Categories
hypnosis Personal Development self-help

Self-Hypnosis vs One-to-One Treatment

If you can do it yourself, why pay for expensive therapy? After all, with DIY jobs around the house you often end up with a better quality job than when you pay a so-called professional to do it for you.

Self-hypnosis is great for those times when you want to just re-program your automatic thinking and behavioural processes. The very act of spending time every day with you, caring for you, in a state of deep relaxation, is hugely beneficial. Using your imagination, in this state of deep relaxation, to set up an intention for your future and to plant messages in your subconscious mind without conscious interference is an excellent way to manufacture beneficial change in your life.

When you visit a skilled hypnotherapist you are with someone who is listening to you and caring for you. To have someone listen to your story, without judgement, is of itself hugely therapeutic. You are also with someone who notices details – what you talk about, what you don’t talk about; what your mood state is; and most importantly – a skilled therapist will notice and seek to address the real causes of problems.

Let me give you an example: say you have a problem with confidence.

The self-hypnosis route would perhaps have you repeating a mantra along the lines of “I am filled with confidence in all situations” or “I feel confident and find myself expressing my thoughts and ideas fearlessly in meetings and conversations”. Accompanied, maybe by a visualisation of you, in a situation where you have lacked confidence, behaving in a confident manner and feeling feelings of success and achievement.

A hypnotherapist would probably have you engaging in that sort of visualisation during your therapy anyway, so why bother paying all that money when you can get it for free if you DIY.

Well, for me at least, lack of confidence is not as simple as that. Lack of confidence is about fundamental belief in self, and it is this belief in self, or rather lack of belief in self that I would seek to correct using hypnotherapy. Lack of belief in self is the result of early programming by those adults who had the greatest impact on our development as a young mind. So the problem is quite deep rooted and consequently needs gentle, loving guidance to discover how this lack of belief in self came to be present. In other words it is important to teach, and experience, the huge difference between something you believe about you and something that is true about you. This doesn’t happen with self-hypnosis. So if your lack of confidence is the result of one highly critical parent always finding fault, then therapy would seek to correct this; if it is the result of over protective parents who were excessively fearful of you taking risks – like climbing trees, or going out alone – then therapy has a different problem to solve. There are other reasons why an individual might lack confidence – early classroom experiences with a teacher who doesn’t love children or the job, or a highly sensitive physiology… The problem with self-therapy is the lack of experience at understanding self, and correcting the real problem.

Another area where an experienced therapist is beneficial is in the area of challenge. We are constantly making up ideas about our world that simply aren’t true. More than one person in my consulting room has considered themselves a total failure. They’ve never succeeded at anything and they never will. If you believe that you believe it and because you believe it you will not seek to change it because no one seeks to change what they see as a truth. But if you believe that you always fail at everything you do, doing self-hypnosis to achieve success isn’t addressing the fundamental belief that is in error. It’s like using self-hypnosis to win the lottery and never bothering to buy a ticket.

However, as soon as anyone tells me they are a total failure, or they never succeed at anything, I have to challenge it. And my challenge is always successful and I can always point out several occasions in anyone’s life when they have been successful. They just never see it because their erroneous belief about themselves blinds them to their successes. What I also do is challenge the meaning of success to them. Usually it’s lots of money, promotions, material possessions, good relationships, and so on. They fail to see small successes, like still being alive after x number of years, like having raised beautiful children, like passing a driving test, like honouring others by being punctual, like gifts to charity, like small acts of kindness to strangers… there are successes in everyone’s life. The real problem with feelings of failure in life is an inability to see, to honour, and to appreciate the small successes. Just allowing someone to look at themselves and their life from a different perspective is like lifting a huge burden off their back, and that’s even before the hypnosis starts and is used then to reinforce these new learnings.

So your friendly neighbourhood hypnotherapist is actually providing you with something more than you can do for yourself. The best course of action is to have a consultation or two with a hypnotherapist in order to establish what the real problem is and to receive guidance and training in how to use self-hypnosis most effectively. That way you get the best of both worlds.

Self-hypnosis is highly beneficial and I would encourage you to try it out, just recognise that it has limitations.

Michael J Hadfield D.Hyp., MBSCH

Categories
hypnosis

Hypnosis – Quick fix or permanent change

Look, I want to have loads and loads of money, but I don’t want to do any work in order to have it. Have you any suggestions? Seriously, apart from buying a lottery ticket – do you have any suggestions? I want to laze around all day and just have money arrive in my bank account, and not just little bits of money – loads and loads of it, and I want it guaranteed for life. Not only that but I want it right now, and I’m only prepared to pay you £40 for you to give that to me, and even that seems a little steep, so if you could give it for free that’d be great. I don’t want to hear you saying that you might be able to help me, or that I might be able to learn something that might take a couple of months, I need it and I need it now.

I hope you are laughing.

I hope you are at least smiling.

Sounds a bit like a child doesn’t it?

If you change money, to a cure for anxiety, or stress, or phobia, or smoking, or losing weight, or nail biting, or marital problems, or excessive drinking, or blushing, or headaches, or pain, or a whole host of other physical and psychological problems… then what you have in the opening paragraph is what most people expect from hypnosis.

Many don’t want to be responsible for their own health, and don’t want to put any personal effort (other than turning up for one, or at most two, appointments) into getting better and although a hypnotherapist is always the last resort, they expect miracles from him or her that they wouldn’t dream of expecting from a psychologist, psychiatrist or medical doctor.

Hypnosis needs the full involvement of the patient in order for results to be achieved. It needs a commitment to stick with treatment until the problem is resolved or it is quite clear that the treatment is having no further impact on the problem. Sometimes we need our problems, but that’s another article. And when we need our problems we are quite often strongly resistant to having someone help us to resolve them – or even to allow someone sufficient access to our minds to discover what exactly the reason is.

Another reason for the unreasonable expectations people have of hypnosis and hypnotherapists is that hypnosis is seen as some sort of general anaesthetic. I’ve lost track of the number of people (even doctors) who expect me to ‘put them out’, and are disappointed when that doesn’t happen. But because they see hypnosis as a general anaesthetic they expect some sort of ‘mental operation’ to take place while they are ‘out’ and to be ‘fixed’ when they ‘come round’, as if their life-long anxiety pattern, or over-eating habit was some appendix that could be whipped out, the hole sewn up and the pain gone.

These problems can be helped, eased, or restored to what might be considered normal, using hypnosis. Sometimes it’s straightforward, sometimes it takes effort and determination to resolve the issues that are reducing quality of life. I remember in my early days as a hypnotherapist, at the end of a course of treatment a patient said to me that what I had given her was like coming down on Christmas morning and opening a gift to find in it what she most desired in the world, it was like I’d given her her life back.

That’s the potential of hypnosis.
Michael Hadfield D.Hyp., MBSCH

Categories
psychoneuroimmunology self-help

I Feel Lousy – Isn’t that Great!

Do you ever listen to other people’s conversations? I mean when you’re standing at a bus stop, or having a drink in a café after a hard morning’s shopping. You know, those people whose voices are just a little too loud and you can’t really help listening; after all you are on your own, and other people’s lives are quite interesting.

What do they talk about? Their problems I’ll bet, with health issues being high on the list. And have you ever noticed how it’s a bit like a game of ping pong. One party will bat a little titbit “my back’s been playing up something awful”, and the other will respond with something ‘better’ and before you know where you are, you know all about all the cancers, and the hip operations, and the chronic chest infections, that their family and friends have had in the past ten years.

Sound familiar?

So illness seems important. If it isn’t, why do we spend so much time talking about it?

Have you ever noticed how you suffer with a bad cold, or dose of ‘flu, or possibly something more serious, when life itself is becoming tedious, work is getting you down, or your husband seems to have lost interest in you. Have you ever noticed how, when you are happy and life is full of joy and excitement, you rarely experience illness? It has been known for a long time that ‘stress‘ has a depressant effect on the ability of your body’s immune system to fight infection. Illness is the body’s way of saying ‘you’re not looking after you‘, and usually the way you are failing to look after yourself is in your mind – your emotional well-being is generally the part which is being neglected when you start to experience illness.

Now, the scientists say that disease organisms, viruses, bacteria, genes, and even your age, cause illness. They may be right. But if they are then those same ‘experts’ are your only hope for defeating illness. Yet with all the drugs and all the scientific advances over that last fifty years – shouldn’t the hospitals be emptying out by now? How easy is it to get an appointment with your doctor? How full was the waiting room last time you visited? All that science seems to be accomplishing is to change the nature of illness without actually removing it.

If illness is a necessary warning system to let you know that you need to slow down, or look at how you are living your life then this is exactly what we would expect to see with scientific advances; a change in the style of illness, but no change in the quantity or quality. Smallpox and bubonic plague have been eradicated, but doesn’t AIDS do pretty much the same sort of job.

So, how can this awareness help you?

Well it can help you if you want to feel better and be less ill. Because the first step to freeing yourself from this pattern of stress/illness is to recognise that the illness is helpful. Now, I know pain isn’t much fun, and I’m not suggesting that life-threatening problems should be ignored. In fact I’m not even suggesting that you stop visiting your doctor for treatment. I would actually strongly advise that you take all the help you can get if you have a health problem.

What I am suggesting is that if you want to be free of illness, you need to start by looking at what illness gives you, and welcome those gifts. You might get a few days off work, early retirement, forced retirement from a job you hate; illness may be the only occasion when anyone looks after you or gives you affection, if you are lonely then illness at least brings you into close contact with people (doctors and nurses) who touch you and treat you gently; if you are trying to cram too many things in your life then illness gives you a break and gives your body a much needed rest.

It would be beneficial then to see what changes you could make to your life so that this ‘benefit’ was no longer needed because you already had it. If you don’t like your job then consider the possibility of doing something you enjoy instead; if you are alone then open your mind to the possibility of this being different. If you are simply too busy then build relaxation into your schedule and see it as just as important a part of life as the ‘busy’ness.

But whatever you do, don’t neglect illness, it is your mind’s way of telling you it’s time for change. And if you decide that change is appropriate for you have a look at Herbert Benson’s excellent The Wellness Book: The Comprehensive Guide to Maintaining Health and Treating Stress-Related Illness which looks at simple techniques to restore health and well-being. Or Carl Simonton’s Getting Well Again: The Bestselling Classic about the Simontons’ Revolutionary Lifesaving Self-Awareness Techniques, which demonstrates the truly awesome power of the mind in the face of life-threatening and (from the medical perspective) incurable illnesses.

Michael  Hadfield    D.Hyp., MBSCH

Is a hypnotherapist who works with visualisation to bring about life changes

Tel: 01928 575784

Categories
IBS

What exactly is IBS, and more importantly, have I got it.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a physical problem that many people have to put up with on a daily basis. There is no cure because it is not a disease, it’s a functional disorder, characterised by the medical world as a brain-gut dysfunction. However, it is still misunderstood by some trained medical practitioners and frequently treated as a psychological condition. IBS is very real and can be devastating to an individual’s enjoyment of life. IBS is also a more common problem than many might imagine.

Percentage of population suffering IBS symptoms

UK 10%

US 15%

Japan 10%

Canada 6%

Brazil 43%

But what exactly is it?

Well it turns out that the medical world has decided that what it is is not something else. By that I mean that when other possibilities for the symptoms have been eliminated – then the diagnosis is IBS. It is largely a diagnosis by exclusion. IBS is a term used to describe a collection of symptoms that suggest a lack of normal gut function, but the symptoms are not consistent from individual to individual. There is individual variation. However, the most significant aspect is abdominal pain/discomfort accompanied by change in defecation frequency and/or a change in stool consistency.

One important point that I cannot stress too highly.IBS cannot and should not be self-diagnosed. The reason for this is because some IBS symptoms are also symptoms of other more serious, and other less serious, problems that are medically treatable. If you suspect you have IBS then visit your medical practitioner for confirmation. If your suspicion is confirmed then you can consider what would be your best course of action.

Symptom Checklist

Doctors have been using the following ROME II criteria for diagnosis.

Rome II Diagnostic Criteria for Irritable Bowel Syndrome Symptoms that Cumulatively Support the Diagnosis of IBS:

  • Relieved with defecation; and/or
  • Change in frequency of stool; and/or
  • Change in appearance of stool.
  • Abnormal stool frequency
  • Lumpy/hard or loose/watery stool
  • Straining, urgency, or feeling of incomplete evacuation
  • Bloating or feeling of abdominal distension.

Supportive symptoms of IBS:

  • Fewer than three bowel movements a week
  • More than three bowel movements a day
  • Hard or lumpy stools
  • Loose (mushy) or watery stools
  • Straining during a bowel movement
  • Urgency (having to rush to have a bowel movement)
  • Feeling of incomplete bowel movement
  • Passing mucus (white material) during a bowel movement
  • Abdominal fullness, bloating, or swelling

But this then became simplified by ROME III to:

Rome III Diagnostic Criteria for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

At least 3 months, with onset at least 6 months previously of recurrent abdominal pain or discomfort associated with 2 or more of the following:

  • Improvement with defecation; and/or
  • Onset associated with a change in frequency of stool; and/or
  • Onset associated with a change in form (appearance) of stool

Some symptoms can be mistaken for IBS and must receive immediate medical treatment.

Red Flag symptoms which are not typical of IBS:

  • Pain that awakens or interferes with sleep
  • Diarrhea that awakens or interferes with sleep
  • Blood in the stool (visible or occult)
  • Weight loss
  • Fever
  • Abnormal physical examination

If you have any of these symptoms see your doctor immediately. If you have blood in your stool, visit your nearest medical emergency treatment centre immediately.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy