Abstract

Sexual abuse within the family, particularly incest, constitutes a severe form of interpersonal trauma that can profoundly affect survivors’ psychological well-being, identity development, and capacity to establish trusting relationships. Conventional trauma-focused interventions may be experienced as burdensome by some survivors, as they often require the verbal recounting of traumatic memories. This qualitative study explored the experiences of adolescent girls who had survived incest and received spiritually integrated hypnotherapy as part of trauma-focused counselling support. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological design, the study involved eight participants aged 15–18 years who were purposively recruited from community counselling settings in Malaysia. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews lasting 45–60 minutes and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis within a phenomenological interpretive framework. Four interrelated themes emerged from the analysis: emotional stabilization, characterized by reduced physiological distress and an increased sense of safety; subconscious trauma processing, in which participants described hypnotic imagery as facilitating indirect engagement with traumatic memories; spiritual meaning-making, through which Islamic spiritual perspectives supported the reinterpretation of shame and self-blame; and post-traumatic growth, reflected in improved self-perception, future orientation, and personal autonomy. Drawing on these findings, the study developed a preliminary four-stage Spiritual Hypnotherapy Trauma Intervention Model. This study contributes to the literature on trauma rehabilitation by integrating clinical hypnosis, Islamic spiritual values, and phase-oriented trauma theory into an empirically informed conceptual framework. Nevertheless, further research is necessary to evaluate the model's effectiveness, clinical applicability, and suitability across diverse survivor populations.