WILLIAMS: Fight Psych - Did Hypnosis Improve Chael Sonnen's Fighting Abilities?

by: Alex Williams, MMATorch Senior Contributor

It's not unusual to see mixed martial artists attributing their successes, in part, to their coaches and training partners. In the history of the sport, though, I can only recall two fighters who ever credited their hypnotists. The first was an early UFC competitor whose name escapes me. He claimed that his being hypnotized prior to the event guaranteed him victory. He lost quickly.

The second is Chael Sonnen. During an interview in May on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, Sonnen stated that since he saw a sports psychologist and was hypnotized, he has "never [been] the same":

"I went and got professional help and I sought out a doctor, Ed Versteeg. I hate talking about this because this was a real secret. This was a real turning point for me was when I went in, worked on sports psychology and got hypnotized.

Let's assume that this wasn't Sonnen in pro wrestling mode and he really did see psychologist Ed Versteeg, who hypnotized him. Is there reason to believe that hypnosis helped Chael? Or is his perception rooted more in illusion than fact?

There is a common belief that hypnosis means waving a watch in front of a person and putting her or him in a trance-like state. This belief is false. Neither watch nor trance is involved. As the American Psychological Association defines hypnosis:

Hypnosis is a procedure during which a health professional or researcher suggests that a client, patient, or subject experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior. The hypnotic context is generally established by an induction procedure. Although there are many different hypnotic inductions, most include suggestions for relaxation, calmness, and well being.

When hypnosis works (i.e., the patient "experiences changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behavior,"), it's because of the patient's own openness to suggestion. In controlled studies, all of the effects of hypnosis can be created by mere suggestion alone; there is nothing special about hypnotic inductions.

So what role can hypnosis play in psychotherapy? Hypnosis has been studied as an adjunct component to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). I discussed CBT and its applications for MMA in a previous column, but in brief, CBT involves patients' systematically challenging and exposing themselves to their irrational thoughts and fears. Evidence indicates that hypnosis may increase the effectiveness of CBT (for example, in the treatment of anxiety disorders), particularly for patients who are highly suggestible.

Conversely, there is no research support for hypnosis as a stand-alone treatment for any mental disorder. In fact, the American Psychological Association, which is often overly-accommodating to crackpot therapies, specifically states that hypnosis "is not a type of therapy" and should not be used in isolation.

In other words, if Chael's psychologist used hypnosis in conjunction with CBT for Chael's fight-time anxiety, then the hypnosis might well have improved Chael's outcome. If, though, the psychologist used hypnosis by itself in an attempt to put Chael in a "permanent trance" that would forever eliminate his combat jitters, then there's no reason to believe it helped Chael at all.

But imagining the worst case scenario (the latter one), why would Sonnen still ascribe healing powers to a bunch of bunk? One possibility is that the hypnosis did benefit Sonnen because of what's known as the placebo effect. The placebo effect refers to patients' improving solely due to their own expectations that they will improve. In this case, there'd be no particular qualities of the hypnosis that helped Sonnen. He could have completed any form of therapy and received the same benefits, as long as he believed that the therapy would work.

The other possibility is that Sonnen's improvement really wasn't as dramatic as he indicates. Judging by his statements, there's reason to believe Chael's engaging in retrospective rewriting of the past. That is, he wants to believe the time and money he invested in therapy was worth it, so he's altered his memories of what he was like prior to therapy. Consequently, it seems to him like therapy produced a bigger change than it actually did.

In discussing the effects of hypnosis and his therapy in general, Chael said:

"I'm looking at my record. I've won every round I have ever fought. I've never been in a tough fight. I've never had stitches, I've never broken anything, I have dominated everybody and I've lost eight fights, and I've lost all of them by submission and I've lost all of them in the second round.

. . .

I had to acknowledge that [I was finding ways to lose] and once I did it, I never lost again. I lost to Paulo which was the controversial one and then I lost to Anderson after dominating him, I've never been beat since I saw this doctor."

We can deduce from these statements that Chael received the therapy after his third loss to Jeremy Horn, which was the eighth loss of his career. Of those eight losses, only three fit his description of second round submission losses. Two were first round submission losses. One was a points loss to Keiichiro Yamamiya, a loss that seemingly invalidates Chael's claim of having never lost a round. One loss was a corner stoppage to Terry Martin after Chael, who says he'd "never broken anything," claimed to have suffered a broken rib. The other loss was a blood stoppage in his first bout with Horn, in which Horn took Chael down and split him open with ground and pound.

Chael certainly had a problem with submissions, but it's simply not the case that all of his losses owed to him being submitted in prolonged bouts after easily winning the early goings.

Chael stated that he never lost after seeing Dr. Versteeg, a statement contradicted by the submission losses to Paulo Filho and Anderson Silva he noted just moments before. Chael also failed to mention that sandwiched between those losses was a first round submission defeat to Demian Maia.

It's true that his post-therapy, testosterone-assisted wins over Michael Bisping, Brian Stann, Nate Marquardt, and Yushin Okami (not to mention his twenty-two minutes of dominance versus Anderson Silva) represent the best run of Chael's career. However, his three post-therapy tap out losses suggest that his vulnerability to submissions remains.

In retrospectively rewriting the past, Chael's falling victim to the same cognitive errors that all of us do. And none of this means that hypnosis wasn't an important adjunctive aid in Chael's therapy. But hypnotizing away one's ability to be submitted? That's just psychobabble.

Alex Williams is a doctoral student in clinical health psychology. Follow him on Twitter @williamspsych. He can also be reached at alexwilliams123@gmail.com. For more on the science and pseudoscience of hypnosis, Alex recommends 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior.

Urijah Faber Wagnney Fabiano Kevin Kimbo Slice Ferguson Paulo Filho Mirko Cro Cop Filipovic