How hypnosis works

Why Do People Get Emotional or Cry During Hypnosis?

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People cry during hypnosis for a plain reason: much of the work is aimed at feelings. Sessions ask you to focus closely on a difficult situation, a memory or an image of change, and suggestions can be aimed at emotion directly. When your attention is held on something painful, tears are an ordinary human response. What is less certain is the popular idea that crying is itself the cure.

Why does hypnosis bring feelings up?

Because emotion is one of its targets. According to the Wikipedia article on hypnosis, in hypnosis one person guides another to respond to suggestions for changes in subjective experience and alterations in perception, sensation, emotion, thought or behavior. A session about fear of flying may ask you to picture the cabin; a session about grief may ask you to think about the person you lost. Those are emotional exercises by design.

Three features of the setting add to this:

  • Focused attention. Hypnosis narrows attention onto what the practitioner describes, so a painful image gets your full attention rather than a passing thought.
  • Relaxation. You are physically still and comfortable, with less to distract you from what you feel.
  • Memory. WebMD’s medically reviewed overview notes that hypnosis is sometimes used to revisit memories or stressful events linked to a mental health condition, and remembering something painful can bring the original feeling back. The same overview warns that hypnosis given by someone who is not a trained professional could create fake memories. Hypnosis is not a way of establishing whether a memory is accurate, and the strength of a feeling is not proof that it is.

What is “abreaction”?

It is a psychoanalytic term for emotional release. The Wikipedia article on abreaction describes it as a psychoanalytic term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses, a type of catharsis. It was made public in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s 1895 Studies on Hysteria, built on the idea that pent-up emotions tied to a trauma could be discharged by talking about it.

The term has a more complicated history than its popular use suggests:

  • Freud and Breuer did not treat spontaneous emotional reliving as curative in itself.
  • Mainstream psychoanalysis downplayed it over time, in favor of “working through” the emotions that surfaced rather than relying on the release.
  • Carl Jung grew critical of the trauma theory behind it, writing that “not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.”

So when a practitioner describes tears as a release of stored emotion that clears a problem, they are using an old model that even its originators qualified.

Is crying a sign the session is working?

Not by itself. An emotional session can be a useful one, and a session without tears can be just as useful. Judge the work by the change you came for, not by how much you felt in the chair.

Jung’s warning matters here too. Strong emotion during a session does not prove that a memory which surfaced is accurate. The Wikipedia hypnosis article notes that memory can be altered by suggestion, so a vivid, upsetting “memory” that appears in hypnosis deserves caution, not instant belief.

Who is more likely to have intense reactions?

People with a history of trauma deserve particular care. The same hypnosis article reports research by Deirdre Barrett identifying a group of highly hypnotizable people, “dissociaters,” who often have a history of childhood abuse or other trauma, and notes that among clinical groups people with post-traumatic stress disorder are among the most hypnotizable. Strong responsiveness and painful history can go together.

If trauma is part of what you are bringing, work with a licensed clinician trained in trauma treatment, and ask how hypnosis would fit into that treatment rather than replace it.

A warning about overwhelming emotion

You can ask to stop at any point. If a feeling becomes overwhelming during a session, say so, open your eyes and ask the practitioner to slow down or end. If distress continues after you leave, contact the practitioner and your own clinician. If you have thoughts of harming yourself, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the United States, contact your local emergency number or crisis line.

This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice; talk with a licensed clinician about your own situation.

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