Behavioral issues: Hypnosis helps educate yourself

Behavioral problems are often associated with children, but adults can also struggle with them. Think, for example, of aggressive behavior, compulsive behavior, overly impulsive behavior, socially inappropriate behavior, self-destructive behavior, addictive behavior, and even when people isolate themselves—this is also considered a behavioral problem.

Those behavioral problems are problems because it is awkward for your social ties and thus your functioning in society. It hinders your own survival, so to speak.

This is because your behavior affects other people, and if you have a behavioral problem, it can cause other people to have a problem with you. This makes it more difficult to find or hold a job. Even working together as an entrepreneur can be made more difficult because of behavioral problems.

As a result, behavioral problems can make the life of someone suffering from them impossible, or at least much more difficult than necessary.

A hypnotherapist can help people struggling with behavioral problems in several ways. Behavior is, in fact, the result of emotions and choices. Those choices and emotions, in turn, stem from thoughts and beliefs. And it is precisely with those beliefs and thought processes that hypnosis can play a role. By changing them, you can change a person’s behavior.

So even as an adult, hypnosis can still help ensure that your “upbringing” is a success. Instead of relying on your parents for this, a hypnotherapist helps people educate themselves.

Hypnotherapy for aggression

If aggressive behavior is your problem, hypnosis can help as well. For example, aggression plays a role more often in men who suffer from depressive symptoms than in women.

Research shows that hypnosis combined with cognitive behavioral therapy helps against depressive symptoms (and, in men, the aggression it can provoke). Compared to people receiving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) alone, depression, anxiety and hopelessness were reduced 6%, 5% and 8%, respectively, with hypnotherapy[1].

Another study comparing hypnotherapy to CBT even found that people with hypnotherapy were better served[2].

It’s not just men who can struggle with aggression. Women, too, may be slightly more aggressive than usual at certain times of the month due to their hormone levels. Research shows that hypnosis can also help women cope better with this issue[3].

Stopping Compulsive Behavior with Hypnosis

Compulsive behavior—or, in extreme cases, even OCD—can also be treated with hypnosis. You may experience compulsive behavior or even compulsive thoughts; both can be treated with hypnosis.

In the case of compulsive thoughts, hypnosis can help you become more mindful of your thoughts and stop and change a compulsive thought pattern. The latter can be achieved, for example, through reframing.

In addition, you can also distract yourself by shifting your focus. This is something a hypnotherapist can help with if compulsive thoughts are the problem.

As for compulsive behavior, this can also be changed with hypnosis. In one case study, a man was helped by replacing awkward compulsive behavior with desired compulsive behavior[4].

This is also a technique we teach our trainees.

I once used the technique myself to help a woman who compulsively ate a cookie every time she came into her kitchen. We replaced this behavior with briefly sweeping the floor. In time, she indicated to me that her kitchen had never been so clean. And she had lost weight because she could now just leave the cookies alone.

A super result!

In cases of socially inappropriate behavior, this technique can also be used to replace awkward behavior with healthy “normal” behavior. Erickson himself also helped his psychiatric patients with suggestions. For example, if someone pretended to drink blood—even though in reality that wasn’t happening and the person was merely making a drinking gesture—he would suggest that they do so in the bathroom instead. In this way, someone with socially inappropriate behavior could still function in a normal environment, because they would then do all those inappropriate things in private.

Then no one else was bothered by it, and the person had still found a way to get a little weird for themselves.

Making impulsive behavior more thoughtful with hypnosis

Impulsive behavior can also be incredibly awkward. Especially if those impulses cause you to miss appointments or do really stupid things. Reason enough, then, to do something about it.

Impulsive behavior is often the result of a particular emotion a person does not want to feel. In a study of a successful woman with bulimia and an unemployed man with mental health problems, who both suffered from impulsive behavior, it was found that the hypnotic state could be used to break the connection of the emotion to the impulsive behavior.

Hypnosis was used to create a different link to the emotion, then to resolve it with the impulsive behavior[5].

The hypnotic state was used to make clients more aware of how their bodies felt just before the impulsive behavior. This was done to make it more recognizable and to make the feeling more tolerable. Then these feelings were linked to helping thoughts so that the impulse did not have to be carried out.

Stopping self-destructive behavior with hypnosis

Sometimes you also have people, when life is going well, it scares them so much that they do something to ruin it for themselves. After all, then it "adds up" again. Terribly inconvenient, because it's also allowed to just go right, right?

Self-destructive behavior can also involve hurting yourself without killing you. Examples include scratching yourself, banging your head against a wall, hitting yourself and the like. In Pakistan, adolescents were studied to see if hypnotherapy combined with CBT helped stop this, and it did. They were much less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior[6].

To do this, the young people received weekly sessions of about 1 hour. They did this for 12 to 13 weeks. They were also given homework in the form of self-hypnosis.

Treating addictive behaviors with hypnosis

Someone who is truly heavily addicted will do anything to feed their drug addiction. Stealing, lying, cheating, and always putting themselves first. This is very problematic, because it costs you your social relationships. On top of that, an addiction also costs you your health. So you’re losing on two fronts if you continue with addictive behavior.

Ericksonian hypnotherapy is a method for treating addictive behavior. A study on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of alcohol addiction found that the long-term outcomes for people treated with hypnosis were better than for those treated with motivational interviewing[7].

Hypnosis can also play an important role for other addictions. I myself also have experience with this, as I used to love certain substances and had to quit. I even accidentally did this with a hypnosis technique, but I only found that out later when I started studying hypnosis.

This technique is also now being taught to people in training at the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.

Agoraphobia, or agoraphobia

Isolating yourself is also considered a behavioral disorder. If you have agoraphobia and cannot leave the house because of it, it is important to do something. After all, despite social media, going outside is often one of the things that make life a success.

Fortunately, a hypnotherapist can offer a helping hand here as well. Research shows that hypnotherapy works well for people with agoraphobia. In the study, people on the waiting list for regular mental health care actually received hypnotherapy. These were 8 to 12 sessions over three months (far more than necessary, but for scientific research, people should be given roughly the same suggestions). Even in this way, which was not fully adapted to the person, hypnotherapy helped to reduce symptoms with this anxiety[8] and thus to lower social isolation as well.

Another study involving a 20-year-old man with social anxiety also showed that hypnosis, combined with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), helped him overcome this anxiety. This involved a single session lasting 3.5 hours. As a result, he no longer needed medication to manage his social anxiety[9].

Hypnosis for behavioral problems

Behavioral problems can arise over the course of your life due to a variety of issues and triggers. A hypnotherapist can help people transform behavioral problems so that people become "model citizens" 😉 .

In this article, you have mostly read that hypnosis works, but not yet "how" hypnosis works exactly.

Would you like to learn more? Then join the free online masterclass on hypnosis.

Or sign up right away for one of our events or training courses. You’ll immediately learn techniques to help people. After the first training course, you’ll already be able to tackle many behavioral issues and help people transform their lives.

(Just think what you can do when you have done all the training.)

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