Can Hypnotherapy Help with Trauma? How It Supports a Dysregulated Nervous System

 

When you sleep, you dream, even if you don’t remember. Your brain is in the process of consolidating memories, working things out and processing emotions. The science is divisive, but some believe we dream to process difficult emotional experiences from the day.

 

There is a point in the circadian rhythm when your body reduces excretion of cortisol – the stress hormone. For a human living in alignment with nature, this begins in the early evening and continues throughout the night, with the lowest concentration of cortisol around midnight.

 

The body begins to excrete cortisol again in the early hours, ready for its influx as the sun rises and it’s time to wake up. This makes sleep the perfect time to process difficult situations and emotions. And why some scientists, such as author of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, believe people with PTSD experience repeated nightmares. The cortisol running through their body never gets low enough for the brain to fully process the traumatic experience. Each night it tries again. 

 

Trauma, whether acute, chronic, complex or developmental, affects the nervous system. Keeping you stuck in a pattern of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. During hypnosis cortisol levels drop, so hypnotherapy offers a way to safely process trauma without re-experiencing the distress associated with it. 

 

How Trauma Affects the Nervous System

 

When you experience stress, your body activates the sympathetic nervous system. This is your fight or flight response, and it puts your body into the optimal state to fight or flee for survival. As your body senses the passing of the threat, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which puts your body back into the state of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the calm state in which the body maintains its baseline in a changing environment. For example, if the external temperature rises, the body will act accordingly to maintain its internal temperature.

 

Allostasis is an alternative view of physiological regulation, which helps us understand many chronic health conditions, including trauma. Allostasis suggests the body maintains stability by adapting and changing, but (unlike the fixed and reactive state of homeostasis), allostasis is flexible and predictive. Rather than constantly returning to the same state, the body returns to an adapted state. Trauma can disrupt allostasis, keeping the nervous system in a constant stress. Over time, this allostatic overload can lead to anxiety, fatigue, burnout, or chronic illness. Hypnotherapy can help the nervous system shift from survival-based allostasis to a more balanced, regulated state.

 

Why Traditional Talk Therapy Isn’t Always Enough

 

Talking through trauma can sometimes reinforce distress, rather than resolve it. This is because the symptoms of trauma are the result of the body’s inability to process the emotional reactions, rather than intellectually understand it. The body gets stuck in the trauma – you feel trapped in your emotional reactions – as the trauma embeds in the body. The body can react with physical symptoms like tightness, pain, or hypervigilance, long after the traumatic event. Talking through an experience doesn’t always help the emotions move through the body, so even if your mind moves on, the body can carry the trauma, requiring a more holistic approach to truly heal.

How Hypnotherapy Helps Reprocess Trauma Safely

 

Hypnotherapy helps trauma processing in different ways

 

• Bessel Van Der Kolk speaks in his book The Body Keeps the Score about noticing how soldiers previously uncomfortable speaking about their experiences find it easier to do in hypnosis. This is because hypnosis works on the part of the brain, which worries about what others think. During hypnosis, the soldiers felt more able to share their experiences, externalise and work through the suppressed emotions.  

 

• Some people believe we can access repressed memories during hypnosis. Despite acknowledging the brain forgets as part of its survival mechanism, it is imperative the hypnotist does not lead the client or suggest. Dissociation is a mental process that causes you to feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories, or identity. It’s a survival mechanism that helps us cope with overwhelming stress or trauma. Dissociation can cause memory gaps or amnesia. Dissociation, especially in response to trauma, may cause you to block memories or lose track of time. This is not intentional. Using hypnosis, you can access the emotions attached to a specific event or events, and process them with an experienced hypnotherapist, during the calm state of hypnosis, within the safe space of a therapy room. You can do this with or without access to a memory of the specific event, allowing the brain to reshape its response to past evenings without needing to relive them.

 

• Cortisol levels within the body reduce during hypnosis, which means you can process experiences and emotions like the brain does when dreaming. 

 

 

Regulating the Nervous System with Hypnotherapy

 

To help with trauma, hypnotherapy shifts the nervous system from survival mode to calm. Techniques like guided visualisation and breath work help signal safety to the body. You do not need to re-experience the pain to recover from trauma. Hypnotherapy provides a way to move from survival to peace and self-trust by reshaping the way the mind and body respond to it.

 

References

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4688585/#:~:text=Typically%2C%20the%20nadir%20(time%20point,into%20to%20the%20waking%20hours.

 

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