We recently received a lovely testimonial from a lady who was advised to try
hypnotherapy for anxiety.
“Well, what can I say about Chris !! He is just amazing and he has changed my life completely. I had suffered from anxiety for a very long time but when Covid hit us it got a lot worse and it got so bad that I was barricading my bedroom door with furniture at nights. I didn’t know why I was so anxious but Chris found the reason went back to when I was 8, a trauma in my life 65 years ago. With Chris’ help and guidance we confronted it and totally put it to bed. I am no longer suffering from anxiety I’ve got my wag back!
Chris invited me to come back for a top-up session in September and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Thank you so much, it’s such a wonderful clinic, as soon as I walked in the door It felt so positive and friendly.
See you in September. Hazel”
So many clients notice a huge change in their lives, and it doesn’t have to be something that takes months and months or even years; with this lady, the testimonial was written after just five one-hour sessions. Each session aimed at using hypnotherapy for anxiety involved between 30 – 45 minutes of actual hypnosis.
In effect, the hypnotherapy for anxiety was anything between two and a half and three and three-quarter hours. That’s quite a short period of time to deal with a lifetime of anxiety – so what did we do that the likes of counselling etc., didn’t touch?
So what techniques can we use when working with hypnotherapy for anxiety?
I’ve already spoken about the horse and rider analogy, where the rider knows that there’s nothing to worry about when passing a carrier bag etc but the horse freaks out. We talk about the rider being our conscious mind and the horse being our subconscious, or unconscious, mind.
So many therapies talk to the rider but the hypnotherapy (especially hypnotherapy for anxiety) talks to the horse, so the 1st thing that we did was assess the clients’ anxiety levels and take a brief history before going ahead with hypnotherapy to calm down the horse.
We always advise our students to start their first session with a technique known as the Fork in the Path followed by something known as coping to mastery.
When the Fork in the path is done well and with passion this can stay with the client for years after. Experience shows that when clients come back the thing they remember most of all is the fork in the path, but only when it is delivered in a certain style. As with most things we can work out what works best over the years and the style we have developed is the one that works best overall.
By the time Hazel came back for her second session her anxiety levels had dropped significantly but were still higher than we would have liked them to be we practiced some more coping to mastery techniques and began to get her talking in hypnosis. We used something called the child on the beach to help her begin to see where these feelings first came from.
The subconscious is very good at finding the Initial sensitising Event (ISE) as well as any subsequent sensitising events (SSE). Memories are strange things and can be wrong or mixed, we must never forget this – what isn’t in question though are the emotions that memory creates. The mind can then set up a core belief, in this case, it was to do with being left alone.
It’s all well and good knowing where the anxiety came from but we also need to be able to release it which is part of the next blog
