What would you do if you could trust your body again?
Say yes to an invitation. Make a journey. Return to a classroom or a working day. Have an ordinary afternoon that feels wonderfully unremarkable. Hypnotherapy for FND can often help to achieve that.
When you are living with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), these can become enormous things.
Your world may have started organising itself around symptoms. What happened yesterday. What might happen today. Whether you will manage. Whether someone will understand if you cannot.
At The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy, we want to understand that whole experience, including the life you would like to get back to.
Our work with FND brings together clinical hypnotherapy, relevant research and an individual understanding of how your symptoms affect you. We explore where change may be possible, with goals that mean something in your everyday life.
You can also explore our wider Physical Symptoms And Pain section.
When ordinary life starts requiring extraordinary planning
Sometimes the hardest part of FND happens between episodes.
You notice a sensation and wonder what it means. You weigh up whether to go somewhere. You think about what happened last time. Other people are discussing plans, while part of your attention is already considering how you might leave.
Or perhaps your experience is different. Symptoms arrive with little warning. Your movement, speech or awareness changes. Afterwards, there may be exhaustion, frustration, or the difficulty of explaining something you are still trying to understand yourself.
Over time, confidence can become another casualty. Activities you once approached without thinking begin to feel complicated.
We take that seriously.
We also want to know what matters to you beyond the symptoms. The people you miss seeing. The things you have stopped doing. The independence you want to rebuild.
Those details help give the work a direction.
Understanding FND, and the possibility of change
FND involves changes in how the nervous system functions. Symptoms are real and involuntary, and can include functional seizures, weakness, movement difficulties, altered sensation and speech problems.
Research explores several interacting processes, including attention, expectations, the sense of control over movement and the brain’s interpretation of bodily signals. Psychological stress can be relevant, but it is not a requirement for FND. There is considerable variation between people. Hallett and colleagues, The Lancet Neurology, 2022
That variation matters when considering treatment.
Two people can share a diagnosis while having very different symptoms, histories and needs. We begin by listening to yours.
Why consider hypnotherapy for FND?
You may already have spent a great deal of time trying to understand what is happening.
Understanding can be valuable. Yet knowing something intellectually and experiencing a different response in your body are different achievements.
Hypnotherapy uses focused attention, imagery and therapeutic suggestion to explore changes in experience and response. In our FND work, we use these processes with specific therapeutic aims, agreed around the individual.
Depending on your circumstances, the work may focus on rebuilding body confidence, reducing fear surrounding symptoms, changing responses to particular situations, or developing a stronger sense of connection with everyday life.
For example, someone may feel reasonably comfortable at home but become intensely watchful when travelling. We would explore that difference, including what the journey has come to mean, what they anticipate and how their system responds.
For another person, the priority may be movement, awareness or confidence following repeated episodes. Their sessions would need a different emphasis.
The useful question is: what might help your particular system respond differently?
Working towards a life with more room in it
Imagine being absorbed in a conversation and realising afterwards that you had been listening to the other person.
Imagine looking forward to something without immediately calculating everything that could go wrong.
Imagine noticing a familiar sensation with a little less alarm, or approaching an activity with a little more confidence.
These are examples of the kinds of changes a person might want to work towards. Your priorities may be entirely different.
We will ask what progress would look like in your life. Depending on your symptoms, that could include changes in the frequency or disruption of episodes, greater participation in daily activities, or less fear around what your body might do.
Some changes are easily counted. Others become apparent when you find yourself doing something that had quietly disappeared from your life.
Both deserve attention.
How we approach FND at SICH
Your first conversation gives us an opportunity to understand your diagnosis, symptoms, existing care and reasons for seeking hypnotherapy.
We are interested in patterns, but we will also listen when there seems to be no obvious pattern. You do not need to arrive with an explanation.
From there, we agree a direction for the work and tailor the sessions around you. Themes may include a greater sense of safety, body trust, confidence, responses to symptoms and reconnection with activities that matter.
As the work develops, we review what is changing and what remains difficult. That allows the treatment to respond to your experience.
We take medical diagnoses and other care into account. New or changing symptoms still deserve appropriate medical assessment.
One experience that helped shape our interest in FND
Emily, whose name has been changed, is a member of Paul Howard’s family. Her experience helped inform his interest in developing hypnotherapy work for FND.
She had been diagnosed with FND and was experiencing seizures. Paul worked with her using a tailored hypnotherapy programme.
Within four weeks, her seizures had stopped and, in her family’s account, she had returned to her usual life.
For the family, this was a profound change.
You can read our FND hypnotherapy case study for a fuller account of Emily’s experience, the individually designed treatment and what changed over the following four weeks.
It is also one person’s experience. It cannot establish how much improvement came from hypnotherapy alone or predict another person’s outcome.
What it contributed was a powerful reason to investigate further, study the clinical research and develop a thoughtful approach to working with others seeking help.
What does the research say about FND hypnotherapy?
Hypnosis and suggestion have a substantial history in FND research. A systematic review published in General Hospital Psychiatry in 2024 examined 35 studies, including five randomised controlled trials. The authors described promising findings, while explaining that differences between treatments and limitations in study quality prevented definitive recommendations. Connors and colleagues, 2024
A separate pilot study involving 46 adults examined a treatment combining hypnosis with a specific movement technique called catalepsy induction. It reported reductions in motor symptom severity that remained at eight weeks after treatment. Its design and combined treatment limit what it can tell us about hypnosis alone, other FND symptoms or treatment for young people. Tibben and colleagues, 2024
These findings give us reasons to take the approach seriously and continue examining it carefully. They do not provide an individual forecast.
At SICH, we bring that same curiosity to the person in front of us: what is happening, what matters to them, and what changes during treatment?
When someone you love has FND
Watching someone experience frightening or unpredictable symptoms can leave you searching constantly for answers.
You may be trying to offer encouragement while wondering how much to suggest, when to step back and how to help ordinary life continue.
Where appropriate, we involve parents, partners or carers in understanding the work. When working with a young person, their own perspective and involvement in decisions are central.
We want to hear what they find difficult and what they hope will change. They deserve a voice in the process.
Questions you may be asking
FND symptoms are real and involuntary. Exploring how attention, expectation and automatic responses may influence symptoms does not make them a conscious choice.
You do not need a complete explanation before contacting us. We can begin with your current experience and the goals you would like to explore.
We cannot determine that from a diagnosis alone. We discuss an initial plan, review your response and adapt the work accordingly. Individual experiences, including the case described above, are not a timetable for someone else.
Yes. An initial conversation can help us understand the situation and explain how the person themselves would be involved.
We will discuss your existing care and how any work with us would fit into it. You should continue prescribed treatment unless the relevant prescriber advises a change.
Tell us what you would like to be possible again
Perhaps you have a very specific goal.
Perhaps you simply want a day that feels less organised around FND.
You can begin by telling us where things stand. We will listen, explain our approach and discuss whether working together would be appropriate.