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Case Studies

Confidence Case Study

John D. (26) came to see me because he felt that his jealousy was jeopardising his relationship with his girlfriend. His previous two relationships had ended in disaster because of his insecure attitude. He told me that he felt all right when he started going out with a woman, but after a while, the old problems started creeping back and he began resenting her spending time with her friends, even if he was invited to join them. This became even worse when she wanted to spend some time on her own or when she was speaking to another man. He immediately thought that she didn’t want him anymore. When we began to look at his childhood, John said that his parents had temporarily placed him and his little brother with a foster family when the boys were very young because the parents had to work and did not have the time to look after the children. When they felt financially secure after five years, they came to collect the children from the foster family to take them home. By that time, the children had bonded with their foster family and loved them and did not want to leave. John and his brother were very upset when people they didn’t really know took them away. This traumatic experience, together with all the feelings of fear and anxiety, became imprinted on John’s mind at a very early age, and John began to assume subconsciously that he must be unlovable if his foster parents allowed strange people to take him away. He concluded that there must be something wrong with him. In his sessions, John learnt to relax with self-hypnosis, and with the help of analytical hypnotherapy, he began to overcome the trauma of feeling abandoned during childhood. After seven sessions, he still remembered what had happened in his childhood, but he was no longer emotionally attached to the past and so was able to build up self-esteem and greater confidence. This allowed him to act calmer and in a more laid-back manner in his relationship which, last thing I heard, is still going strong.
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Anxiety Case Study

Marion S. (35) came to see me for persistent anxiety which occurred in all areas of her life. She woke up anxious, felt anxious at work and spent a lot of her time going over what had happened in the past and worrying about what would happen in the future throughout the day. Marion’s childhood had been fraught with trauma. She was one of 6 children, with a mother who found it difficult to show affection and a father she admired for his intelligence but whom she also feared for his violent temper when he was drunk. She could not remember her parents praising her for anything. One day when her father came home drunk and her mother wasn’t at home, he became very angry, ranting and raving about the mother’s absence because he suspected that his wife was having an affair. In reality, Marion’s mother had gone to the village to look for her husband. The children sat in their beds, crying and terrified, hearing their father shout downstairs that he would kill his wife when she came back. Marion was very frightened but felt she needed to go downstairs to try and warn her mother before she came in, but her father sent her back up to bed. Luckily, the mother looked through the window before coming into the house, saw her husband with a shotgun in his hand and asked a neighbour for help. Together, they managed to calm down her husband so that he put away the gun. Marion needed 10 sessions to work through this and other traumatic events of her childhood and noticed how her anxiety began to gradually reduce so that she started to feel calmer and more confident in everyday situations.
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Depression Case Study

Gloria B. (68) had been depressed ever since her husband David had died. She told me that David had been the love of her life, and since his sudden death 6 years ago, she had suffered from severe bouts of depression which she did not seem to be able to shake off. Her depression was there most of the day, making her feel tired, listless and stressed, and it also stopped her from sleeping soundly. She finally realised that she needed to seek help for her condition or she herself would become ill. When one of my former clients recommended me, she set up an appointment for an initial consultation. In her first session, I taught Gloria self-hypnosis which helped improve her sleep. In her second session, I took her through a hypnosis technique gleaned from family constellation which made her feel a great sense of relief at the end of the session. I asked her to contact me again two weeks later to let me know how she was doing, and she confirmed that her depression had lifted, and while she still felt sad, she no longer felt depressed. Four weeks later, she contacted me again to confirm that her depression had disappeared and she was beginning to take an interest in the world around her and had started going out and seeing friends again.
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Psychosomatic Case Study

Sophia C. (24) came to see me because she suffered from frequent abdominal cramping which sometimes also led to diarrhoea. This cramping could occur on a daily basis and was not connected to her periods. She had been to her GP who referred her for tests, but all results came back as clear. There seemed to be nothing wrong with her digestive tract.
A nutritionist had also asked Sophia to keep a food and drink diary in case she had a food intolerance. She was to note down at what time the abdominal cramping occurred during the day. Sophia kept a diary for two weeks, but there seemed to be no connection between foods and drinks she consumed and her cramps.
I suspected that the cramps were a physical reaction to a psychological issue and therefore took a very detailed background history. It turned out that Sophia had suffered from cramps during her childhood for several years, but after a while, the cramps seemed to disappear, so Sophia thought that she had ‘grown out’ of the cramps.
It had been only recently that she noticed the cramps again, and they started to affect her performance at work.
At the time, Sophia was in a difficult relationship with a man, with frequent disagreements and constant tension between her and her partner.
Looking back at her childhood years she remembered that her parents had rowed frequently, often right in front of her, and at times, objects would be hurled through the room as one of the parents got into a rage. To me, this showed an emotional connection between her parents’ noisy rows and her current strained situation with her partner. As a child, Sophia get so upset and unsettled by her parents rows that she developed strong physical symptoms as a consequence. Once the parents had divorced, Sophia’s home life became more peaceful and after a while, her cramps disappeared. When her current relationship became tense and escalated into arguments, the cramping-reaction was re-activated.
As the origin of her psychosomatic reaction lay in the past, we worked through her childhood trauma with analytical hypnotherapy, and after five sessions, Sophia was able to deal with disagreements in a calmer way so that her abdomen could stay much more relaxed. The emotional link between her childood experiences and her physical reaction had been severed by her hypnotherapy sessions. Even though Sophia still remembered her parents rows, her body no longer reacted to the memories.

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Toxicity and Mood

Anxiety and depression are very common emotional issues that affect an increasing number of people. Over the last 30 years of working as a therapist, I found that more and more young people present with these debilitating emotional problems.

While past trauma and difficult life situations play an important part in creating anxiety and depression, there are a number of other little-known factors that can have a major negative impact on your emotional state.

Besides hypnotherapy, I also trained in health kinesiology, and in that capacity, I noticed that anxiety and depression (and even OCD) improved and often went away completely when clients began to exclude foods they were intolerant to and started taking supplements that helped their body to detox.

Toxins can accumulate in the body through dental fillings, vaccines, medication recreational drugs, antibiotics and other factors. Toxic metals encourage invasive organisms, and both toxic metals and invasive organisms damage the gut (‘leaky gut’) which can severely disturb emotional balance.

To find out more about the hair sample tests, please click here:

A 35-year-old male client came to see me for his initial consultation, presenting with depression which had not shifted even though he had gone through psychotherapy for five years. Rather than starting with hypnotherapy sessions, I carried out a hair sample test to find out if there were any underlying reasons for his depression rather than just emotional factors. It turned out that he had problems with mercury, with the most likely source being his amalgam fillings. I tested which supplements where appropriate for him to start the detox and also checked him for food intolerances. He started taking his supplements and excluded the allergenic foods and over several months had his amalgams replaced. He needed to continue with supplements after the dental work had been done, and slowly his depression started to lift. Four months after completion of amalgam removal, he started feeling like a weight had lifted off his shoulder, and soon after, his depression disappeared completely. And all this without a single hypnotherapy session…

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