A high percentage of hypnotherapists really don’t deserve the title “hypnotherapist” because their only approach to therapy is to create a trance and give suggestions. Many of them aren’t even structuring the suggestions appropriately.
It is true that suggestion therapy alone can be effective in certain kinds of issues. I have helped many people overcome obsessive finger nail biting and never used any techniques but suggestion. For smoking cessation, age regression is not necessary.
But, in most weight control problems, I want to know what the family’s eating patterns were in their childhood — what were they told about food, “finish all the food on your plate”, “you have to eat more to stay healthy”. I ask, “were your mother and dad overweight or obese?”
I want to learn more about the childhood eating patterns and the attitudes about eating. Were they poverty stricken? Was food limited? Did they only eat the cheapest kinds of food because it was all that the family could afford? As an adult, a part of their mind may be constantly saying, “I’m going to eat what I please, whenever I please, no matter what”. Hypnotists who treat everyone the same way are impostors. I call them suggestionists or hypnotists, but never hypnotherapists.
A major problem has occurred because on numerous internet websites there are thousands of CD’s offered on hundreds of problems. Many desperate and unknowing people are reading advertising copy about the CDs that promise to cure just about everything from athletes foot to leprosy. When they buy a CD, and don’t get a result, they say, “hypnosis didn’t work for me”. They take the blame and assume it’s their fault for not responding. Many of the issues that are advertised as capable of being resolved purely by suggestion need far more work than just suggestions on a CD.
I have seen CD’s advertised to increase the growth of your hair and CD’s that tell women they can increase the size of their breasts from listening to suggestions. Or that men can increase the size of their sexual organs through listening to the CD. There is no scientific evidence that that any of these promises have ever materialized. The buyers don’t send it back and say, “give me back my money, you deceived me”. They just say, “it didn’t work for me”. These con-artists are truly villains. They’re committing an unforgivable sin by making promises that they cannot deliver.