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The unconscious mind is like a river making its way back to the sea, it has the ability to find its way out of problems.
What is clinical hypnotherapy?
Clinical hypnotherapy uses the state of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes.
How does clinical hypnotherapy work?
Unlike other forms of therapy, clinical hypnotherapy taps directly into the resources of your unconscious mind.
What is different between conscious and unconscious mind?
The conscious mind is involved in creating awareness of your experience, it includes the functions of your brain like perception, attention and memory, things you can recall and do intentionally.
The unconscious mind refers to all that sits below your conscious awareness. It regulates all your bodily functions and nervous system, your innate ability to return to homeostasis (balance), to repair and regenerate. It includes your primal drives and needs to survive and protect yourself, your emotions, learning, automatic habits, patterns of thinking, beliefs, sense of self and memories that you are not aware of.
Benefits of clinical hypnotherapy
Anxiety is associated with habitual, ritualistic or addictive patterns of behaviours and thinking, and coping strategies to protect you from fear, soothe unwanted emotions or make you feel safe and in control. In the long run they maintain your anxiety, so together we can work on:
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Identifying your coping strategies
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Understanding the anxiety underlying them
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Identifying the root cause of your anxiety
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Re-processing any traumatic unresolved memory in a safe way
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De-sensitising any triggering situations
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De-conditioning fear responses
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Learning strategies to regulate in and out of anxious states
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Reframing and letting go of unconscious limiting drives and beliefs
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Generating and learning new behaviours
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Re-calibrating your nervous system response
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Building capacity, increasing your threshold to stress
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Re-introducing fluidity in the CNS, to come in and out of stress or trauma responses
I use evidence based methods, to achieve effective lasting change.
What is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is a naturally occurring state that has been used for healing purposes since ancient times. It sits between being awake and asleep, While being awake, you have conscious awareness of your external reality, but not during sleep. During hypnosis, your body is resting deeply, your mind remains alert and you have greater awareness of your internal reality, at the exclusion of the external reality, but you'll be able to switch back instantly to reality if you need to. Hypnosis is safe because you remain in control.
Hypnosis is associated with specific frequencies of neural activity. It increases Theta and Delta brain waves. Theta waves are associated with light sleep, REM and vivid visual imagery. Delta waves are associated with deep dreamless sleep, transcendental meditative states, increased self-healing and immune system functions. In other words, during hypnosis you gain access to vivid imagination and creative faculties and memories, you are more open to suggestions and able to make changes that are right for you.
How to access your unconscious mind?
There are different ways to induce hypnosis. The most common is through deep relaxation, Conversational hypnosis and NLP use of certain language patterns and questioning, to bypass the critical factor of your mind, open up closed thinking loops, release trapped emotions and generate new more adaptive pathways. Plus, hypnotherapy focuses on your solution state, priming your unconscious mind to find a solution as opposed to explaining your problem.
Can hypnosis make you do things against your will?
The answer is no. Making someone do something involves coordinating a series of actions. Coordination is managed by areas of the brain that are not responsive to hypnosis. Therefore, it is impossible that a hypnotist makes you do something against your will.
As a trained hypnotherapist and psychotherapist, I use hypnosis purely to enhance therapeutic gains.
Hypnosis can affect motor activity, perception and sensations. It can induce catalepsy and alter your brain-body control. For example, I it could make someone’s arm move up or on the contrary they may feel unable to move it. In therapy, this can be used for example in automatic writing, to allow your unconscious mind to express certain things.
Hypnosis can induce analgesia and reduce the sensation of pain in parts of your body. In therapy, this can be used very effectively in pain management, child birth, dentistry and surgery where analgesic drugs cannot be used, for example brain surgery.
Hypnosis can alter perception and feelings, induce positive or negative hallucinations. In therapy, this can be used to make you experience what it feels like to have your problem resolved, and instruct your unconscious mind to lead you to your solution state.
