Hypnosis is used widely by clinicians as an adjunct and facilitator of therapy in a wide range of psychological and psychiatric disorders, but particularly with the anxiety disorders.

Why hypnosis has a special role in these disorders relates to, the enhanced hypnotic capacity found with patients with anxiety disorders; the hypnotic processes associated with conditioning; the lack of reality based perspective taking in patients; restrictions in verbal inhibitory processes that would modify affect; and the inappropriate acceptance of underlying threat beliefs.

Hypnosis facilitates therapy by enhancing expectations of outcome; encouraging acceptance of therapeutic re-interpretations and persuasive communications; reducing basal levels of arousal; establishing rapid control of symptoms by cued self-hypnosis; allowing desensitization via hypnotically imagined events experienced as reality; using dissociation while extinguishing conditioning; permitting healthy dissociation away from anxiety symptoms; imaginal coping rehearsal as reality; enhancing a sense of control and permitting explicit and implicit re-interpretation of historical trauma related events.