How Hypnosis Can Help After Alcohol Withdrawal

What is alcohol withdrawal?

Withdrawal means stopping alcohol in someone who is dependent, and the syndrome that stopping triggers in the body.

Three things need separating, which everyday language runs together.

• The withdrawal syndrome is the physical reaction to stopping: tremors, sweating, nausea, a racing heart, anxiety, sleep disturbance. In severe forms it can go as far as seizures and delirium tremens, which are medical emergencies. That is why stopping is supervised.
• Medically managed withdrawal is the care given during that phase: medical assessment, an outpatient or hospital setting depending on the situation, treatment, monitoring. It lasts as long as it needs to and it is not decided alone.
• Life after withdrawal, the maintenance phase, is everything else: the months and years that follow, the triggers, the social life to rebuild, the question of relapse. This is where hypnosis can have a place, alongside follow-up in addiction medicine.

If you are not dependent and your goal is to drink less, the useful page is Hypnosis to Drink Less.

What a hypnosis session can aim at

Let us start with what hypnosis does not do, and this list matters more than the next one.

It does not replace medical withdrawal and plays no part during it. It replaces neither addiction follow-up, nor treatment, nor a peer support group. It does not protect you from relapse and can guarantee nothing on that score. It will not make you feel disgusted by alcohol: we use no aversion suggestions. And it does not put you to sleep or make you do anything against your will.

What the work does aim at, with the agreement of the team following you:

• Spotting and defusing triggers: a place, an hour, a person, an emotion, a smell. Naming them in advance and preparing what happens when they turn up.
• Getting through an emotion without a substance. That is the heart of the work: alcohol did that job for a long time, and other resources have to take it over.
• Easing the anxiety and sleep difficulties that often go with the first months.
• Rebuilding a view of yourself that is not organised around shame, because shame is fuel for relapse, not a brake on it.
• Preparing the risky situations you have identified: a wedding, a holiday, retirement, a bereavement, a change of rhythm.

About relapse

A relapse is not a moral collapse nor proof that none of it was worth anything. On journeys with dependence it is common, often gone through several times, and it is part of what care teams explicitly anticipate.

What distinguishes one trajectory from another is not the absence of relapse: it is what happens in the hours and days that follow. A drink taken again can stay an episode, or become a habit again, and what tips it one way or the other is almost always the same thing: silence. Telling someone quickly, getting back in touch with the team following you, calling a helpline that same night: those are the things that change what comes next.

If it has just happened to you, this is not the moment to disappear. The numbers are at the foot of this page.

What the research says

We may as well be blunt: research on hypnosis and alcohol is scarce and does not allow any conclusion.

A Norwegian randomised trial published in 2019 compared Ericksonian hypnosis sessions with motivational interviewing in people hospitalised for alcohol use disorder, inside an otherwise intensive treatment programme. Thirty-one people took part, far too few to settle anything. Both groups reduced their drinking, and the gap in favour of hypnosis at one year did not reach statistical significance. The authors note that only two randomised controlled trials existed at the time on this question, and they consider several readings of their result themselves, including the one where neither hypnosis nor motivational interviewing adds much to the treatment programme itself.

A Cochrane review of hypnotherapy for smoking cessation reaches a comparable conclusion: the evidence does not establish superiority over other behavioural approaches, and if a benefit exists, it is small at most.

Our position follows directly. What is documented in alcohol dependence is addiction medicine. We offer hypnosis as possible support inside that framework, and we would rather write that than quote work which does not say what it is made to say.

Book an appointment

Alongside your follow-up, never instead of it. A question before you decide? Write to us: a clear answer, including "this is not the right time for us", is part of the work. You can also book an appointment directly. Our practitioners who work in English see people in Montreal, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Paris and Lille, and by video wherever you are in the world. The number of sessions is worked out at the first conversation.

For the common ground behind all these questions, our page Hypnosis for Alcohol and Drinking Less brings together what hypnosis can and cannot do, and the situations where the first step is a doctor.