An article in the Coventry Telegraph this week featured a lady who had had hypnotherapy to successfully cure her fear of thunderstorms.
This phobia had started from simply feeling uncomfortable during a storm to becoming a constant worry and over the years, the phobia had started to rule her life to the point where she was wearing clothes to protect her from the wet weather and avoiding using electrical items for fear of being electrocuted during a storm. It had even progressed to the point where she felt suicidal.
Many phobias start as something and nothing and gradually progress to take over the patient’s life. A fear of thunderstorms or simply bad weather is quite common, but many people feel alone with their phobia.
Self-hypnosis is often tried but things like CD’s are not customised to the individual and in the case of phobias or fears, it is often necessary for a hypnotherapist to tailor the session.
Sometimes a patient knows the origin of a fear but not always and it is not necessary to know the origin for therapy such as CBT and hypnosis to work.
Many business people recognise stress as their top complaint on a daily basis. Many do not realise how much stress can contribute to health problems until it is too late. Although stress starts at work, it affects home life and other areas quite quickly. For example, it can interrupt normal sleeping patterns, cause weight loss or gain (usually not the one that you would like) and cause a lack of concentration. This can cause issues at home for the person’s partner, children, family and friends.
Hypnotherapy is often used to relieve stress and many companies have seen success by incorporating hypnotherapy into their employees routines and corporate benefits.
Hypnosis helps, not just by relieving the stress but also by teaching the patient’s mind how to deal with stress. The physical problems we feel from stress are caused by a reaction in our mind. Sometimes a patient will have no conscious or concrete idea of why they are stressed, so the hypnotherapist can work with them on an unconscious level to help discover the reason(s) for stress and how best to deal with it.
It is not only a case of learning how to deal with new stress but also how to release the old stress of the past. Hypnotherapy can help people to do that.
Depression is notoriously difficult to deal with, and even diagnose according to the exposure in the media in recent months.
Some symptoms of depression include:
- lack of motivation
- inability to concentrate
- feeling sad
- feeling hopeless
- mood swings
These symptoms are also symptoms experienced by women going through the menopause. CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is a way of learning to cope with depression and has been used by many women to help them cope with the menopause. CBT is a way of teaching and learning new habits and behaviours and these new habits and behaviours can be used to help stem the depression and feelings of sadness.
CBT can also help teach people how to better communicate with others. A feeling of being misunderstood can be a contributory factor to depression so this can also help patients overcome their depression.
If you are taking sleep medication prescribed by the doctor, then you should consult your doctor before coming off any medication. Many of the new medications prescribed have few side effects, but if you want to get off the medication and try natural remedies or alternatives, then a responsible therapist will always advise you to speak to your doctor before stopping the medication.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a form of psychotherapy, which has proved very effective in the past for many people suffering from insomnia.
CBT works, as the name suggests, by modify behaviours or patterns that have become a habit, whether knowingly or not. For example, the therapist may work with you to try altering things such as waking up at the same time each day, avoiding short naps, minimising light and noise in the bedroom and getting out of bed if you’re having trouble sleeping after fifteen minutes.
Dependent upon your circumstance, situation and personal preference, CBT can also be combined with hypnotherapy, which can prove to speed up the process.
Star of BBC’s ‘What Not To Wear’ programme, Lisa Butcher, started writing a new column in The Sun from July. In the column, Lisa talks about how she used cognitive hypnotherapy to help to boost her confidence when she first started working in front of the camera.
Lisa said:
“When I started work on What Not To Wear at the BBC, the clothes I wore were important, but that was not enough to give me the confidence I needed. I discovered a solution in cognitive hypnotherapy/ neuro-linguistic programming… I went to two sessions and that was enough to build up my strengths and deal with my anxieties.”
Hypnotherapy is generally acknowledged as being more effective when combined with cognitive behavioral therapy. As Lisa discovered, it is very effective and results can be achieved in very few sessions.
Hypnotherapy is ideal for use with anxiety, confidence, stress or relaxation issues, insomnia, and many fears and phobias. As we have talked about in our earlier articles, many hypnotherapists offer a free consultation to give clients the opportunity to ask any questions they may have prior to a session.
Everyone is aware of using hypnosis to help them quit smoking, increase confidence, release their fears or lose weight and if you think about all these different effects, they are all changes to your life. At the end of the day, you need motivation to make change or you wouldn’t change. However, even with motivation, even with wanting to change, change is not easy.
Hypnotherapy helps with motivating you to change - from the inside, really motivating your unconscious self so that it is easy to make that change. You may need motivation for other changes, so think of all the things can hypnosis can help simply by focussing on your motivation for the task in hand.
You might need motivation to set up your own business, focus on a particular task at work, or anything. Hypnosis will focus your mind and help you to concentrate. You can only work on one change at a time to help your unconscious mind to absorb the changes you need.
Hypnosis can help remove those littles voices in your head that stop you from achieving your goal, voices like ‘you don’t deserve it’, ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘you have no time’ and more. Hypnotherapy can help to quieten those voices and even remove then. Don’t let a lack of motivation stop you getting or doing what you want to in life.
Although this may sound a bit of a daft question to some, it is in fact a very common fear amongst those unfamiliar with hypnosis and how it works.
The simple answer is that this cannot happen. In all the centuries of hypnosis being used, there has never been a single report of someone getting stuck in hypnosis.
People fear that they might not be able to come round or that if something happens to the hypnotherapist, then they will be left stuck in hypnosis.
If something were to happen to the hypnotherapist, the hypnotised person would either awake straight away or they would simply drift off to sleep and wake up when they were ready. This misconception may have arisen when people have watched, usually on television, a hypnotised subject seemingly struggle to come round when the hypnotherapist asks them to. This is usually a simple case that the subject is enjoying the relaxed sensation so much that they don’t really want to come out of it. Hypnosis is a really relaxing feeling.
Indeed, patients remain in control at all times. It is very rare for someone to go into a deep trance so that they can’t hear what the hypnotherapist is saying. Many people can hear every word that is said. If they wanted to come out of the trance, they could do so easily by just opening their eyes at any time.
Mediation is when two parties involve a neutral third party to help them overcome or resolve a dispute or argument. The third party is not advisory in any capacity but merely there to help the parties to come to a shared understanding of the situation and to work towards an agreed resolution.
Mediation is also sometimes called ‘alternative dispute resolution’ (ADR). It can be undertaken by couples, two companies, or even two countries. Some examples of disputes which may be dealt with or helped by mediation include:
Family:
- Marital disagreements
- Prenuptial agreements
- Separation / divorce
- Financial distribution
- Parental / custody issues
- Elderly care issues
- Sibling conflictsWorkplace:
Workplace:
- Wrongful termination
- Harrassment
- Discrimination
- Grievances
Disputes involving the following issues:
- Landlord/tenant issues
- Builders/contractors/homeowners
- Contracts
- Medical malpractice
- Personal injury
- Partnerships
Other:
- Youth/peer mediation
- Violence prevention
Mediation is often cheaper than going to court, quicker and more effective. It is also more private and discreet.
This is another common fear from clients, although not always a question they wish to ask.
When you are in hypnosis, you will not give away any information that you do not wish to. This fear is based upon the misconceptions and highly dramatised versions of hypnosis shown in films or on television. Stage hypnosis and the media have helped to publicise misconceptions such as these.
In hypnosis, you are in full control although many people find they are more receptive to suggestions whilst in hypnosis. Often, people report feeling more ‘awake’ and aware of what is going on than they are normally! If someone under hypnosis wants to stop the session at any time, it is very easy for them to do and they can simply open their eyes.
It is very easy for someone to lie in hypnosis - this is one of the reasons why evidence obtained under hypnosis is inadmissible in a court of law.
Hypnosis has been developed over centuries and has proven to be very effective in many ways.
Have you ever woken up just before the alarm has gone off? It happens to a lot of people and many put it down to co-incidence or habit without realising exactly why.
Expectation is a huge power. When we expect something constantly, that expectation is embedded deep in our unconscious and that is what wakes us up.
Hypnosis is a great way of making unconscious expectation louder. When we consciously expect something, it takes a while sometimes to filter through to our unconscious mind, however, hypnosis amplifies the effect and speeds it up.
As an example, think of a placebo. When patients are in a trial and they have the placebo, they consciously expect the pain to go away or the symptoms to stop and their expectation is so powerful that the unconscious mind makes the physical pain relieving mechanism work and the pain goes away and the symptoms lift.
When you have had to wake up early and have woken up before the alarm, it is a little like the placebo effect. Knowing you have to get up early causes the expectation to set your unconscious alarm. Those who suffer from lack of sleep or insomnia when they have to get up earlier than normal often say that knowing they have to get up early increases their stress levels and actually causes the insomnia itself.
Expectation is very powerful and using hypnosis, we can harness this effect and use it.