How to Use Hypnosis for Physical Healing

It's not just the relaxation accompanying hypnosis that produces healing in the body, but the hypnotic imagery and suggestion itself that works the 'magic'.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw. Beautiful pink skin with no scarring! The warts were dying, and we were ecstatic!”

– Melissa Armer, mother of a boy whose warts were cured using hypnosis

In his psychotherapy practice, my father, Ivan Tyrrell, once used a story to cure a client of warts. We used the same story in our wart treatment online hypnosis session to heal a boy of terrible warts all over his hands.

His mother describes the cure here.

So how is this possible? How can the soothing power of words alone not only ameliorate physical pain to the point that it may no longer be felt at all, but also cure or at least enhance recovery from physical conditions like warts?

The roles of hypnosis in reducing inflammation¹ (which seems to drive so many diseases)² and accelerating healing after surgery have been well documented.³

For me this is not surprising, as the divide between mind and body is, in some ways, an artificial one.

Prefer to watch instead?

The mind is the body

People often talk about the ‘mind-body connection’, yet I prefer to think of the mind and body as not so much connected but blended.

Whether the mind – or, I should say, consciousness – can transcend the limitations of the body or time and space is, alas, a discussion for another day! But I do like to think of consciousness as residing in all parts of you, not just ‘in your head’.

Anyway, certainly what our mind is doing has immediate and sometimes long-term effects on the physical reality of our body.

Long-term emotional stress, for example, as accompanies depression, can start to shrink the hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.⁴ And simply recalling a time when you were really angry can reduce the pumping efficiency of the heart if you have heart disease.⁵ So every thought and feeling you have influences your body, and, likewise, what your body is doing influences your mind.

Hypnosis seems to be a fast-track way of multiplying that effect. For example, a 2007 study found that women who were hypnotized before undergoing a breast biopsy or lumpectomy required less sedation during the procedure and experienced less pain, nausea, and emotional distress afterwards.⁶

Hypnosis is more than just relaxation

Now, we know that simple relaxation is good for immunity and mental wellbeing. But it seems it’s not just the relaxation accompanying hypnosis that produces healing in the body, but the hypnotic imagery and suggestion itself that works the ‘magic’.

At Washington State University, researchers conducted a study where some volunteers received hypnotic suggestions aimed at strengthening their immune systems while others were given only relaxation suggestions or none at all.⁷ They then measured their levels of T cells and B cells – key players in the body’s immune system.

The results showed that those who had undergone hypnosis had significantly higher levels of these protective cells.

So it seems that there is plenty of evidence that the mind-body connection and its role in influencing health is tangible: It can be observed, measured, and influenced through hypnosis above and beyond the simple but undoubted effects of simple relaxation.

But before we get carried away, I want to make one thing clear.

A cure for cancer?

Although lots of evidence supports the role of hypnosis in not just ameliorating physical pain and enhancing immunity but also facilitating wellbeing in people going through cancer,⁸ I don’t want to claim ‘hypnosis can cure cancer!’

Why? Because cancer, like many diseases, can spontaneously reverse. Its progression can slow, or other treatments such as immunotherapy, surgery, or chemotherapy may be the decisive factor in its remission or cure.

FREE Reframing Book! Just subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter below.

Download my book on reframing, "New Ways of Seeing", when you subscribe for free email updates

Click to subscribe free now

If a patient was having hypnotic treatment alongside other medical treatment, it would be disingenuous at best to try to claim that hypnosis had cured the cancer.

I treated one woman over Zoom for many years. She had cancer in her breast, lungs, pancreas, and other organs. At her request, we used hypnosis to ‘battle’ the cancer.

She told me her doctors described her as a medical marvel as she outlived by many years their predictions of what was ‘meant to be possible’.

But I still can’t put this down to the influence of hypnosis, as the reality is we just don’t know. She was having multiple other treatments too. Certainly the improvement in mental wellbeing she enjoyed as a result of my hypnotic was of immense benefit. But I didn’t cure her and would never claim that I did. The hypnosis may have contributed to suppressing the cancer.

So I offer these tips not to suggest we can guarantee a cure for anything or that we should tell patients to abandon conventional physical interventions for any disease or illness they might have, but simply as an exploration of an adjunct treatment and an adventure in what might be possible for your client.

Tip one: Open the door of possibility for your client

As we’ve just said, you should never promise your client you’ll cure them with hypnosis. But at the same time, we know how powerful the placebo response is. Expectation is powerful.

We can prime our clients with truisms as to how the mind can influence the body and even allude to research on hypnosis and healing.

You don’t know for sure you can cure someone’s warts or help shrink a tumour (and it’s certainly not ethical to unequivocally claim you can do these things!), but you can suggest to a client, more generally, that we don’t know just what is possible – that research shows hypnosis can greatly benefit the workings of the body and that we’ll work together with an openness to that possibility.

A positive orientation and openness is a great place to start.

Most of this can be done before formal hypnotic induction. But what about once you’ve induced hypnosis?

Tip two: Use storytelling and metaphor to enhance immunity and redirect blood flow

The immune system is highly responsive to psychological and emotional states. Chronic stress and negative emotions can suppress immune function by increasing stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Using self-hypnosis has been shown to counteract these effects and enhance immune activity by increasing white blood cell activity.⁹

On the surface, storytelling seems a strange way to influence immunity. And yet even saying ‘on the surface’ is a use of metaphor. To use another metaphor, human beings live and breathe metaphor. We almost can’t avoid it. As one UK sports broadcaster once famously said, apparently in all seriousness: “In my day we didn’t use metaphors. We didn’t beat around the bush!”

The woman I mentioned above, who lived many years longer than medically predicted and with much less pain, would enjoy me telling tales of multitudes of white knights seeking out rogue armies to destroy evil invaders.

As you may know, killer T cells, also called cytotoxic or CD8+ T lymphocytes, are a type of white blood cell that are essential to the body’s immune defences, directly destroying infected or cancerous cells.

So it’s no great stretch to tell tales of trillions of ‘white knights’ vanquishing ‘evil invaders’ to ‘clear the kingdom’ and so on.

We can also use storytelling to suggest blood flow changes in the body.

Cutting off supplies

Perhaps at least part of the mechanism behind mind/body healing using hypnosis is predicated upon the mind influencing blood flow, which then effects corresponding changes in the body.

For example, the story my father used to cure a client of warts (and the story embedded in our hypnotic audio session for warts) goes like this:

The princess and the wise woman

Once upon a time, in a kingdom of rolling hills and golden rivers, there ruled a wise and noble king. He had but one daughter, a princess as kind as she was fair. But when the old king suddenly passed away, the young princess found herself alone upon the throne, uncertain of how to govern.

From across the border, a cunning ruler saw her inexperience and sent forth his armies to seize her lands. Like a flood, the invaders poured in, taking village after village, ever pressing towards the palace. The young queen, though brave, did not know how to stop them.

In her despair, she remembered the sage – an old woman her father had always sought in times of great peril. So she climbed the highest mountain, where the wind howled and the air was thin, and found the old sage seated upon a stone.

She told her of the invaders, of their relentless march, of her helplessness. The old woman listened, then gazed into her eyes and said:

“These invaders need feeding, do they not? They require food, water, and weapons. But tell me, how do they receive these things? Look not to the army – look to the supply of the army.”

At once, the queen understood. She raced back to her kingdom and commanded her soldiers to block the rivers and canals that fed the enemy’s supply lines via their barges and boats. The lifeblood of the invaders – food, drink, and reinforcements – was cut off.

Within days, their strength withered. Thirst and hunger gnawed at them, and soon they scattered like leaves in the wind, vanishing from her lands.

So it is with warts, those unwelcome invaders of the skin. They, too, must be fed – by blood. And just as a queen can cut off the lifeline of an enemy army, so the mind, through the power of hypnosis, can command the blood to retreat, starving the wart until it withers and falls away.

Of course, you can use variations of that story or produce entirely new and different ones. The trick is to look at the pattern of the illness and disease. How might this pattern, and the pattern of a solution, be presented metaphorically as a story during hypnosis?

Of course, we can also make more direct suggestions for healing during trance.

Tip three: Use more direct hypnotic suggestions.

I love the use of metaphor because on a subtle level listening to stories is hypnotic, especially when the story is delivered well with creative use of language and an appeal to all the senses of the client.

But as well as, or, for the more literal-minded client, perhaps even instead of using metaphor and story to heal, we can sometimes be more direct in our suggestions.

We might have them visualize the warts leaving their skin by suggesting a ‘healing feeling’ of warmth flowing through the body from a great universal source of health. Like dipping into a timeless pool of healing. Or we might present the healing force as a colour and have them visualize that healing colour circulating around their body and powering up when it meets what it needs to work on most.

Sometimes I’ll talk of healing as a feeling they can notice throughout the day and suggest that the healing will be happening even when they’re not aware of it, such as when they sleep deeply at night.

We might use ‘pseudo-orientation in time’ and have the client time travel hypnotically (obviously!) to a future in which they are recovering and then healed.

Now, you’ll notice that even though these approaches are more direct than the storytelling, and the use of metaphor is more oblique than in tip two, they still require creative use of language and a kind of visceral use of your client’s imagination.

Over to you!

Maybe you already use these approaches or others. But if not, there is no harm in introducing them into your practice (as long as you don’t suggest your client stop all other treatment!).

Words influence the mind, and the mind cannot help but influence the body.

So we can help our clients heal by:

• Suggesting they can heal: alluding to the immense power and unknowable potential of the human mind and body, thus opening the door to possibility.
• Using storytelling and metaphor in or even outside of hypnosis to enhance immunity and alter blood flow in the body.
• Using more direct suggestions for healing.

Dr Milton Erickson once said:

“It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don’t know what they can do.”

That’s true. And of course, you and I are people too. It might be truly amazing what you can do. For yourself, and for others.

Train in hypnosis online with Mark

Whether you’re new to hypnosis and would like to incorporate it into your work, or a seasoned hypno-pro looking for new skills, we have a course for you. Uncommon Hypnotherapy is our entry-level course, where you’ll learn indirect, conversational hypnosis, and Precision Hypnosis will take your skills to the next level. All delivered through our online platform, Uncommon U.

FREE Reframing Book! Just subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter below.

Download my book on reframing, "New Ways of Seeing", when you subscribe for free email updates

Click to subscribe free now

About Mark Tyrrell

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

You can get my book FREE when you subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter. Click here to subscribe free now.

You can also get my articles on YouTube, find me on Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook.

Notes: