Hypnosis for Alcohol Abuse

While not everyone can be hypnotized, those who can may find unexpected success

Hypnosis, at one level, is about deep visualization and finding the belief we can do something that previously seemed impossible. Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock

Ben considered himself a healthy 41-year-old. He was a true waterman: a paddleboarder, fly fisherman, and many years ago, a champion crew team member at his university. He ate nutritious food, drank enough filtered water, and made himself invaluable at work as the vice president of a large company. To an outsider, he looked like the all-American dad, but behind closed doors, there existed two Bens: the lovable, sociable, kind Ben, and Ben the mean drunk.

Between a separation, a divorce, the estrangement of his children, and a recent relationship that ended because of his excessive drinking, he knew he had a problem. Worse, he felt like he had tried and failed every treatment available.

These included three outpatient and one inpatient rehabilitation center, trials of various online and in-person Alcoholics Anonymous groups, naltrexone, a pill that kept you from the urge to drink, a pill that makes you sick if you drink, and a few different counselors who suggested books that cut your drinking down (but still allowed some drinking), books for agnostics, and books that promised if you make it 30 days, you’ll make it.

He tried TedX Talks, videos of recovered addicts, and getting a sponsor, but nothing could motivate him from operating from his usual level of consciousness—stopping at the liquor store on his way home from work—at least long term.

Ben was at the point he’d never believed he would hit: rock bottom. Then like a flick of a switch, he decided he’d had enough. He went to find a new rehab center during the COVID-19 crisis. Most were booked with long waiting lists, but he found a holistic place that offered hypnosis for alcohol. Ben likened the idea of hypnosis to a pendulum-holding witch doctor, but as he checked himself in, he contemplated a quote from Buddha, pinned to the wall:

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

Choosing Sobriety

Most alcoholics have some questions before trying something so out of the box. Who should try hypnosis for alcohol? Does it have to be a last resort? What if you just wanted to cut down on your bad habits? And most importantly, what are the sessions like?

There are different styles of hypnotherapy that are sometimes used independently or blended, including authoritative style, when you passively receive suggestions from the practitioner, permissive style, when the hypnotist encourages you to take a more active role in the process, and self-hypnosis, when you follow recordings on an app or DVD, or meditate, focusing on your goals.

British author and certified hypnotherapist Alisa Frank answers many of these questions on her webpage. Her clients can book one-to-one sessions or order her audiotapes: “Take control of alcohol,” “Stop binge drinking for women” and “Stop binge drinking for men.” She also recommends reading her book, “Cut the Crap and Feel Amazing,” in which she devotes a whole chapter to breaking addictions.

“My system of alcohol reduction hypnotherapy deals with the emotional issues connected to drinking too much alcohol such as boredom and stress or upsets.” She uses hypnotherapy to break the habit of drinking, reprogram sleep patterns, and release cravings.

She said her therapy works for people who want to think less about alcohol and say “no” to a drink when they need to.

One of her testimonials from her website reads: “Since the hypnotherapy to stop drinking alcohol my once-toxic relationship with alcohol has gone through an unequivocal break-up. I start to notice other small shifts. For instance, I start buying sparkling water and filling my usual wine glass with it in the evening to relax. ... I also started running more regularly and practicing yoga twice a week—a goal I’d worked toward for at least a year but never quite managed. I start eating healthier lunches and dinners and getting up earlier, feeling refreshed and energized rather than shattered and slightly depressed. The change is noticeable and quite remarkable.”

Does It Work?

There are certainly enough testimonials from people who have had success to give hypnotherapy some street credit. There are also studies about the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for other conditions that show it has a significant and measurable impact. 

The American Psychological Association (APA) said in a statement online: “A growing body of scientific research supports the benefits of hypnotherapy in treating a wide range of conditions, including pain, depression, anxiety and phobias.” The APA states that “hypnosis works and the empirical support is unequivocal in that regard.”

Despite that, black-and-white movies with a goatee guy in a cape swinging a pocket watch really played a number on the public image of hypnosis, especially those fixated on the line: “Look into my eyes.” Some associate hypnotism with spells and voodoo. Others deemed the practice devoid of therapeutic benefit. A movie reviewer for Robert Ebert called the newest thriller “Hypnotic” about the “dangerous power of hypnotherapy” slick and cheesy. The lousy representations of hypnosis are everywhere.

But hypnosis is becoming more mainstream—big in the United Kingdom and the United States—with hypnosis centers in practically every major city. Alcohol rehab centers offer hypnosis now, and if you peruse the list of treatment approaches on Psychology Today, you will find several that offer hypnotherapy for alcohol abuse. Most have received certification from national and international hypnosis societies as well as other innovative and unconventional institutions.

Other practitioners have gotten creative with their hypnotherapy sessions, pulling ideas from the long history of the ancient technique.

For instance, a form of quantum hypnosis is also emerging as a possible alcohol treatment modality, explained by Giuseppe De Benedittis in the Internal Journal of clinical hypnosis, that “applies to hypnotic cognitive functioning rather than hypnotic structure.”

World-renowned Marissa Peer, a therapist from the UK, for instance, has had so much success in her trademarked Rapid Transformational Therapy method for addiction—a hybrid of hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, life coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy, and neuroscientific principles—she’s devoting her time into training more therapists to do the same healing work.

More Than a Fad

Hypnosis isn’t new. It’s actually older than Jesus.

The earliest references to hypnotism date back to ancient Egypt and Greece, when hypnosis was used to induce dreams to be analyzed to get to the root of the trouble, according to a fascinating history lesson from Harmony Hypnosis in London.

The word “hypnos” refers to the Greco-Roman god of sleep. Early writings from 2600 B.C. in China and 1500 B.C. in India mention hypnotic procedures, but the modern father of hypnosis was Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, of the 1700s, from whose name “mesmerism’ is derived.

“Mesmerizing” Mesmer was the man who popularized the “power of suggestion,” though his style was a bit too showman-like for the times. Apparently, that made his colleagues a bit jealous, and he wasn’t taken seriously. Like the holistic practitioners of today, he was considered a bit too “out of the box.”

British surgeon James Esdaile of India was the one who ushered hypnotism into clinical acceptance. Esdaile performed hundreds of major operations in the 1800s using hypnotism as his only anesthetic. His work attracted significant attention and was considered a medical breakthrough.

The 1800s also brought in Frenchman Emile Coué, who pioneered the physiological use of “auto-suggestion” until Sigmund Freud captured people’s attention with psychoanalysis and interest in hypnosis waned.

Freud has the name recognition, but Coué birthed one of the most utilized ideas in holistic health: that the imagination is more powerful than the will. Or in other words, the power of suggestion in hypnosis can act as a placebo.

According to the Harmony Hypnosis article, Coué was a man of enormous compassion who believed he merely facilitated his patient’s own self-healing, rather than healing them himself. “He understood the importance of the subject’s participation in hypnosis, and was a forerunner of those modern practitioners who claim, ‘There is no such thing as hypnosis, only self-hypnosis.’”

“If you ask someone to walk across a plank of wood on the floor, they can usually do it without wobbling. However, if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine the plank is suspended between two buildings hundreds of feet above the ground, they will start to sway.”

Perhaps the most relevant contribution Coué made to the practice of hypnotherapy is his famous phrase: “Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.” When read beside the famous mantra of the 12-step AA program: “One day at a time,” it almost looks like hypnotherapy was destined for the treatment of alcohol abuse.

Fast forward to modern day and the medical hypnosis techniques of psychiatrist Milton Erickson (from the 1900s) are still being used and tweaked for today’s most worrying psychological problems and damage to the brain, such as alcohol interfering with the brain’s communication pathways and affecting the neurons when someone abuses alcohol long term.

Ericksonian hypnotherapy uses indirect suggestion, metaphor, and storytelling to alter behavior, rather than direct suggestion, according to the Hypnotherapy Directory.

But how about hypnosis as a treatment approach specifically for alcohol? And more importantly, can this claim be backed up with evidence?

Should Alcoholics Try Hypnotism?

Studies on hypnotism related to alcohol are limited, but there are a few. A 2018 Norwegian study published in the Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy compared the effect of hypnotherapy in alcohol use disorder (AUD) to motivational interviewing, one of the more popular treatment methods. The intervention consisted of five individual one-hour hypnotherapy sessions over five weeks.

Explained by the Hypnotherapy Directory, the hypnotist will encourage the patient to enter a deep state of relaxation, or trance-like state, while your body is more open to suggestion. Using suggestion techniques, the hypnotherapist will look to change the way you react to alcohol. The suggestions would be tailored to your triggers, changing the way you react, to ultimately help you stop craving alcohol.

The Norwegian study used Erickson’s permissive hypnosis method to make the patient find alcohol repulsive. Many rehab centers and private psychologists incorporate Erickson’s methods and add a little of their own creative touch, such as creating the right relaxation mood with candles, ambient music, yoga mats, and whatever else they find works with individual clients.

For example, a hypnotherapist might have the patient start a session by imagining themselves descending a staircase, and with every step, becoming more light and relaxed.

“Each treatment session began with a conversation about the patient’s past life events, present situation, alcohol problem and his or her thoughts about it,” the authors of the Norwegian study wrote, adding that patients would visualize when and where they bought alcohol and how it was consumed. Then, through breathing and relaxation exercises (with visualization of a peaceful place in mind), the patients were put into a trance.

“Once the trance was induced, the patient was asked to visualize mastery of a selected situation. This situation was tailored according to the patient’s needs. It could include, for example, abstaining from alcohol at a party, passing their regular alcohol shop without going inside, or mastering another problematic issue, such as staying relaxed and calm in the presence of other people. When indicated, the events of the past were a subject of hypnotic intervention as well,” they wrote.

The relatively small randomized controlled trial found patients receiving hypnotherapy did marginally better concerning alcohol use at one-year follow-up compared to the controls, and the portion of the patients reporting total abstinence was higher in the hypnotherapy group.

Researchers wrote: “There was also a small, although far from significant, reduction in mental distress in the hypnotherapy group compared to the control group.”

The second study from Virginia, published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis in 2004, evaluated drug- and alcohol-addicted veterans. Their conclusions suggest self-hypnosis audio tapes can be a useful adjunct therapy in helping chronic substance abusers with their reported self-esteem, serenity, and anger or impulsivity—especially those who played the audio tapes at least 3 to 5 times per week.

Is Hypnotherapy Enough?

Some practitioners say hypnotherapy works better as an adjunct therapy.

Victor Tsan, medical doctor, certified hypnotherapist, homeopath, and acupuncturist, is the medical director of the Philadelphia Hypnosis Clinic. He has practiced for 46 years and focuses his work on modifying behavior patterns through life regression procedures. He believes the best treatment of alcoholism is two-fold.

A former pharmacist, he was awakened by the idea that too many drugs will worsen a condition rather than cure it. He believes there is a perfect balance between the use of modern alcohol drugs and holistic techniques in therapy. Tsan’s webpage states that the benefits of Antabuse or its generic Disulfiram (the pill or implant that makes one sick if they drink alcohol) combined with hypnotherapy is key for overcoming a serious alcohol problem.

Hypnosis Is Not for Everyone

Truth be told, a 2012 Stanford University study from the Archives of General Psychiatry found not everyone can be hypnotized—and that’s a biological fact.

Using data from functional and structural magnetic resonance imagining, Dr. David Spiegel, director of the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, learned the ability to be hypnotized had less to do with personality, and more to do with brain structure—specifically, those who were more easily hypnotized had greater activity between the executive control and salience networks. By contrast, there was little functioning connectivity between these two areas of the brain in those with low hypnotizability.

Spiegel developed a test known as the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales to find out—if you really want to. He estimates that one-quarter of the patients he sees can’t be hypnotized.

To flip that statistic over, three-quarters of his patients can be hypnotized. If those were your odds, and it could help you end a devastating addiction, would you try it?

Beth Giuffre is a mosaic artist and frequent contributor to The Epoch Times. When the youngest of her three sons began having seizures, she began researching the root cause of intractable epilepsy and discovered endless approaches to healing for those who are willing and open to alternatives.