Attachment-Focused Hypnosis in Psychotherapy for Complex Trauma: Attunement, Representation, and Mentalization

The relational and psychological functions of attunement, representation, and mentalization are essential components of a secure attachment experience. Psychotherapeutic approaches informed by attachment theory have gained significant empirical and clinical support, particularly in the area of complex trauma. Despite these advances, attachment-informed trauma treatment could benefit greatly from the experiential wealth that clinical hypnosis has to offer. In its utilization of shared attention, tone of voice, pacing, representational imagery, and hypnotic language, clinical hypnosis as a state, relationship, and technique offers psychotherapists a way of introducing a healthy attachment experience and renewing appropriate developmental functioning in patients who are survivors of complex trauma. In this article, attunement, representation, and mentalization are reviewed from a hypnotherapeutic perspective.