Friday 14 August 2009

Hypnotherapy for phobias.

I am a qualified Hypnotherapist and was priviledged to do training with two of the finest trainers in Hypnotherapy at that time, Wilf Proudfoot and Stephen Brooks.

Hypnotherapy is very powerful and can be very effective in the treatment of phobias. Hypnosis, or what may be termed a trance, is a perfectly natural state that we go in and out of many times a day every day. A hypnotherapist is a facilitator of hypnosis and when in a 'trance' you are always in control and can usually remember everything that happens. Here are just three of the benefits of hypnosis:

1) It is very relaxing and has been proven to lower your blood pressure and release any tension in the muscles.

2) Hypnosis can reduce the amount of hormones produced by stress.

3) It can be used to treat many ailments and conditions in addition to phobias.

We often talk about the conscious and unconscious minds. Our conscious mind is the mind we use in our everyday awareness of the things we are 'conscious' of. If I ask you to become aware of how your right foot feels you can do that but previously you were not consciously aware of it because your conscious mind was reading this article. You unconscious mind keeps your body working so you don't consciously have to bother. It controls things such as your heart rate, breathing and hunger. It is also a storehouse of everything that has ever happened to you.

The conscious mind rationalises and considers whether something is true or not. The conscious mind cannot rationalise and will eventually accept as true anything it is told often enough. I remember many years ago I visited someone who had not seen for a few years this lady had been very intelligent, confident and had a good job but in our conversation on that occasion she told me several times how useless she was. I was totally shocked at the difference in her. By frequently telling her she was useless someone had programmed her to think she was useless. Unfortunately this may have been her husband or his mother. This is what we mean by the power of suggestion and is why we must be so careful about the thoughts we think and change any negative thoughts for positive ones. We must also, as this case shows, be very careful about what we allow others to tell us or suggest to us and thus programme us with.

The conscious mind is like a guardian for the subconscious mind protecting it from negativity but as the above case shows it can be bypassed eventually. In hypnosis it can be bypassed easily as it is relaxed or distracted so the hypnotherapist can use suggestions to programme the subconscious mind in positive way to overcome a phobia or many other conditions. Such is the power of hypnotherapy that after treatment you may even laugh at how silly you were to have, for example, a phobia of spiders.

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