Ask somebody how they feel about being hypnotised and you will get a wide range of responses – fear being one of them. Yet, without knowing it, everyone reading this article is likely to utilise the hypnotic state every time they visit the gym – that music you hear may be just music but it helps you to get into “the zone” of heightened performance. I am a hypnotherapist and I use hypnosis in conjunction with other therapeutic techniques to teach my clients how to utilise that high performance state to overcome habits, fears, weight issues, anxieties; it even helps with some medical problems (like Irritable Bowel Syndrome).
Not surprisingly hypnotherapy can also be useful for improving sports performance and over the years, I have been asked by professional and Olympic standard athletes to help them improve their game.
How Does Hypnosis Work?
Maybe because of the misrepresentation of hypnosis on stage, screen and literature the most frequent question I am asked is “How does it work?” The goal of all therapy is to create a new perspective; hypnotherapy achieves this by helping us build new mental pathways. Hypnotherapy is far more effective than other forms of therapy because it is extremely efficient at achieving perspective changes. Where people may attend other forms of therapy for months on end, I expect most people to get the change they want within four sessions using hypnotherapy.
In this first article, I am going to talk about how hypnotherapy helped one lovely lady change her perspective on life. Vivienne, the lady in question, is the late mother of Lesley Beeton, one of the members at the Spirit. Here is what Lesley says about how hypnotherapy helped Vivienne.
Lesley talks about how Hypnotherapy Helped
"Mom was extremely ill and there was no cure for her cancer. She was very afraid of her diagnosis, devastated by the prognosis, and felt unable to see any positives in her life. We knew that Mom needed to come to terms with her disease, to decide how to live the rest of her life, and to tell the clinical teams how she wanted to be treated.
I asked Stephen to work with Mom when conventional anti-depressant therapy was withdrawn and she was not offered any counselling. Stephen adopted a personalised approach to Mom’s needs. She was very fragile and cried a lot during the initial sessions, but she seemed much calmer to us almost from the beginning. Mom learnt to trust Stephen and enjoyed the one-to-one time, working hard to change her perspective as her disease progressed.
Although she never understood how hypnotherapy worked, she acknowledged that without it she would never have achieved the insight and focus to make informed choices about dying at home or plan her funeral. She was calm and at peace, happy to be alive each day, right up until the end. On the day she died, Mom declined all drug interventions and passed away quietly at home, pain-free and in her own time.”
Peace and Quiet
Most chronic illnesses, including cancer and heart disease, are complex - having more than one cause and often more than one treatment. The medical teams work very hard to treat the disease but often the patient gets trapped on a medical ‘treadmill’ without the peace and quiet they need to consider their own needs. Patients suffering with these serious conditions also have all the small niggles that the rest of us do - headache, stomach upset, coughs and colds, dental pain, period pain etc, and it’s often these small things which can really bring a person down. So there is a real benefit in investing early on in diagnosis in a plan for managing ongoing symptoms, medical interventions and the emotional side effects of chronic illness - hypnotherapy can help with this.