Hypnotherapy
Suggestion Therapy
This is mainly used for straightforward problem areas such as smoking, weight loss, nail-biting, bed-wetting and simple fears. In many cases, only one or two sessions are necessary, but the number of sessions depends very much on the individual client and on the background to their problem.
During a session of suggestion therapy, you are helped into a relaxed and focused state of mind and then given suggestions that help you change a particular behaviour or reaction. While in hypnosis, suggestions are more easily accepted because the critical faculties of the conscious mind are partially suspended. Imagine that the conscious mind is a watchdog in front of the gates to the subconscious. With the help of hypnosis, the watchdog of the conscious mind is calmed down so it goes and lies down to doze while the hypnotherapist walks quietly past it and delivers positive suggestions to your subconscious mind for storage. These post-hypnotic suggestions can then later on be carried out in reality.
Mrs Diane A. (30), a single mother, came to see me because she was afraid of driving her car. She had passed her driving test two years ago but had not needed to drive very often so started to feel insecure on the road and took the bus instead to go into town or to the supermarket. However, her little son now needed to go to a different school which was awkward to reach by bus, so driving became her best option. Diane felt petrified but knew she had to overcome her fear.
After her first session, Diane was able to sit in her car, go through all the gear changes and all the controls and start the engine, without driving anywhere.
After her second session, she was able to drive around the block while a friend sat next to her, and in her third session, she was able to drive to her son’s new school, initially with a friend accompanying her, and a week later driving by herself. She was surprised how quickly she had regained her confidence and enjoyed her new freedom of using her car again.
Analytical Hypnotherapy
Analytical hypnotherapy is also known as hypno-analysis. Its objective is to discover the underlying reason for a presenting symptom and, by working through the cause, making this symptom redundant.
Analytical hypnotherapy is centered around the client’s memories and consequently requires the client to speak during hypnosis. While you are in hypnosis, your concentration is better and your powers of recall are much enhanced so that it becomes easier to access events that happened in the past. The hypnotherapist can then help the client to work through the memories, using visualization and other techniques, so that the client can allow the old memories to go back into the past where they belong and move forward in their life.
Mike D. (20) came to see me with a problem that had been going on for many years: he was embarrassed to eat in public. For this reason, he avoided restaurants and parties. He was perfectly OK at home with his family, but as soon as he was surrounded by friends or work colleagues, he couldn’t cope and made excuses to avoid taking part. He had been to a number of other hypnotherapists who tried to help him with suggestion therapy, brief therapy and NLP, but nothing seemed to work for him. When I started to dig a bit deeper in his first session, it turned out that Mike had several embarrassing memories from his school years where a teacher had ridiculed him in front of the whole class on several occasions. The humiliation from these experiences had stayed with Mike and had eroded his confidence. I helped Mike work through these memories with analytical hypnotherapy methods and after only three sessions, he reported that he had been out with his work colleagues for a meal and had had a great time. Removing blocks from the past had helped him enjoying a much better quality of life.
Self Hypnosis
When a client comes to me with a problem that requires hypno-analysis, I always teach them self-hypnosis in their first session. That way, my client can practice at home how to go into hypnosis easily and effortlessly and whenever they want. In order to achieve this, the client receives a self-hypnosis MP3 to practice with. This MP3 is included in the fee for the first session.
Miss Adele B (54) had both her Covid jabs and all went well with only very mild side-effects. The reason she came to see me was that initially, having had her jabs made her feel safer going out into town to do her shopping. However, after a few weeks she read that you could still get Covid and be contagious after having had the vaccination, and she started to become more and more anxious until she felt unable to go out any more for fear of catching the virus or passing it on to her family. In her session, I took her through a simple self-hypnosis exercise to help her relax around the topic of going out, and after carrying out the exercises for a few days, she started going out again, feeling safer and more in control.
