Can You Be Hypnotised Against Your Will?

It’s one of the first questions people ask, and usually one of the last they admit to. Somewhere behind it sits a film scene: a swinging watch, a voice saying you are getting sleepy, and someone who afterwards does things they’d never choose.

The short answer is no. But the reassurance isn’t the interesting part – what’s interesting is why the answer is no, and what that reveals. Because the same explanation that rules out losing control turns out to be the explanation for why this method gives you more control than you had before.

The short answer

No. Hypnosis cannot be done to you against your will, and you cannot be made to do something you genuinely don’t want to do. The reason is structural: every hypnotic effect is self-produced.

Hypnosis is focused attention combined with a heightened readiness to take up a suggestion – and taking it up is something only you can do. If you don’t go along with a suggestion, nothing happens. There is no mechanism by which a hypnotist overrides your will, because the hypnotist was never the one generating the effect in the first place.

Where the fear comes from

Three sources, mostly.

Film and fiction, where hypnosis is written as mind control because mind control makes for better plots than “a person deliberately concentrated on an idea”.

Stage hypnosis, which looks exactly like control and is designed to – more on that below.

And the language we use. “Putting someone under.” “Being hypnotised.” Even the word hypnosis itself, from the Greek for sleep, describes something that isn’t sleep at all. The vocabulary implies a passive recipient and an active operator. That grammar is wrong, and it’s done considerable damage to public understanding of the method.

What hypnosis actually is

Here’s where the research has moved decisively over the past few decades, and the work of Irving Kirsch has been central to it.

Hypnosis is not a trance state you are placed into. It is a mental exercise – focused attention plus an increased readiness to respond to suggestion. That’s it. No altered entity takes over, nothing is transmitted, no part of you is switched off.

The model I trained in takes this seriously. Hypno-CBT®, developed at the UK College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy, explicitly rejects the idea of hypnotic “trance” altogether and defines hypnosis as the strategic, disciplined use of imagination, attention, suggestion and expectation. Which is precisely why nothing in my sessions happens to you.

What produces a hypnotic effect is your own participation: you hear a suggestion, you choose to engage with it, you direct your imagination and attention accordingly – and then your perception delivers exactly that experience.

The simplest demonstration is the classic arm heaviness suggestion. You’re told your arm is becoming heavy, that it feels weighted, difficult to lift. If you go along with the idea – genuinely picture it, attend to the sensations consistent with it – your arm will actually feel heavy. Not as pretence. As a real experienced sensation.

But notice where the heaviness came from. Nobody put it there. You generated it, by doing something with your attention and expectation. The suggestion was an instruction; the effect was your own work.

And this explains the whole thing: if you decide not to follow, you simply don’t. Hear the suggestion, decline to engage, and your arm stays exactly as light as it was. There’s no override. The entire phenomenon depends on your cooperation at every moment.

A related point worth knowing: expectation itself does real work here. What you anticipate will happen shapes what actually happens – which is why your own expectancy is part of the mechanism rather than an obstacle to it. Again: your contribution, not someone else’s power.

“But people say it feels automatic”

A reasonable objection, and the answer is one of the more interesting findings in the field.

Suggested effects genuinely do feel involuntary. The arm doesn’t feel like something you’re lifting-or-not-lifting by decision; it feels heavy, as though gravity had changed. People describe suggestions as happening to them rather than being performed by them.

Both things are true at once, and here’s why. You produce the effect through what you do with attention and imagination – but that process isn’t something you experience as effortful. It runs below the level at which you watch yourself deciding. Much as you don’t experience choosing to find a joke funny, or deciding to be moved by a piece of music. Your own processes generate the response; you simply arrive at the result.

So “it felt automatic” is an accurate description. It just isn’t evidence that someone else was driving. It’s evidence that you’re rather good at something you weren’t consciously monitoring – which, incidentally, is exactly the capacity we put to work therapeutically.

“But what about stage hypnosis?”

A fair challenge, because it genuinely looks like control. Three things explain it.

Selection. Stage hypnotists don’t work with whoever walks past. They run brief suggestibility tests on an audience and pick the small minority who respond most strongly. You’re watching the top few per cent, chosen precisely because they respond readily.

Volunteering. Everyone on that stage walked up there. They knew what the show was. They arrived having already decided, at some level, to go along with it – which is exactly the state of willing cooperation hypnosis requires.

Social pressure. A stage, an audience, an expectation of entertainment. People do things in that context they wouldn’t do in a quiet room – with or without hypnosis.

What stage hypnosis demonstrates is that willing, highly responsive people will produce remarkable experiences when they commit to a suggestion. It doesn’t demonstrate that the hypnotist controls them. Ask a stage volunteer to do something that genuinely violates their values and the performance ends.

Clinical work has nothing in common with this, apart from sharing a word. (More: is hypnotherapy evidence-based?)

Why some people go deeper than others

Hypnotic responsiveness varies between individuals, measurably and fairly consistently. Some people engage with suggestion readily; others need more practice. This is one of the better-established findings in the field – and it’s worth noticing that it argues against the mind-control picture. If hypnosis were something done to people, it would work uniformly. It doesn’t, because it depends on what each person brings.

The more useful way to think about depth: going deeper is an active, self-controlled skill. You’re not waiting to be taken somewhere. You’re doing something – narrowing attention, sustaining focus, allowing imagery to become vivid. Like any skill, it improves with practice. People who find it difficult in a first session usually find it noticeably easier by the third.

Which is also why self-hypnosis is learnable. You can be taught to enter the state entirely on your own – something that would be impossible if an external operator were doing the essential work.

The reversal: this is exactly why it helps

Now the part that matters most, and the one most people never hear.

The fear is losing control. The reality is the opposite: this work gives you more control over yourself, not less.

Think about what brings people to hypnotherapy. Anxiety that fires regardless of what you know. Stress responses you can’t talk yourself out of. Thought loops that run at 2am without permission. Self-doubt that ignores every piece of evidence. Every one of these is an experience of not being in control – of your own nervous system doing things you never authorised.

Hypnosis is a deliberate, self-directed exercise in influencing exactly those automatic processes. You’re not handing over the controls. You’re reaching the part of the system that normally operates without you, and learning to steer it.

That’s why my clients consistently report the same discovery, often with some surprise: they have far more influence over reactions they’d always assumed were fixed and untouchable. Not because something was done to them – because they did it, with guidance, and found out they could.

Which is also why your active participation isn’t optional. Coaching isn’t something performed on you while you lie there. I guide; you change. (More: what happens in a session)

What’s actually true about suggestibility – and where to be careful

Being honest about this matters, because the reassurance above shouldn’t shade into overclaiming.

Suggestibility is heightened during hypnosis. That’s the point of it. And that has one genuine implication worth knowing: hypnosis should never be used to “recover” forgotten memories.

Memory is reconstructive, heightened suggestibility makes it more malleable, and the combination can produce vivid, confident recollections of events that never occurred. This is one of the legitimate criticisms of the field, and any practitioner offering memory retrieval is working against the evidence.

What increased suggestibility does not mean is that your judgement or values are suspended. You can evaluate a suggestion, decline it, question it, or stop entirely at any point – and people routinely do.

The practical safeguard is the ordinary one: work with someone properly trained, who tells you what they’re doing and why, and who agrees the goals with you before anything begins.

FAQ

Can a hypnotist make me do something I don’t want to do?

No. Every hypnotic effect depends on your going along with the suggestion. Decline it and it doesn’t occur. Suggestions that conflict with your values simply fail.

Will I reveal things I’d rather keep private?

No. You control what you say, exactly as in any conversation. We can work effectively on a pattern without you disclosing every detail of its history.

What if I’m the sort of person who can’t be hypnotised?

Responsiveness varies, but for therapeutic purposes you don’t need to be highly suggestible – the focused, relaxed attention we use is reachable for nearly everyone, and it deepens with practice. Willingness to engage matters considerably more than natural talent.

Does this apply to online sessions too?

Yes, identically – hypnosis is your state, not something transmitted across a room. (More: online hypnotherapy)

If you’re wondering about memory, waking up, or what the state actually feels like, I’ve covered all of that here: what happens in a hypnotherapy session.

The control was never the question

Or rather: it was – and the answer turned out to be the opposite of what the myth suggests. Nothing here happens to you. All of it happens through you. Which is exactly why it works.

I offer a limited number of sessions per week, and they have no fee – instead, you donate what you can to people who need it. Here’s why.

Limited weekly slots available.

Sources and further reading

• Kirsch, I. (1985): Response expectancy as a determinant of experience and behavior. American Psychologist, 40(11), 1189–1202.
• Kirsch, I. & Lynn, S. J. (1995): The altered state of hypnosis: Changes in the theoretical landscape. American Psychologist, 50(10), 846–858.
• Rosendahl, J., Alldredge, C. T. & Haddenhorst, A. (2024): Meta-analytic evidence on the efficacy of hypnosis for mental and somatic health issues: a 20-year perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1330238. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10807512

Hypno-CBT® is a registered trademark of the UK College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy.