Lord, a question I hear almost daily. Hypnotherapy or traditional talking therapy? Subconscious healing vs talk therapy (as if there's a vs), or is hypnotherapy better than therapy for trauma? There's a lot to unpack here, but before we do, let me share my personal experience as a clinical hypnotherapist in the UK from an Arab background who spent much of her 20s healing.

I've always been stuck between the extremes of being loved by people around me and me thinking I'm weird, overbearing and hyper-sensitive. I was very emotional, but lived in a house that believed crying would bring 'nahs/evil eye/curses', so I used to suppress my tears and release them at school as my way to express myself safely and rebel from a rule that I didn't understand.

This suppression became a coping mechanism for me, and I became extremely hyper-independent. I was a workaholic; my friendships were intense, and it was just too much for me to handle at some point. I remember booking a therapy session and having such a high after an incredible workday and night after I hosted the Palestine Book Awards that I cancelled it the next day, thinking I was fine. Three years later, I went back to therapy and stuck for real. I had to be so careful as not to tell my parents (eventually I did, and they got very scared for me and said I'm going down a trajectory of being sectioned into a mental hospital if I keep letting these doctors mess with my mind), and I was just very nervous not knowing what to expect.

I started with CBT, as per GP recommendations, because that's what's most readily available on the NHS. Come to my third session, my therapist knew that CBT wasn't enough for someone who suppressed her emotions since childhood, and I went on to get re-assessed and be put into arts therapy for two years. This was a mixture of individual therapy and group therapy. Later on, I discovered hypnotherapy.

Hypnotherapy vs talk therapy

I'm not here to tell you what to do, but from my experience, I think both have their place. The problem is that people have a misconception that hypnotherapy is there to control your mind, when we all know it's not.

You are there in full control, more in control than you've perhaps ever been, because hypnotherapy simply guides you into a state of deep relaxation where your subconscious becomes more receptive. Nobody can make you do or say anything you don't want to. If anything, it's the opposite of losing control. It's finally getting quiet enough to hear what's been running the show underneath.

Talk therapy gave me language. It gave me a room, a witness, a structure to finally say the things I'd swallowed since I was a child crying in school toilets because home wasn't safe for it. Arts therapy gave me a way to express what I didn't have words for yet, the rage and grief that lived in my body long before it lived in my sentences. But even after two years of it, even after CBT and group work and everything the NHS could offer, there was still a part of me that stayed just out of reach. I could talk about my patterns fluently. I could explain my hyper-independence, my suppression, my workaholism, in full clinical language. Understanding it wasn't the same as healing it.

This is where hypnotherapy found me, or maybe where I finally found it. Because talk therapy largely works with the conscious mind, the part of you that analyses and explains and rationalises, and the conscious mind is only about five percent of who you are. The other ninety five percent, the subconscious, is where your beliefs about yourself were formed before you were even old enough to question them. It's where I learned that crying was dangerous. It's where I learned that my emotions needed to be managed, hidden, saved for somewhere safer than home. You cannot think your way out of a belief that was never formed by thinking in the first place.

So no, it isn't hypnotherapy versus talk therapy. It's talk therapy for the parts of you that need a witness and a language, and hypnotherapy for the parts of you that were shaped before language existed. In my own healing, and in the women I now work with, I've seen this play out again and again.

The client who can tell you exactly why she people pleases, who has read every book, who can explain the theory perfectly, and still finds herself saying yes when her whole body is screaming no. Talk therapy gave her the map. Hypnotherapy is what finally lets her walk the terrain.

There's something else, too, that I rarely see discussed in this conversation, which is where God fits into all of this. Growing up, healing and faith were often presented to me as separate lanes, therapy over here, prayer over there, as if the soul and the mind aren't housed in the same body. But in the Sufi tradition I come from, the nafs, the self, is something to be known intimately before it can be purified. Tazkiyah, the process of purifying the heart, isn't about bypassing your psychology to get closer to God. It's about going through it. Husn al-dhann, having a good opinion of God's plan for you, doesn't mean skipping the grief. It means trusting that the grief is part of the plan.

This is why I don't separate the mysticism of the East from the precision of the West in my work. Talk therapy gave me the Western precision, the frameworks, the safety of a diagnosis, a name for what I was carrying. Hypnotherapy and the spiritual work underneath it gave me the mysticism, the felt sense that healing isn't just clinical, it's sacred. Most people use God to escape themselves. This work uses God to find you.

If you're stuck asking which one you should choose, I'd gently ask you a different question instead. What part of you is asking? Is it the part that wants to understand, or the part that's tired of understanding and just wants to feel different? Because both parts deserve tending to, and you don't have to pick one path and abandon the other. I certainly didn't. I needed every single room I sat in, the NHS waiting room, the arts therapy circle, the hypnotherapy chair, to become the woman writing this to you now.

So, why consider hypnotherapy?

• It speaks to the 95%. Talk therapy engages the conscious, analytical mind. Hypnotherapy works directly with the subconscious, where your core beliefs about yourself were formed long before you had the words to question them.
• It closes the gap between knowing and feeling. If you can explain your patterns perfectly but still can't stop repeating them, that's usually a sign the work needs to go deeper than insight.
• It works with the body, not just the story. Suppressed emotion often lives somewhere language can't quite reach. Hypnotherapy creates the safety to actually release it, not just narrate it.
• It's gentle, not invasive. You remain fully aware and in control throughout. Nothing is done to you; you're guided inward, not taken over.
• It can hold faith and healing together. For anyone who's felt like therapy meant leaving God out of the room, hypnotherapy (at least in how I practise it) doesn't ask you to choose.
• It often moves faster on stuck patterns. Things like people-pleasing, anxiety, self-worth, and old survival habits can shift in a handful of sessions once you're working at the subconscious level.

If any of this is landing for you, and you're ready to actually feel the shift rather than just understand it intellectually, that's exactly the work I do.

If you'd like, tell me your actual booking link or contact details and I'll drop them in properly instead of the placeholder.