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When it comes to hypnotherapy, myths, misconceptions, and fallacies abound. I’ve been dealing with them in my clinic for all my practicing life. Notions of control and who has it, whether I will make you bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken, and ideas about mad, staring eyes and swinging pocket watches are perennial concerns.

However, a recent paper published in BJPsych Advances aims to dispel some of the more enduring misconceptions about both hypnosis and hypnotherapy. ¹

Steven Jay Lynn, a professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York, together with his colleagues, Madeline Stein and Devin Terhune from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, concisely dispel myths including that patients can’t resist suggestion, that people under hypnosis are faking it, or that people are either hypnotisable or they’re not (yes they can, no they’re not, and people vary greatly in the responsiveness are the respective answers here).

Sadly, they don’t address the pocket watches or the staring eyes.

I’ve been practising hypnotherapy since 2004. Before that, I was a journalist and copywriter. In all that time, nearly every single article I have read on hypnotherapy has begun with something along the lines of, “you’d be forgiven for thinking that hypnotherapy is all about mad, staring eyes and swinging pocket watches,” thereby reinforcing a stereotype that hypnotherapy is indeed all about those things. There have been so many articles like this, that I’ve lost count. In fact, several articles about Lynn’s research have started off this very way.

When I was training to be a journalist, I was taught to avoid clichés like the plague (you see what I did there?). So, to all you budding and established writers of copy: please, once and for all, it is not about the mad, staring eyes or the swinging pocket watches. It’s time to stop forgiving people for thinking that it is and, it may be that the only people who really think that it is are the journalists, copywriters, and bloggers writing articles on hypnotherapy for the very first time. So just stop it because it really isn’t so. Except, that it is or, at least, it can be. Sometimes.

Allow me to explain. But before I do, I just want to speak about the hypnotherapy session itself, because it contains different stages, the first of which is very relevant to the above.

First, there is the induction (where you get your client to close their eyes and relax). Next, there is the deepener (where you deepen the trance to an appropriate level). That's followed by the part where you do the actual therapy and, finally, there’s the bit where you bring your client back out of trance.

Now that I've got that out of the way, you can blame the mad, staring eyes thing on a guy called Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). The founding father of a form of hypnosis known as "mesmerism," he thought that people could be healed by influencing their bodies (or what he thought of as a fluid flowing through them) with magnets and willpower. His sessions (more like performances) were often very theatrical, and he would stare at his subjects intently.

Fast forward to today and, under a very specific set of circumstances, mad, staring eyes can be used to induce a trance. Some people have great difficulty closing their eyes and letting go, even when they say they really want to. So, you must make them feel uncomfortable. You need to freak them out a bit. And a really good way to do that is to bend down right in front of them, get really close, and then have them stare directly into your wide-open eyes. This is an uncomfortable experience and, to escape said discomfort, people usually close their eyes very quickly. You can then proceed to deepen the trance.

To this day, "mesmerise" means to capture someone’s attention completely. And, as Mesmer is also responsible for the term "animal magnetism," he clearly has a lot to answer for. However, it’s due to a bona fide medical professional that we have the thing about the swinging pocket watches.

Doctor James Braid (1795-1860) was both an eminent surgeon and a pioneer of hypnotherapy for surgery (anaesthesia hadn’t been popularized yet). He found that staring at things (such as pendulums and pocket watches) created a hypnotic state in his patients. This practice was soon picked up by other hypnotherapists of the time (that time being several hundred years ago).

For the induction part of hypnotherapy, the best way to get someone to close their eyes is to tire those eyes out. There are many ways you can do this, including swinging things in front of them. The object could be anything: a pen, your finger, your hand, a necklace, and, yes, even a pocket watch. I even have one myself. A friend bought it for me when I graduated (thank you, Michael!) but I’ve only used it once or twice in the whole time I’ve been a hypnotherapist, and then only because I was asked to.

To conclude, apart from what I have outlined above, let us hear no more about staring eyes and swinging things. I did once hypnotise someone with a sonic screwdriver, but then, he was a Doctor Who fan and I just happened to have one on hand.