What does hypnotherapy work best for?
Hypnosis is known as the ultimate learning state and is what makes hypnotherapy a brilliant choice for addressing anything that has at some point, been learnt. To understand that more fully, read on…
Connecting with the subconscious
Hypnotherapy differs from the majority of talking therapies available in that it uses hypnosis to access the subconscious part of your mind. The reason for connecting with the subconscious is that it controls the vast majority of how you behave, the emotions you feel and the things you think about. So, by accessing this area of your mind, changes you want can often be made more quickly and are easier to retain than if trying to do the same through conscious thought alone.
Everyone experiences hypnosis everyday
The state of consciousness we call hypnosis is something we all go through as we fall to sleep and reawake, it’s approximately a 30-minute window either side of deep (or REM) sleep. During this time our brainwave frequency reduces, and our mind is more suggestible, or to put it another way, better at taking on information and imagining possibilities for us. To give an example, if ever you’ve heard a strange noise as you’re drifting off to sleep and found your mind racing with overblown ideas of what it could be, all from a noise that if you’d heard during the day wouldn’t have even registered. A more positive example people talk about is finding themselves coming up with answers to problems as thy wake up in the morning, the subconscious mind has solved what the waking conscious mind could not – and you thought the saying ‘I’ll sleep on it’ was just a delaying tactic! The difference with hypnotherapy is that instead of these somewhat random occurrences, the hypnotherapist will guide the client into a state of hypnosis and then work with them to achieve the change or changes that have been agreed at the outset of the therapy.
Just letting it happen, automatically
The magical part in hypnotherapy is that once the suggestions have been understood and accepted by the subconscious, it will do its best to make them happen automatically without you even needing to think about, in fact its best when you don’t. Remember a time when you’ve heard your name across a crowded room or spotted a friendly face on a busy street? Chances are you weren’t listening out for your name or scanning for your friend’s face, but your subconscious mind was, and because its complex filtering processes understood these things were of interest or importance to you, it bought them to your attention. It will act on hypnotherapeutic suggestions in the much the same way, putting them into practice for you as you go about your day. One important note is that your subconscious will only accept suggestions that are inline with your change goal or in some way beneficial to your wellbeing, anything that isn’t will either be rejected or just ignored.
Knowing that hypnotherapy is a way that you can learn or relearn whatever it is that helps you achieve your change goal, what kinds of things do we learn?
We learn to be fearful, anxious, or phobic of certain objects, people, animals, situations etc. Learning an anxious response can sometimes develop into panic attacks under certain circumstances, triggering our fight/flight response even when there is no apparent danger. We know these as learned responses because we are all born with only two fears, falling and loud noises. Everything else we learn along the way, either through our own experiences or we inherit them from people to whom we look up to (especially during our early years).
We learn to enjoy eating sugary foods, drinking alcohol, smoking and more besides. It’s true to say, nobody really enjoys their first cigarette, alcoholic drink, or taste of coffee? Usually quite the opposite, we find them revolting but we learn to tolerate them and then in time, like or even crave them. For some an emotional and/or chemical dependency forms. All a learning process.
We learn habits, both those that have a physical aspect like nail-biting and also thinking habits, some of which can take on an obsessive nature. Most of these we learn as a way of coping with some form of stress or insecurity in our lives. But learn them we do.
We learn to respond to stress. Some can manage this and cope but for an increasing number, the conflicting pressures of life can be overwhelming and our learned coping mechanisms can fail, impacting mental and physical wellbeing. Once at the point of overwhelm, learning new ways to cope can be just another thing on the to-do list. But can be made possible with the help of a hypnotherapist.
More deeply, we learn about ourselves, what we are, where we belong, how important we are in context of our social groups. We learn from this an idea of how safe and loved we are, beliefs that we carry with us into all areas of our lives and which impact greatly on how we think, feel and behave. Again, all of this we learn and can relearn, building a greater sense of self-confidence and self-esteem to help us succeed and enjoy life.
So now you know, anything which has been learned, can be relearned, and reprogrammed with the help of hypnotherapy. And because of working at a subconscious level, this change happens quickly. People are often amazed at how something they may have struggled with for years just disappears. Some can even feel an initial upset that something they believed was permanent and may have caused them much anguish, can actually be overcome. But as you might expect, this upset is short-lived as the smile of realisation takes over, when they are free of their problem. To find out more about how hypnotherapy can help you, contact me for an initial consultation.
