Hypnosis promotes positive changes in adults and children.

"Children are more easily hypnotized than adults, and hypnotherapy as a method responds to the general developmental needs of children by addressing their ability for fantasy and imagination. Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis are tools with which to assess and develop protective factors, and enhance positive adjustment."

"Hypnosis and NLP use words in a very conscious way to affect the subconscious experience and promote positive changes. There is more harm in NOT understanding how POWERFUL words are, than in avoiding hypnosis and NLP out of fear or simple innocent ignorance."

"What is hypnosis? Hypnosis can be defined as a way to focus attention and communicate ideas in an experiential way that benefits a client. Now, who wouldn’t want to learn how to do that?

Hypnosis is not a therapy and it is not a cure for anything.

Rather, hypnosis is a tool that is designed to facilitate positive changes that a person wishes to make.

There are different schools of thought regarding how direct or indirect one should be in using hypnotic techniques and communications. Some people advocate for specific philosophies, therapeutic models or approaches, but I personally don’t subscribe to anything other than what works for an individual.

The pioneering work of the late psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson is most consistent with how I have intuitively worked with children in therapy. He saw the strengths and resources people had and utilized these in his treatment. It didn’t matter what diagnosis people had, their age, their gender, their intelligence or any other such factors. He respected their individual strengths and found ways to gently introduce new ways to use those strengths in what has come to be called conversational hypnosis. More and more literature is coming out in the domains of mindfulness, relaxation, calming exercises, visualization, and others as well, but the common denominator they all share is an experience that effects positive change in the person through an experiential mechanism not easily defined.

Hypnosis is more often than not a skill that is developed over time. Yes, there are people who experience hypnosis once and make a dramatic change, but it’s not usually the case in working with children.

A person can learn to do this for themselves (self-hypnosis) or have the experience guided by someone else.

The key is in knowing what works for YOU, or your child. If a CD doesn’t work or a therapist doesn’t effect change, don’t blame it on the hypnosis. It means THAT CD didn’t work FOR YOU or that therapist didn’t connect with YOU.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It means you haven’t found the right connection.

Hypnosis isn’t just about talking TO a person; it is about talking WITH a person. That can be done in story form, during a game, playing with toys, using a computer, sitting quietly in a chair or many other ways. There are all kinds of ways to engage a person in perspectives giving rise to meaningful change."

Edited from PsychCentral, Diane Yapko, MA