I sit down with a client and say “let’s go back to the root cause,” I am literally directing the subconscious to find something – whether it actually exists or not. The mind, in that open and receptive state, will try to deliver what it’s been asked for. And the client may return home convinced they’ve uncovered a real memory of something that never actually happened.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a person building a new story about themselves and their past from something that was, in part, created in the therapy room.
This isn’t a fringe concern. History has shown, in the starkest terms, what can happen when therapists go looking for something they’ve already decided is there.
When therapy goes looking for what it expects to find
The consequences of directive memory work are historically documented and well-researched. In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of Recovered Memory Therapy in the United States – in which therapists actively guided clients, often under hypnosis, to search for hidden memories of childhood abuse – produced thousands of cases of alleged Satanic ritual abuse, almost none of which could be substantiated. Families were destroyed. Lives were upended. The memories felt real, but they had been shaped by the very process meant to uncover them. The references at the end of this article go into this in detail for anyone who wants to read further.
This is precisely why I consider it irresponsible to direct a client towards a root cause. Not because the past is irrelevant – but because the act of directing the subconscious to find something will produce something, whether it’s true or not.
The cause is rarely one clean event
Even setting memory aside, the idea of a single root cause is often a simplification. Most of the patterns people bring to me – anxiety, low confidence, phobias, habits they can’t seem to shake – didn’t start with one moment.
They built. A repeated experience here, a meaning attached to something there, a gradual reinforcement that this is just how things are. Sometimes what tipped it happened last year. Sometimes it was small. Sometimes the person can describe it clearly, and sometimes they have no idea where it came from.
The cause doesn’t need to be one thing. And it doesn’t need to be found.
What I do instead
My sessions are deliberately open. Rather than directing a client towards a specific destination, my guidance is typically something like: “Let’s go to wherever you need to go, experience whatever you need to experience, to get the outcome you most need today.”
That distinction matters enormously. I’m not leading. I’m not planting a destination. I’m creating the conditions for the mind to do what it already knows how to do – and then trusting it.
What happens next looks different for every person.
Sometimes a client is drawn to one particular experience – something that carries real weight and helps explain how they’ve been showing up in the world. We work with that. Sometimes they move through ten or more smaller experiences across their life, each one contributing a little piece to the pattern. We work with those too.
Other times, the session takes a completely different shape. A client unpacks a belief they’ve been carrying for years – one that made sense once but simply doesn’t serve them anymore – and the insight arrives quickly. An empowering mantra emerges. Everything shifts from there, not through revisiting pain, but through recognition and release.
And sometimes something surprisingly simple does the work. A client might recall an encouraging word from a parent – something they hadn’t thought about in years – and in that moment, present and future anxieties begin to resolve. The encouragement they needed was already inside them. It just needed to be remembered.
Then there are sessions that aren’t about the past at all. In the case of someone wanting to stop smoking, for instance, it may be far more useful to recognise that cigarettes have become a social crutch – a way of belonging, relaxing, connecting with others – than to try to locate the first cigarette ever smoked. Once that’s clear, a new solution can emerge: getting outdoors, joining a group, finding community in a way that doesn’t require anything in your hand. The old pattern gets replaced not by excavating its origins, but by genuinely meeting the need underneath it.
Why I record every session
One of the reasons I record all of my sessions is professional accountability – specifically around this very issue.
If something emerges in a session that resembles a past memory, I go back and listen carefully. I need to be certain that nothing in my language – a word choice, a pause, a question, the way I framed a suggestion – could have steered the client towards that experience. Even with the best intentions, a therapist can introduce bias without realising it. A leading phrase, an assumption embedded in the wording, a tone that implies a particular kind of answer – all of these can shape what a receptive mind produces.
Recording sessions means I can hold myself accountable in a way that memory alone cannot. My memory of what I said is just as fallible as anyone else’s. The recording isn’t.
If I find any trace that my language may have influenced what a client experienced, that has to be acknowledged – and it informs how I work going forward.
I think this kind of rigour is essential in a field where the line between guiding and leading can be surprisingly thin. The trust a client places in a hypnotherapist is significant. Recording sessions is one of the ways I take that trust seriously.
Every client heals differently
This is the belief at the heart of everything I do: every person heals in their own unique way.
I think it’s genuinely narrow-minded for any therapist – in hypnotherapy or any other field – to be fixed in their conviction about how a particular client should heal. The mind is not a standard system. The work is not a standard process.
My job is to create the conditions, hold the space, and follow where the client’s own wisdom leads. Not to impose a theory about where the wound is buried, or insist on a particular route to recovery.
A word if you’re nervous
People sometimes come to me with a specific fear: that they’ll be taken somewhere they don’t want to go. That a therapist will pry into something private, or bring up something traumatic, or that they’ll have no control over the process.
I want to be direct about this: you are in control throughout. My role is to guide, not to lead you somewhere you haven’t consented to go. And because my approach begins with openness rather than direction, there’s no agenda about what we’ll find or where we’ll end up.
What matters is where you need to go. And the work begins from there.
References
Loftus, E. F. (1993). The reality of repressed memories. American Psychologist, 48(5), 518–537. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.48.5.518
Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (1994). The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. St. Martin’s Press.
Ofshe, R., & Watters, E. (1994). Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. Scribner’s.
McNally, R. J. (2003). Remembering Trauma. Harvard University Press.
Patihis, L., Ho, L. Y., Tingen, I. W., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Loftus, E. F. (2014). Are the “memory wars” over? A scientist-practitioner gap in beliefs about repressed memory. Psychological Science, 25(2), 519–530.
Elkins, G., & Ramsey, D. (2022). Stimulating unconscious processes with metaphors and narrative. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 64(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/00029157.2021.2019670
