Hypnotherapy

“Hypnosis in its relaxing action touches all dimensions of the body and the psyche. In this sense, it can be said that hypnosis is the most potent non-pharmacological relaxing agent known to science.”

Temes, 1999

Have you ever been…

...So absorbed in a book and not heard someone call you?

...Or so immersed in a film that you allowed yourself to cry?

...Or even driven home and not recalled part of the journey?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to any of the above, you have experienced a hypnotic phenomenon.

We all have our own light trance states that can occur when we are involved in any repetitive and automatic activity, such as driving, jogging, taking a shower, or doing the dishes.

Hypnosis then, is a state of altered consciousness that occurs in everyone. It is a completely natural and universal experience.

What is Hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy guides you into this focused state, where skills and techniques are employed to encourage positive change.

Most of us agree that the power of the mind is phenomenal and offers enormous untapped potential. The challenge is to harness that potential.

How can Hypnotherapy help?

Hypnotherapy can help shift your performance and potential to a much higher level. This is why any successful athlete employs a ‘coach’ who will apply techniques used by Hypnotherapists.

It is therefore important to find a Hypnotherapist who is extensively trained in Psychology and understands the principles that help create the optimal conditions for personal growth and enhanced performance.

From the Arts through to business, visualization techniques are extensively used, exerting a positive influence on performance. The use of Imagery in Hypnosis also enhances:

	Creative insight
	Self perception
	Personal growth
	Problem resolution
	Opportunity awareness

Hypnotherapy can be very effective over a wide range of other issues ranging from addictions and phobias, shyness to exam stress.

Hypnotherapy has clinical, medical and dental applications too, including pain relief, pre and post operative rehearsal and the boosting of the immune system. In addition Hypnotherapy can be extremely effective over any condition that has an acknowledged psychological component, such as migraines and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

It is sometimes necessary to mention at this point that any Physical symptoms should be presented to your G.P. as a first point of call. In practice, most GP's view hypnotherapy as a very useful adjunct to conventional treatment.

Those that visit their Hypnotherapist regularly, often find that it is beneficial to have a safe environment to explore issues that might have been unconsciously learned (but still exert an influence), and learn to find and enhance their own resources.

In other words : To become more resourceful.

What happens?

Most clinicians agree that during deep focused relaxation, your ability to absorb specific thoughts, feelings or imagery increases.

You are alert, but more readily accept information that your conscious, left hemisphere of your brain, may usually query or intellectually dispute, however positive it might be.

In other words, the left side of your brain is led into a restful state by an induction. An induction might involve staring at a particular point, or a progressive physical relaxation, or even a monotonous monologue.

This allows your right side of your brain, which is associated with the subconscious to take over and run free, thereby making your unconscious resources available.

With training, people can hypnotize themselves. A person enters the hypnotic state when conditions are right. The hypnotherapist merely helps set those conditions.

Experiencing Hypnosis is a skill. All skills need practice to enable us to become more proficient. At first, some people can take time to experience even quite a light trance, whilst others can achieve that deeply relaxing state straight away.

Those that take a little longer usually find that the more they practice, the quicker the process speeds up.

Dispelling Myths

Will I be able to enter hypnosis?

Nearly everyone can enter the hypnotic state. Interestingly, the actual depth of hypnosis is irrelevant to a successful outcome. It is usually the more intelligent individual with a high motivation for change who achieves the best results.

You cannot be made to do anything you wouldn’t usually do.

If anyone said anything contentious or odd, or asked you to do something that you wouldn’t usually do, you would immediately return to full awareness.

You can return to your regular state whenever you want to, instantly.

After all, if you were ‘enjoying’ a sad movie, and cried during a particularly moving part, (self hypnosis), and then were told that you had to leave the auditorium, you wouldn’t respond that you were stuck in the movie!

There is no relinquishing of your control.

The hypnotherapist isn’t in control of you. The therapist and client form a team. if the client is unwilling to co-operate it is impossible for the therapist to effect a change. The therapist is just a facilitator. No one can ‘put’ you there. The challenge is for you to make it happen.

Sometimes you’ll choose to go and sometimes you wont.

It really is up to you.

Further notes

Some people query whether they can be hypnotized at all. It is certainly true that some people find it easier than others,

but have you ever become very focused on a feeling or a memory?

If you have, you are practicing a form of self hypnosis

We are all ‘suggestable’ to some degree or other. Have you ever been influenced by an advert or a highly esteemed individual? Or have you ever experienced one part of you over ruling another part of you? It might be interesting to reflect on how the subconscious mind will always over rule our conscious minds.

Or reflect for a moment on the extreme lengths Court officials go to, in order to avoid jurors becoming influenced by a Newspaper report or even by a phrase or comment — and this is when we are fully conscious and have all our critical faculties in place.

Hypnosis is a tool that helps form a bridge between our conscious and our subconscious minds. Most of us stay - and practice to stay - in the conscious. This is limiting, as it is our subconscious mind that holds and releases all our resources, learnings and experiences.

The subconscious mind influences our decisions and how we respond. Recent neurological research suggests that even our ‘free will’ is illusionary - that our subconscious minds start to respond to a stimulus fractionally before allowing our conscious mind to ‘choose’.

Once a thought is repeated, it strengthens a pattern; The stronger the pattern the quicker it becomes a belief; Once a belief, it exerts a powerful influence over your judgements, behaviours and experiences, often unconsciously. It is in effect self fulfilling. So achieving a mental 'balance' through hypnotherapeutic techniques will not only harmonize your electro-chemical activity in your brain, but increase your ability to use your imagination , your intuition, and your creativity to change beliefs and see different perspectives.

The subconscious mind is never right or wrong. It merely acts on what it 'knows' or has learned. It doesn't 'reason'. It will quite happily grind out falsehoods as it will truth. Hypnotherapy helps 'bypass' those protective mechanisms designed to protect our beliefs.

Sometimes these powerful learnings are not for our own good. For example, someone may have been told, as a child, that they were clumsy and accident prone. Once that suggestion becomes a belief — perhaps through repetition — that belief exerts a powerful influence on all their future performance, so hypnotherapy is possibly one of the most important practices to learn. It is a truism that when you change your usual patterns of thinking you will inevitably change your reality.

With practice you can develop this state into one of concentration and focus. At this point you have a wonderful potential for mental and physical control.

Confidence and Self Esteem

When you believe that you can do something well, or feel that you can do something well, you might enjoy a feeling that we call, confidence.

In contrast when you believe something about yourself and your sense of self worth, you might be described as having either a high or low self esteem.

When the distinctions between confidence and esteem become blurred, problems can arise. After all, there are so many things we may feel unconfident about, but if we link each one to our esteem, our esteem will inevitably spiral downwards.

Often a lack of self esteem is rooted in a person’s past, so if you were taught that you were only worthwhile if you behaved in a certain way or when you achieved someone else’s standards, and then you failed to meet them, low self esteem might be the outcome.

It is at this time that a critical internal dialogue can begin, further compounding the problem. Once internally repeated enough times — it becomes a belief - once a belief it becomes self fulfilling.

Whilst confidence is a fluid feeling, one’s self esteem should remain relatively ‘fixed’. After all we are ‘’all equal in the eyes of God’’, and our political culture believes the same - 1 person : 1 vote.

Or do you believe that someone else is worth 10 votes to your 1?

A leading scientist might have high self esteem and feel confident about his new discovery, but feel very unconfident about standing up in front of a room full of people to tell them about it.

Take another example; imagine someone who devotes their life to helping those in poverty and destitution. If those people were truly worthless, then the helper would by implication also be wasting their time. After all what’s worthwhile about helping something that’s worthless? We would cease to admire them.

Is that how you really see Mother Teresa?

Hypnotherapy is an extremely powerful way to enable you to value yourself more. After all you can agree can you not, that you are unique, so you are just different— neither better nor worse.

Once your self esteem is more established, you will find that you have the ability to separate confidence from esteem. Once this happens you will find that its o.k. to be good at one thing and not so good at another.

You will cease to link your self esteem to an event or piece of work. This of course means a wonderful freedom and a much less stressful life.

Hypnotherapy will help replace negative old beliefs and mind sets with more positive ones. After all, were you born with low self esteem?

Hypnotherapy can help banish that internal critic, enabling you to see yourself in a more positive light. Under hypnosis, unambiguous powerful suggestions are given to your subconscious mind and because they are ‘true’ and you are happy to receive them, changes occur.

These changes are worth having. To name just two benefits; You might immediately notice how much better and enjoyable your relationships with others become and secondly, new opportunities will be seen and acted upon.

Self hypnosis

So although totally benevolent, our subconscious mind can sometimes produce feelings that, in adulthood, might be either unnecessary, for example blushing when being introduced to someone new, or very limiting, such as refusing a promotion at work, because it involves flying.

Those people who entrench and strengthen the negative - often through natural negative self-hypnosis, often do so without realizing it.

One such referral experienced an acute phobia regarding spiders (Arachnophobia). So much so, she couldn’t even touch a photograph of a spider without eliciting a debilitating fear and revulsion. Added to that she was skeptical as to the power of hypnosis.

How much evidence did she need to believe in the power of hypnosis? She, without 'trying', had successfully reprogrammed her responses to an extreme irrational and illogical level. Her conscious mind ‘knew’ a photograph couldn’t hurt her, but she had hypnotized herself to believe it could.

Universal laws suggest that if you can convince yourself so effectively ‘in the negative’ - you can do so, ‘in the positive’.

Of course it doesn’t matter which particular phobia one is talking about, because all phobias are an external expression of an internal, usually unconsciously learned, anxiety.

Repression

Our human mind can, in times of extreme emotional disturbance, use repression as a ‘coping or defence mechanism’ to protect itself from anxiety. As this defence mechanism has to operate at an unconscious level, it can lead to a complete denial that an event ever took place.

However, there are two main downsides to repression, one is that repression invariably leads to symptoms. These symptoms are not perceived to be connected with the event because the event has been repressed! So the intellectual rational part of us concludes that although the behaviour is unwanted, it must be due to our genetic makeup, or ‘As I have always had this — it must be a trait or in my genes’.

The second is that repression fails to resolve the reasons why, and further, requires a great deal of energy to keep effective. Eventually, rather like a volcano, it is ready to explode at the appropriately presented cue or stimuli.

So, every behaviour will have a cause. And increased knowledge about the cause will lead to a catharsis.

Hypnoanalysis is probably the best method for dealing with repressed events.