5 Ways Hypnotherapy Can Help

What is hypnotherapy, and how can it help?

Hypnotherapy is very simply a way to relax the active, conscious mind, and allow the wisdom of the deeper unconscious mind to come forward. Our active mind can only hold a few objects of knowledge at a time – and the more stressed we are, the less we are able to access it.  Every thing else that we have learned, that we know, is held in the unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a specific way to relax that enables us to access that information, bypassing the conscious mind.

What does a hypnotherapy session look like? It’s pretty simple – and not very mysterious: you sit there, close your eyes, and listen to me! Think of it as guided meditation. There is no swinging pocket watch, there will be no quacking like a duck. There WILL be breathing in and breathing out, feeling your body relax more and more deeply…and before you know it I will be saying “and now open your eyes and return to full, normal consciousness!”

Here are five things that I use hypnotherapy for in my practice:

1) Phobias: fear of flying, claustrophobia, fear of heights, elevators, agoraphobia. Hypnosis can help your brain develop new resources and new ways of dealing both with old, habitual patterns, and with new fears that seem to be beyond the control of the conscious mind.

2) Trauma: hypnotherapy is a powerful tool in reducing the poison of traumatic events. In just a few sessions, hypnotherapy can bring healing to painful memories that in the past have filled us with dread.

3) Future events: not only can hypnotherapy heal painful events from the past, it can help us face difficult, fearful, or complicated events in the future (think job interviews, meeting the in-laws, etc).

4) Undoing beliefs that no longer work for us:  low self esteem, relationship patterns that don’t work, poor career choices…many of these are driven by beliefs that we developed as kids that worked for us then, but are abysmally inappropriate for adulthood. Hypnosis not only can help us uncover these beliefs, but help us consciously create new ones that support a thriving lifestyle.

5) Reduce chronic anxiety: hypnosis is a powerful tool for deep relaxation that allows the body to “reset” itself and break out of the cycle of anxiety. Not only does that happen in the office, but I can teach my clients a self hypnosis technique that they can you use on their own, outside of the office.