Hypnosis Cannot Erase a Memory — So How Does It Change a Life?

People often ask what hypnotherapy actually corrects in the brain.

The simplest answer is an image.

Picture the mind as a great jar you can keep filling with water — it never overflows, and you can never draw the original water back out. One day you discover salt water at the bottom, making the whole jar unusable. What can be done?

Add enough clean water. Until the salt is diluted past the point of tasting.

This is the principle hypnotherapy works on.

The salt water at the bottom stands for the unhelpful patterns settled in the subconscious — a belief that limits you, a fear without reason, a response the brain learned and now runs automatically.

Neuroscience has found that memories and learned patterns are encoded across billions of connections between neurons, and there is at present no clinical way to delete a particular memory directly.

What can be done — and what we do through Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy — is to add new and more constructive material to the subconscious, consistently. As the new pattern accumulates, it gradually begins to work in place of the old one, without any sense of forcing yourself.

The difficulty is not deleted. It is diluted, until it no longer holds power over a life.

And that is what lasting change means.

For how this works in the brain, see “How Hypnotherapy Works in the Brain” and “Hypnosis Is Subconscious Learning”.