Most hypnotherapists will charge anywhere from $75/hr to $250/hr. The rate depends upon experience, talent and locale.

Prospective clients may be surprised at these numbers, often because they are used to insurance co-pays for mental health services. Hypnotherapy is not covered by most insurance plans because we don’t often deal with mental illness. We are dealing with optional, quality-of-life concerns – things that can be avoided by taking a different route to the store or seeking a different job. They are also far more common than mental illness, which is why they are excluded from insurance coverage.

Unfortunately, those optional concerns can become the seed from which true mental illness is born. Remember when the uninsured would wait until they were sick enough to get admitted to the emergency room? It’s something like that. Sometimes literally so: failure to deal with cigarette, alcohol or drug addiction can lead to serious long-term medical consequences. In the arena of mental health, failure to deal with a phobia can build until the client can’t leave their home. The quality-of-life issue becomes a mental illness.

But still, if the issue is not yet that severe when we start work with a client, why should hypnotherapists charge rates similar to those charged by doctors and lawyers?

The reason we do is because you are asking us to help you care for your mind. If you don’t value your mind, then the subconscious is going to pick up on that and not buy into doing the work.

Your subconscious is seven times more powerful than your conscious mind. I don’t want to have to fight its lethargy, so I charge enough money to ensure that the subconscious knows that success is important – and as soon as possible.

It’s also enough that every client should take picking their therapist seriously. Interview more than one, and from more than one school of treatment. Here in Ventura, we have graduates of the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, including myself, drawing upon over a thousand hours of training. That training emphasizes the importance of protecting the integrity of the client’s personality and is reflected in the way we interview, customize therapy to the client, and use dreams. Our rates reflect our skills – and our investment in caring.

The least sophisticated practitioners will use one-size-fits-all methods and scripted therapies. Those are effective for many clients, and particularly so if you feel that you have good rapport with the therapist. In between is a spectrum – you’ll almost always be able to find someone that you’re comfortable with.

But if the therapy doesn’t work, don’t let yourself be told that “You can’t be hypnotized.” That’s not true: you just need a more sophisticated practitioner.