Inside the First Session: Hypnotherapy for a Long-Standing Alcohol Pattern

Practitioner notes by Tim Thornton, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Sydney.

Most of what gets written about hypnotherapy is either marketing or testimonials. There’s a gap in the middle: what the first session actually looks like when someone sits down and says, “I’ve got a problem with alcohol.”

This is an account of a recent first session with a client. Her name has been changed to protect her privacy; everything else is as the session ran.

Who was in the room

Virginia came in presenting what she called “negative patterns”. She’s in her seventies, semi-retired, a mental health professional, a practising Buddhist who follows the middle path. On paper, insight is not what she’s short of.

What she disclosed, once we got past the surface framing, was that she had been leaning into alcohol for most of her adult life. Like a lot of people, she had spent years quietly entertaining the hope that she could become a moderate drinker. Just a civilised glass or two. It had never gone that way. It always went further.

How I set up the work

I always tell clients at the start that this is at least a four-session piece of work. Rarely does one session do it, and setting that expectation protects the work. The first session is the biggest. It is where I do the intake and gather the information I need. It feels like a lot of talking, but it is the foundation everything else is built on.

In Virginia’s first session, we did get into some hypnotherapy. I never leave a first session as talk only. I always take the client to a safe, relaxed place and run a short process so they can feel the state and I can see how they respond.

The body scan

Once Virginia was in the relaxed state, I asked her to do a body scan. Where in your body do you hold this? Some clients place it in the head. Virginia placed it in the throat and the heart. Chest area. On a scale of zero to ten, she rated it a three in that moment. “Normally higher,” she said. “But I’m relaxed.”

This matters. Where the feeling lives in the body is the thread the rest of the work follows.

Radio control

Next I ran a technique called radio control. The client imagines they are alone in a room, sitting at a radio. The radio is playing a horrible sound, and the horrible sound is the negative response in their body and mind. Their hand is on the volume dial.

I ask them to turn the volume all the way up. Right up to ten. Sit with how awful that would be. Then I ask them to wind it down and try to turn the radio off.

This tells me two things. First, whether the client can turn it off at all. Some can’t. Second, if they can, how quickly. Virginia turned it off fast. That is a good result. It tells me she has control available to her, and control is what we are going to need as the work gets deeper.

In-life regression: where the feeling started

With control confirmed, we moved into an in-life regression. The question that opens it is specific: when was the first time you ever had this physical feeling? Tight in the throat. Tight in the chest.

Virginia went back to around age eight. She was being told off by her mother. In the intake she had already told me that her mother was very young when she had her, that the biological father was never around, and that her mother had left her at a young age to be raised by her grandmother in rural New South Wales. The grandmother was wonderful. That was not the problem.

The problem was underneath. A child who had been left. A child who had worked out, in the way children do, that she must not have been wanted. A pattern of looking for love and not finding it in the place she first expected it. And in that first scene, aged eight, being told off, the feeling in her throat and her chest was already there.

That is where I believe the drinking has its roots. Not in the glass. In an eight-year-old girl trying to understand why she had been left behind.

What this tells you about the work

If you came away from that description thinking “this isn’t about alcohol at all”, you are starting to see the shape of how I work. Addictions and compulsions are almost always doing a job. They are soothing something. If you only treat the behaviour at the top (the drinking, the eating, the smoking), the thing it was soothing keeps looking for another outlet.

At the root of every addiction is a hurt. The work is to find the hurt and resolve it, not to white-knuckle the behaviour.

Virginia’s first session gave us the thread. The next three or four sessions will follow it.

If this is you

If you have a pattern you have tried to change on willpower and it keeps coming back, there is likely an older piece underneath it. Hypnotherapy for alcohol is one of the areas I work in regularly. Alongside it, I work with emotional eating, anxiety, and smoking cessation using the same approach.

Book a confidential consultation or call 0424 079 690. In person in Sydney CBD or online across Australia.

This post describes the structure of a first session. The client’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. Hypnotherapy is a complementary approach and not a substitute for medical or psychological treatment where that is indicated. Individual results vary.