Rewind Technique RCT | Hypnotherapy Research | Clear Minds

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For decades, the standard treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — including trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT) and EMDR — required patients to revisit their most painful memories in careful, structured detail. For many people, that prospect alone was enough to avoid treatment altogether. Now, a newly published randomised controlled trial (RCT) is adding robust clinical evidence behind a very different approach: the Rewind Technique.

What the Study Found

Published in 2025 and indexed on PubMed (PMC11921860), this two-armed RCT investigated the Rewind Technique as a remote treatment for PTSD, delivered entirely via video calls. Forty participants were randomised into an immediate treatment group or a waitlist control group, with 80% retained at the primary endpoint of eight weeks.

The results were striking. Researchers measured outcomes using the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5) — the gold-standard diagnostic tool used in PTSD research. The difference in scores between the treatment and waitlist groups was 12.64 points (95% CI: 2.29 to 22.99, p = 0.02), representing a large effect size of Cohen's d = 1.05. Crucially, these improvements were not a short-term spike: symptom reductions were fully maintained at the 16-week follow-up.

What makes this particularly notable is the mechanism. The Rewind Technique asks participants to imagine watching a "film" of their traumatic memory from a cinema seat — safely distanced — before briefly playing it back in reverse at high speed. This dissociative framing is thought to trigger memory reconsolidation: the brain re-stores the memory with reduced emotional charge, without the need to relive it in real time. Participants do not need to describe their trauma in detail to their therapist. The technique typically requires only one to three sessions.

Why This Matters

PTSD is far more common than most people realise. In the UK alone, the NHS estimates that around 4% of adults meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD at any given time — but treatment drop-out rates for conventional therapies remain high, often because patients cannot face extended exposure to traumatic content.

This RCT matters for several reasons. First, it is one of the few rigorous, randomised trials to specifically test the Rewind Technique — a method already widely used within the NHS and UK private practice but, until recently, supported mainly by observational data. Second, the large effect size (d = 1.05) places it in the same clinical league as the most established PTSD treatments, despite requiring a fraction of the sessions. Third, remote delivery via video worked just as well as in-person sessions, making it accessible to people with mobility issues, transport barriers, or those in rural areas.

The researchers note that the Rewind Technique may work by briefly activating the traumatic memory and simultaneously eliciting dissociation — reducing the emotional weight attached to that memory without prolonged exposure. For people who have avoided therapy because "I can't face talking about it," this represents a genuine clinical breakthrough.

How Clear Minds Helps

Clear Minds is built on the same foundational principle: you don't have to relive the past to change how it affects you. The hypnotherapy sessions inside the Clear Minds app work by guiding your mind into a deeply relaxed, focused state — similar to the trance-like awareness described in the Rewind research — where unhelpful emotional patterns can be safely reprocessed and released.

You won't be asked to narrate your worst experiences. Instead, the sessions use guided visualisation, breathwork, and carefully crafted suggestions to help your subconscious mind re-encode stress, fear, and anxiety in a calmer, more proportionate way. For those dealing with the everyday ripple effects of past stress — sleep disruption, hypervigilance, low mood, emotional reactivity — this is exactly what the evidence supports.

If you've been putting off getting help because traditional therapy felt too daunting, the research is now clear: modern hypnotherapy approaches can produce large, lasting improvements without requiring you to go back through your pain in detail. You can start that process today, at your own pace, from wherever you are.

Ready to try it? Download the Clear Minds app and explore the sessions designed to help you reset, recover, and move forward.