Understanding Suggestibility: How Your Mind Shapes Your Reality

The concept of suggestibility is central to understanding how Clinical Hypnotherapy works. Suggestibility refers to the mind’s ability to accept and respond to ideas or suggestions. When I’m working with clients, I’m utilising this natural human trait to help reshape unhelpful thought patterns, break habits, and create meaningful, positive change.

Here’s a deep dive into the role of suggestibility in shaping your reality and how hypnotherapy leverages it for your benefit.

What Is Suggestibility?

Suggestibility is the degree to which a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours can be influenced by external ideas or suggestions. While it may sound like something unique to hypnosis, suggestibility is actually a natural and everyday phenomenon.

For example, imagine being engrossed in a movie and feeling your emotions shift as if you were part of the story. Or consider how a kind word from a friend can boost your mood, while a negative comment might linger in your mind unpleasantly. These are examples of how your mind interacts with suggestions.

In hypnotherapy, this natural responsiveness is intentionally engaged to help clients move towards their goals.

Suggestibility and Hypnotherapy

Clinical hypnosis works by guiding individuals into a relaxed, focused state where the subconscious mind becomes more receptive to positive suggestions. This heightened suggestibility allows the mind to bypass critical or self-limiting thoughts, making it easier to embrace new, empowering ideas.

How Suggestibility Shapes Your Reality

Your thoughts and beliefs are powerful—they shape how you perceive the world, how you feel, and ultimately how you act. If you hold onto negative beliefs, such as “I’m not good enough” or “I’ll never succeed,” these thoughts can become self-fulfilling.

However, suggestibility works both ways. Just as your mind can reinforce limiting beliefs, it can also adopt positive ones. Through hypnotherapy, you can reframe these patterns and cultivate thoughts that support your well-being and goals.

For example:

• A smoker can shift from “I need cigarettes to relax” to “I can feel calm and in control without smoking.”

• Someone with low confidence can replace “I’m not good at this” with “I can learn and improve.”

Individual Differences in Suggestibility

Not everyone responds to suggestions in the same way. Some people may be naturally more suggestible, while others may need time to feel comfortable engaging with the process.

I tailor all my consultations to the unique needs of the individual, ensuring that the techniques and suggestions align with personal goals and responsiveness, and progress at a pace that is most beneficial to you.

Leveraging Suggestibility for Positive Change

One of the key benefits of hypnotherapy is its ability to work directly with the subconscious mind, where long-standing beliefs and habits are stored. By engaging the mind’s suggestibility in a therapeutic setting, hypnotherapy empowers you to:

• Break free from negative cycles.

• Build confidence and self-belief.

• Create lasting, positive change.

Suggestibility is a natural and powerful aspect of the human mind, influencing how you think, feel, and act. Harnessing this trait to reshape reality and achieve goals utilises suggestibility for positive transformation.

“Where Is My Subconscious Mind?” Clinical Hypnotherapy Terms Explained

If you’ve ever heard terms like ‘subconscious mind’ in the context of Clinical Hypnotherapy, you might wonder what it means and where this elusive part of the mind is located. I often explain the workings of the subconscious mind to clients as part of demystifying the hypnotherapy process. Understanding these concepts can help you see how hypnotherapy works to create positive, lasting change.

The Subconscious Mind: What Is It?

The subconscious mind is not a physical structure in the brain. Instead, it’s a concept used to describe the parts of your mind that operate below the level of conscious awareness. Think of it as a vast storage system for your beliefs, emotions, habits, and memories.

While your conscious mind handles active thinking, decision-making, and logic, the subconscious mind runs the show behind the scenes. It controls automatic processes like breathing, heart rate, and reflexes, but it also influences behaviour, reactions, and perceptions based on deeply ingrained patterns.

For example, when you drive a familiar route without consciously thinking about it or respond emotionally to a situation before realising why, that’s your subconscious mind at work.

Where Is the Subconscious Mind "Located"?

Although the subconscious isn’t a specific place in the brain, its functions are thought to be distributed across various regions:

• The limbic system, which governs emotions and memory.

• The autonomic nervous system, which handles automatic bodily functions.

• Neural networks that encode habits and learned behaviours.

In hypnotherapy, the term ‘subconscious mind’ is a simplified, practical way to describe this intricate system that shapes your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

How the subconscious mind forms patterns and beliefs

The subconscious mind plays a crucial role in shaping our behaviours, thoughts, and beliefs by forming patterns based on past experiences, emotions, and learned responses. From an early age, we absorb information from our environment—family, culture, media—and our brains begin to categorise and store this data. These early experiences, particularly during childhood, influence how we interpret the world and react to situations.

Patterns are created as the subconscious mind links repeated experiences with specific emotional reactions. For example, if a child experiences a traumatic event, their subconscious might begin to associate similar situations or feelings with fear or anxiety, even if the present situation doesn’t warrant such a response. Over time, these subconscious patterns solidify into core beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us.

These beliefs often become automatic and are not readily questioned by the conscious mind. For instance, someone who grows up hearing negative comments about how they look might develop a belief that they are unattractive, which can affect their self esteem and interpersonal relationships in adulthood.

However, because the subconscious mind is flexible, these patterns can be reshaped with the experienced guidance of a Clinical Hypnotherapist. Understanding how the subconscious forms these patterns is key to overcoming limiting beliefs and changing behaviours.

Why Is the Subconscious Mind Important in Hypnotherapy?

The subconscious mind is where habits, beliefs, and automatic reactions reside. It operates much like a computer program, running learned behaviours and emotional responses based on past experiences.

This makes it incredibly powerful—but also challenging to change through conscious effort alone. For example, even if you consciously decide to quit smoking, your subconscious mind might resist because it has learnt to associate smoking with stress relief or comfort. Until these deep-set beliefs are explored and redefined, the effort to quit smoking will rely on willpower alone, and most of us will have experienced how exhausting that can be to maintain over time!

Hypnotherapy works by bypassing the critical, analytical part of your conscious mind to directly engage the subconscious. In this state, the mind is more receptive to beneficial suggestions, making it easier to rewrite unhelpful patterns and embrace new, more helpful behaviours.

The Subconscious Path to Change

While the subconscious mind isn’t a tangible part of the brain, its influence is undeniable, and tapping into it unlocks the potential for lasting growth and rapid transformation. By understanding its role in shaping thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, you can better appreciate how Clinical Hypnotherapy works to create meaningful change.

Clinical Hypnotherapy vs Stage Hypnosis - Busting The Myths!

When most people think of hypnosis, they imagine dramatic scenes from TV, movies and stage performances: a mesmerist swinging a pocket watch, subjects clucking like chickens, people seemingly losing control of themselves, or being controlled to act out evil deeds. It makes for good entertainment, but stage hypnosis is a world apart from Clinical Hypnotherapy, which is a professional practice rooted in therapeutic science. Let’s dive into the key differences and bust some of the myths surrounding hypnosis.

Myth #1: Hypnosis is Mind Control

One of the biggest misconceptions about hypnosis, largely fuelled by stage performances, is that it involves mind control. In Clinical Hypnotherapy, nothing could be further from the truth. Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic technique that induces a natural, focused state of concentration to help people access their subconscious mind, where they can better explore and address personal issues. It’s essential to understand that even in a hypnotic state, the person remains in control. A hypnotherapist cannot make a client do anything against their will or moral code. Instead, the client remains aware and actively participates in the process, using their own insights and responses.

Stage hypnotists, on the other hand, rely on suggestibility and showmanship. Stage hypnosis participants are often pre-selected for their willingness to play along or demonstrate a high degree of suggestibility during the audience selection phase. Stage hypnotists are very skilled in choosing who they work with to ensure a show with maximum impact. Unlike clinical sessions, people in stage shows are generally ready to put on a performance for the audience, knowing it’s all in good fun. Despite the seemingly dramatic responses, stage hypnosis has little to do with the therapeutic application of hypnosis.

Myth #2: Hypnotherapy and Stage Hypnosis Are the Same Thing

Another common myth is that stage hypnosis and Clinical Hypnotherapy are the same or serve a similar purpose. Clinical Hypnotherapy is a valid and research-backed therapeutic practice used to address various issues, such as managing pain, reducing stress and anxiety, enhancing confidence, removing dependencies, and treating phobias. Practised by trained professionals, Clinical Hypnotherapy is safe, structured, and tailored to each individual’s needs. By accessing the subconscious mind, clients work on understanding the roots of their concerns and problems, developing effective strategies to change unhelpful behaviours or beliefs.

Stage hypnosis, meanwhile, is solely for entertainment. While it might seem that the hypnotist has a “magical” ability to make people act in bizarre ways, the reality is that stage hypnosis involves a mix of crowd psychology, suggestion, and participants’ willingness to be part of the spectacle. In a clinical setting, no hypnotherapist would ever approach hypnosis with this kind of sensationalism.

Myth #3: You Can Get “Stuck” in Hypnosis

Many people worry that they might get “stuck” in a hypnotic state, unable to wake up or return to normal consciousness. This idea is a myth. In Clinical Hypnotherapy, hypnosis is a natural state of focussed attention, similar to daydreaming or meditation. Even if a hypnotherapy session were to end abruptly, the client would naturally and safely return to full awareness within moments. The hypnotherapist acts as a guide, helping the client enter a state of relaxation and focus, but the client is always in control of their experience.

The Real Value of Clinical Hypnotherapy

While stage hypnosis can be fun and entertaining, Clinical Hypnotherapy has a powerful therapeutic purpose. It’s a tool that can empower people to address deep-seated issues, develop coping skills, and improve their quality of life. By debunking the myths and understanding the true nature of hypnotherapy, people can make informed choices about using it as a beneficial therapy.

Clinical Hypnotherapy and stage hypnosis might share the word “hypnosis,” but they couldn’t be more different in application and intention. Clinical Hypnotherapy is about healing, self-improvement, and real transformation, while stage hypnosis is simply an act designed to entertain. By separating the facts from the myths, we can better appreciate hypnotherapy as a legitimate, effective, and respectful therapeutic practice that exists at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and wellness.