Have you ever been caught in a cycle of emotions, struggling to move past persistent feelings like fear, anger, guilt, or sadness?
These emotions may be triggered by present events; however, the emotional loops are often an indication that there’s something deeper unresolved from the past.
Emotional healing is the process of releasing these burdens so we can live with greater clarity, balance, and peace. It’s not about fixing or coping with your emotions but about processing them in a safe and supportive way. Hypnotherapy is a powerful therapeutic tool that accesses the subconscious mind to release emotions we’ve buried over time. Backed by neuroscience, it allows us to uncover the root causes of emotional pain, release what is unprocessed, and gain wisdom from the situation so that we can approach similar situations differently in the future.
What Is Emotional Healing?
Emotional healing is the process of recognizing, processing, and resolving emotions that have not been fully addressed, including fear, grief, anger, pain, and trauma. Emotions are the body’s way of communicating with us, helping us navigate relationships, environments, and challenges. When we face difficult experiences, we produce emotions like fear, sadness, or anger to guide us through. These are primary emotions shared by all humans (and even animals) and are designed to help us survive by signalling when we are unsafe or when something isn’t working in our favour.
However, many of us have been conditioned to judge these emotions as negative, which prevents us from fully allowing and expressing them. As a result, when emotions are not fully processed, they become stuck in the subconscious and influence our behaviours and physical health, potentially manifesting as anxiety, chronic stress, depression, or disease.
According to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, emotional trauma is stored in both the brain and the body, impacting our ability to regulate emotions and respond to life calmly (Van der Kolk, 2014). Emotional healing allows us to revisit these suppressed emotions, process them, and release their hold on us, creating space for peace and clarity.
How Emotional Healing Works
Healing begins with acknowledging the emotions we are feeling, especially those we have suppressed or avoided from the past. To heal, we allow these emotions to surface and be processed in a safe environment, often by simply talking about a situation or reliving an event. Once the energy of the emotions is released, we gain the ability to reflect on the same situation with greater neutrality and extract valuable learning.
Neuroscience explains that unprocessed emotions are stored in the brain’s limbic system, specifically the amygdala, which regulates emotional memory and fear responses. When a present event triggers an emotion, the brain tends to activate neural pathways formed by past experiences that produced similar emotions. This often leads to a heightened emotional response that feels disproportionate to the actual situation. These patterns keep us trapped, seeing similar events as ongoing threats and triggering stress responses like anxiety or heightened alertness (LeDoux, 1996).
Emotional healing helps replace unhealthy emotional patterns with healthier responses (Doidge, 2007) and rewires the brain through neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways.
How Hypnotherapy Helps Emotional Healing
Hypnotherapy is an effective for emotional healing because it directly accesses the subconscious mind, where unresolved emotions and memories are stored. Its key principles include:
- Accessing the Subconscious Mind: Hypnosis induces a trance state, shifting the brain into theta waves, associated with heightened focus and suggestibility. This state allows our defences to and logical mind to move into the background, and the subconscious mind to become more accessible (Gruzelier, 2014).
- Reframing Emotional Memories: the process enables individuals to revisit past experiences, reinterpret them, and release the emotional intensity attached to them.
- Enhancing Neuroplasticity: The ability to release and reflect in a trance state supports the brain’s ability to rewire itself, replacing fear-based responses with healthier emotional patterns.
Research supports hypnotherapy’s effectiveness. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis found that hypnotherapy significantly reduced PTSD symptoms by helping individuals process trauma and shift emotional responses (Abramowitz et al., 2008). Hypnotherapy also engages the prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotions and helps balance the amygdala’s fear responses (Lane et al., 2015).
How you can use these principals to regulate your emotions at home
By accessing the subconscious mind, reprocessing unresolved emotions, and leveraging the brain’s neuroplasticity, we can release emotional pain and build resilience. Mindfulness has been shown to reduce activity in the amygdala, promoting emotional balance (Hölzel et al., 2011).
Since hypnotherapy closely resembles the state we reach in mindfulness, we can apply its principles for self-regulation. You can follow the same sequence: enter a trance state through mindfulness or meditation, bring up your emotional charges by thinking of what is bothering you and use deep breathing to release your emotions from the nervous system. Once you feel that the energy has shifted, look at the same situation with more neutrality so that you can understand another person’s perspective or accept what triggered you before, and gain an insight from it. For best results, these practices need to be done regularly and can be enhanced by incorporating activities like journaling, affirmations, or meditation.
With these simple and effective tools, we can learn to emotionally regulate, freeing ourselves from the wounds of the past and processing our present emotions more effectively. This allows us to navigate life with greater wisdom and peace.
Photo Credits:
First image: freepik
Second image: freepik
References
Abramowitz, E. G., Barak, Y., Ben-Avi, I., & Knobler, H. Y. (2008). The Role of Hypnosis in the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Review. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 50(2), 101-113.
Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Viking.
Gruzelier, J. H. (2014). EEG-neurofeedback and Hypnosis: Attention, Relaxation, and Perception. Contemporary Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy, 31(2), 75-91.
Hölzel, B. K., et al. (2011). How Mindfulness Practice Affects the Brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(1), 55-61.
Lane, R. D., et al. (2015). Neuroscience of Enduring Change in Psychotherapy: Emotional Processing in Motion. Emotion, 15(4), 477-483.
LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Sonia Samtani
About the author
Sonia Samtani, an award-winning licensed hypnotherapist, speaker, author, and founder of “All About You” Centre, is one of Hong Kong’s leading mental health professionals. With over 18 years of experience, she has transformed the lives of 40,000+ individuals, including Formula Renault driver Dan Wells. Sonia was recently awarded the Global Women of Influence Award 2024 and partners with charities like Christian Action Centre for Refugees and Chicken Soup Foundation to provide mental health support to marginalized communities.
Recently Added
For all our lives, relationships are going to be ever-present. Whether it’s in the form of parents, partners, siblings, relatives, friends, teachers, …
Stereotypes play an important role in cross-cultural communication. By the means of such stereotypes, people’s behaviours are predicted. Therefore, cultural stereotypes in …
Mental health is an essential part of our overall health and it doesn’t exist on its own. The state of mental health …