Hypnosis, or trance, is an enhanced state of mental clarity, wherein the mind is inordinately predisposed to suggestion. The hypnotic state is often applied, as a therapeutic process, to remove mental blocks that inhibit personal success. Professionals, certified to practice hypnosis in restorative applications, are known as hypnotherapists. As hypnosis is a useful tool in eliminating undesirable behaviors resolving mental conflict, it is often utilized to overcome any psychological resistance associated with weight loss.
Secondary Gain
Secondary gain is the term used to describe some indirect advantage that a hypnotic subject may receive for maintaining her problem. For instance, a person who wants to lose weight might have the will to do so, but may also posses an extreme underlying fear of being approached by the opposite sex. This fear could be entirely subconscious, meaning it is hidden from her everyday awareness. The excessive weight, while unwanted, acts as a buffer that guards her from having to face a more terrifying circumstance. Any change work performed in hypnosis to resolve her issue with weight loss will shortly be undone by the deeper internal need to avoid a greater anxiety. When a problem, resolved with hypnosis, returns after some time, two or more parts of the patient's psyche are pulling against one another. Unless this opposing need is detected, the hypnotic process will not work. Conditions like these are often managed through a process called integration. This procedure entails the hypnotherapist discovering what each opposing part intends to achieve, and aligning the energy of both toward a common good.
Environmental Resistance
Stephen Brooks, renowned hypnotherapist and pioneer of indirect hypnosis, says that hypnotherapists "can actually make someone better in the therapy room, then they go back into the same environment, and all the things that were maintaining the problem are still there". Problems are rarely singular issues, including weight loss. A person's everyday environment is filled with the people, things and circumstances that trigger his habitual thinking strategies and patterns of behavior. For this reason hypnotherapy may sometimes produce only short-lived change in those who wish to lose weight. This is because a change must also take place in the individual's surroundings that enable him to persist with the modification to his behavior. If the need to do this is not uncovered, and dealt with properly, the therapeutic process may fail.
When the Problem is Actually a Symptom
Any problem may exist as a reflection of another issue. The connection between disorder and symptom may have no rational basis, yet somehow be associated in the mind of the patient. For instance, eating may be an individual's way of feeling loved, needed, accepted, safe or any number of essential human emotions. Hypnosis, geared toward initiating weight loss alone, will not remedy the underlying cause. In such case, the hypnosis may fail or another, equally destructive, symptom may merely surface to replace the first.
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