Hypnotherapy with affect bridge age regression for choking: a multiple-case study

This study examined how eight athletes (one fencer, one soccer player, one baseball player, and five golfers) experienced clinical hypnotherapy centered on affect bridge age regression for choking under pressure. We conducted a multiple-case clinical study, applying Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological method as the analytic procedure to organize the participants' first-person accounts. Three core themes encompassing twenty shared higher-order themes were identified. Before hypnotherapy, participants reported multidimensional difficulties including cognitive-emotional-perceptual disturbance, abnormal bodily sensations, anxiety-related thoughts, and impaired motor control. During hypnotherapy, they traced their current symptoms back to early-life events, described associations they perceived between earlier emotional experiences and present vulnerability, and reworked the past self's misunderstandings and fears through a guided child technique. After hypnotherapy, they reported changes across competitive performance, emotional regulation, self-confidence, and everyday life. This study documents, at the experiential level, how affect bridge age regression may complement conventional sport hypnosis approaches by attending to developmental experiences that participants linked to their current symptoms, and how it can do so within a short-term intervention format. Rather than verifying the factual accuracy of events recalled during age regression, the study describes the meaning structures through which participants connected these events to their current symptoms.