Categories
hypnosis

Hypnotherapy Masters Course

I spent last weekend enjoying the company of some fellow hypnotherapists as we all attended the Hypnotherapy Centre of Excellence’s Hypnotherapy Masters Course.

This two-day course covered a whole range of advanced hypnotic techniques. Among other things we explored the use of metaphor and the Milton Model in great depth; conversational hypnosis; getting into the clients map of the world in order to induce trance more effectively; attracting opportunities and teaching clients how to create their own experiences; as well as a variety of hypnotic language patterns, the yes set and Swish Pattern for weight loss.

A very useful folder full of scripts and examples was provided as well as plenty of opportunity for practical exercises to hone these new techniques. But what I liked most was the friendly & comfortable atmosphere which I find facilitates learning much more effectively than a more formal classroom environment. Sara Lou-Ann Jones, who ran the course, is a very capable, knowledgeable and competent instructor.

I had a good time, learned some new skills, and am happy to recommend this course to anyone wanting to add a little more depth to their therapeutic skill set.

Michael

Categories
hypnosis Panic Attack

Seven Steps Towards Freedom from Panic Attacks

Your trolley is half full, mind trying desperately to remember that item you know you’ve forgotten, something for dinner, or was it the bathroom, looking along the rows of checkouts, shortest queue… fastest queue… it’s so busy… so many people… can’t move… can’t get past… palms starting to get a little slippery on the handle… it’s hot in here… where’s the exit… not too far away… people in front… people behind now… feeling trapped… why can’t she scan faster… why can’t you have your card ready to pay instead of spending 10 minutes rooting around in the bottom of your bag keeping us all waiting… heart rate increasing… mouth getting a little dry… people looking at me… finding it difficult to breathe… can’t get any air in… going to faint… need to escape… need to get out…

If any of that sounds familiar, then you probably know all about panic attacks. Well you probably know all about them from the inside. You will also know all about how after that first time you experienced one – whether it was in a supermarket, cinema, theatre, aircraft, out in a busy street…, you became wary. Wary of going out; wary of trusting your body not to let you down; wary of people being around you, especially strangers.

You’re not sure but you think you might have been having a heart attack, or a severe drop in blood pressure, or a brain tumour. So you visit your doctor who checks you out very thoroughly and pronounces that you are as fit as a fiddle. ‘You’ve probably just had a panic attack’, opens the door and bids you farewell as if you’ve been wasting his/her valuable time, or as if this collapse of your whole world is the most trivial of health problems and ranks with a minor cut or bruise.

But you know that something is wrong. Seriously wrong.

And quite suddenly your world was no longer safe. But the worst part of it was, that deep down, you knew it wasn’t your world that was the problem. It was you. Your body was no longer reliable. You couldn’t trust it to keep you safe and comfortable. And the nightmarish aspect of it all was that you couldn’t predict when it would let you down. I mean you’ve shopped in supermarkets quite happily all your life, but now they are dangerous places and perhaps best avoided, or only visited with a trusted and close friend so that if anything happens there will be someone with you to deflect the embarrassment.

Then you have another.

Step 1: Decide right NOW that you will do whatever you need to do in order to free yourself from this problem.

That’s when life gets really difficult and your world starts to close down quite quickly. You can never be sure when the next one will hit so you avoid anything that even slightly reminds you of the circumstances surrounding a previous Attack.

Step 2: As soon as you notice yourself hyperventilating (rapid breathing/breathlessness/difficulty breathing in), just close your mouth – and keep it closed.

The only problem you have is Fear. Fear of what might happen to you. Fear of dying. Fear of ending up in hospital. Fear of being carted away in an ambulance. Fear of lying on the floor with a circle of people around you. Fear of acute embarrassment. Fear of not being able to ever go back to that place in case someone recognises you.

So just forget for a minute what the fear is about, because that’s just cosmetic. Fear is the problem.

Step 3: Just accept that during a panic attack you are frightened. Don’t pretend anything else is going on.

Now, if you were out wandering alone in the African bush and there just 30 feet away was a full grown rhinoceros, you wouldn’t be at all surprised if your heart rate increased suddenly. If it then took a step towards you, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find your breathing rate increasing, your mouth getting a little dry, your gut feeling uncomfortable and so on.

Interestingly these are exactly the same ‘symptoms’ that you experienced while having a panic Attack. In the supermarket it was an embarrassment. Here it could save your life. Increased heart rate gets more oxygen to your muscles so you can run or fight, or climb a tree, rapid breathing gets more oxygen in your blood, dry mouth is an indication of a withdrawal of fluids from your extremities so that in the case of injury you won’t lose so much blood. Gut discomfort so that if the worst comes to the worst you can easily create a smelly distraction to give you time to escape (this evolved in the days before underwear was invented). Your body is working perfectly to keep you safe. And you feel pleased that it does so.

Yet when your body does exactly the same thing in the supermarket, you are unhappy with it. Maybe we should get supermarkets to stock rhinoceroses!

You can’t have a panic attack if you are smiling.

Step 4: Next time you feel those first warning signs, have a look round, with a smile on your face, and ask yourself ‘Where’s the rhinoceros?’

What causes all those ‘symptoms’? It’s adrenaline, released by the adrenal glands sitting on top of your kidneys. Adrenaline is a hormone and consequently is produced in tiny amounts that have instantaneous effects on a whole range of body processes. Now what you might not know is that your mind can’t tell the difference between fact and fantasy. Just picture yourself cutting a juicy, bright yellow lemon in half, picking up a piece, holding it under your nose and breathing in that wonderful fresh scent and then gently squeezing it until sour lemony juice drips onto the tip of your tongue. I’ll be very surprised if you don’t get an increased saliva flow – yet there’s no lemon, just a mental image. Your brain really can’t tell the difference between real and imagined, fact or fantasy.

Adrenaline is produced in response to danger – perceived or real. So if a mild fear thought about say, finances, relationships, getting home in time, problems at work, socially and so on wanders through your mind, you might not notice it, but your adrenal glands will. Now physiologically sensitive people will notice the effects immediately, focus on them and worry what they mean. This is another fear thought and releases more adrenaline. Then you notice the intensification of symptomology and think ‘oh my God! I was right to be worried, it’s getting worse’. This is another fear thought, releasing yet more adrenaline, and so the whole process snowballs and before you know where you are you are in the middle of a full blown panic attack, and you have no idea where it came from because you weren’t noticing all the individual little steps that happened so fast it seemed instantaneous.

Step 5: Remind yourself that you aren’t going to die. No matter how bad you feel, no one has ever died from a panic attack.

Step 6: Remind yourself you are ONLY feeling the effects of an adrenaline release.

You may not know why the adrenaline was released. You may not be able to track down the thought that released it, but all you are dealing with is an adrenaline release that is either escalating, or reducing. When it starts to die down, because you haven’t done the physical stuff, like running away or fighting, you will still feel uncomfortable, this is when you may feel light-headed, get jelly-legs or feel a bit wobbly or nauseous. It’s still just adrenaline you’re suffering from. You’d be more likely to die without it than with it.

Step 7: Carry a notebook and pen with you at all times. If you experience yourself having a panic attack, get the notebook out and start to make a note of all the symptoms you are experiencing and make a pact with yourself that whenever you do this you will continue writing down your symptoms (you could score them on a scale of intensity of 1 to 10 as well if you like) until they start to reduce. As soon as you notice them start to lessen you can go from wherever you are to somewhere ‘safer’, but you must stay in the place where the symptoms first became noticeable until they start to diminish.

When you do this you break the Fear Cycle.

When you break the Fear Cycle you are on the road to freedom.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

Categories
hypnosis weight control

Hypnosis for Weight Control – Why Diets Can’t Keep the Weight Off for You

The trouble with diets is that you have to think about food all the time. Though “At first a diet can give you a sense of control. You are taking charge of your eating patterns. You may see success as the scale drops. But soon you are fighting cravings for forbidden foods, as well as hunger pangs and a lack of energy from the lower calorie level. Eventually you rebel against the diet and start “cheating.” If your cheats are small you can still be losing weight, although more slowly. But soon you may go into full rebellion and return to your old eating habits” Am Psychol. 2007

This is how the well known yo-yo effect starts. You get all enthusiastic, go wholeheartedly into the new diet, lose some pounds; then after a few weeks, or a few months, the enthusiasm starts to slip, you’ve done really well, and you want to give yourself a treat or a day off, then that day happens once a week, twice a week, three times a week and the treat happens once a week, once a day, three times a day…

The pounds slip back on, the clothes slowly tighten up again, and you look in the mirror one morning and think I was doing so well…

…or no matter what you do, how closely you stick to the diet, nothing much happens. Others lose pounds, you lose ounces, or even gain them. Life is so unfair…

…or you spend the whole ‘diet-time’ thinking about food, thinking about what you can and can’t eat, counting calories, or points, or syns. Until you get fed-up with the whole thing and give it up…

…for a while…

…and then, usually after Christmas, when you go try on the new summer outfits…  it all starts all over again.

The trouble, I hasten to add, is not with what the diets suggest you eat. The vast majority of them provide good healthy rules for eating that will provide you with a nutritious and balanced intake of food. And lots of people do lose weight using these tried, tested and very successful methods.But the weight doesn’t stay off. The reason is the reasons for weight accumulation are not being addressed. One of the assumptions made is that weight is purely the product of what you put into your mouth and how much energy you expend. Lots of energy expenditure i.e. active life, low calorie intake equals weight loss. Sedentary lifestyle, high calorie intake equals weight gain.

That’s simple maths and it’s perfectly true. You eat fewer calories than you expend and your body has to get those extra calories from somewhere. What you are told is that it gets them from the fat it has carefully stored away under your skin, for just such an emergency. But the truth is that it takes it from lean muscle tissue, because the body knows that lean muscle burns calories even when resting and the body is trying to conserve energy because food seems to be in short supply.

Another assumption is that it is about metabolism or genes. But the territory that is not normally explored is the territory of emotional eating. If it was explored you would find associations with food and being good buried in the subconscious. When you were good as a young child, sweets, candy, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, were the reward for that goodness. When you pleased your parents, this is frequently the treat that was given. But very soon that got twisted and you assumed that if you didn’t get it, you had been bad. And so eating this sort of food gave your subconscious mind the message ‘I am a good and/or loveable person’. The only reason your subconscious would need to be re-assured about that is if it didn’t believe it already. But when you stop giving yourself these ‘treats’, then at a subconscious level, you feel you must have been bad and you are driven to eat something forbidden just to reassure yourself that you really are good.

Now, when hypnosis is used in weight control, the focus is not purely on changing your eating habits. The focus is on changing you deep down inside. Or more accurately, correcting a view of you (someone who is not loveable) that is mistaken, and bringing back to the front the more correct view of you which is that you are as special and as loveable as everyone else.

You will eat differently, and will eat less, but that is purely because hypnosis reconnects you with you, so you listen to your body and feed it when it’s hungry. What hypnosis doesn’t do is give you rules about what you can and can’t eat. By reminding you of the truth about you, we release a power, or an energy, that starts to work with you rather than against you. When you work purely to a diet plan, without addressing underlying subconscious issues (and I’ve only touched on one here – there are many more) there are two of you. One wanting to be slim, and one needing the re-assurance of treats. And the one needing the re-assurance of treats will work to sabotage the diet plan – because their needs have been ignored.

A hypnotherapist works on improving how you feel about yourself, they also install post-hypnotic suggestions that will make it much easier for you to not only have no desire to eat the foods full of calories, but also assist you in achieving a pleasure in eating foods that are good for you that outweighs any pleasure you ever obtained from eating sugary sweet sickly foods.

This control is short term and just to break the habit element of eating. For in truth, you can eat anything you want and stay slim. The emphasis being on want. Hypnosis retrains your mind so that what you want is to nourish a body you care for – easily, effortlessly. Once this is achieved it remains.

When you already feel good about yourself, you have no need to demonstrate that by eating foods that are bad for you. Wholesome, attractive, tasty, well-prepared food is what you deserve – always.

If you want to know more, or would like some help in easily and permanently losing weight and feeling good, then check out my website.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

Categories
Uncategorized

Essential Training

I’ve spent today with the lovely Sara Lou-Ann Jones (Master Trainer in NLP, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching) who was running her 1 day Effective Marketing Course for Therapists, at the Hypnotherapy Centre of Excellence in Manchester.  It was certainly a feature packed day with practical exercises, tons of useful information and even a visit from a web design expert to ensure that this aspect of marketing was included in your marketing strategy. Blogs were mentioned, naturally, so I was happy to own up to already having one – even though I’ve only been blogging for a week and am not aware of anyone actually reading my words just yet.

I’ve taken stacks of notes that I need to sort through and put into some sort of action plan, and Sara also provided a very useful handout which I was pleased to see was full of additional material and not just a copy of the material covered during the day.

You can find out more information at

http://excelwithhypnotherapy.com/hypnotherapy-courses-manchester.html

If you could do with more clients, then you would do well to consider attending this course.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

Categories
hypnosis weight control

Weight Loss, Diets, And Fat

The trouble is fat. Bodies just make the stuff. If fat had never been invented, we could all eat what we like, stay beautiful, and never have to diet or lose weight. Unfortunately some fat is essential to good health. It is a handy insulator that helps regulate internal body temperature, and it really does come in handy when we have flu and don’t have the energy, or the desire, to eat.

“I’m allergic to food.  Every time I eat it breaks out into fat.”
~Jennifer Greene Duncan

However, fat really is necessary and needs to be a part of a healthy diet. The trick is to have just the right amount.

Far too many people consider that whether or not you accumulate fat is down to simple maths. If you eat more calories than you use then you get fat. If you use more calories than you eat then you lose weight. This is the basis of all the calorie reduced diets for weight loss.

For people with an active life, this isn’t too bad. If you spend your work day sitting on a chair and your evenings and weekends sitting on a couch, then calories in have to be reduced to almost zero to make you lose weight.

Yo-Yo diets

But thousands of people use this simple maths to create the Hell of yo-yo diets; the Hell of being unable to eat what they want when they want; the Hell of social isolation because they don’t have enough will power to eat lettuce when all their friends have huge plates filled with steak, fries, onions, mushrooms… and desserts filled with cream.

And thousands of people use this simple maths to watch the pounds fall off for a week or two, then slow down, then accumulate, then fall off again and they fight a constant battle with themselves and their diet. They can even end up hating who they are because their bodies won’t do what they think their minds are telling them to.

Diet clubs

I visit a coffee bar that has a meeting room where Weight Watchers and Slimming World diet clubs hold meetings. I feel a little sad when I see women arriving for their weigh in and nipping into the toilet to relieve themselves of those few desperate ounces so they might just tip the balance and clock up a loss rather than a gain. Because, of course, the public humiliation of having gained a pound, never mind two, is more than can be tolerated. I feel sad because there is a much better, much easier way to lose weight without public weighing or a gimmicky diet.

This is no way to live.

This is not happiness.

I know how to lose weight without dieting.

And this is all down to that simple maths…

…simple maths that is just plain WRONG.

Dieting fights the body’s own intelligence

You see bodies are intelligent. Your body is an intelligent system. I bet that when you were a child you cut yourself. And I bet that within a few days there was almost no trace of a wound. This is the intelligence I am talking about. You did not have to tell the body to start vasoconstriction to reduce blood loss. You did not have to send the message to rush platelets to the damaged blood vessels to start to shore up the hole. Nor did yo have to tell the body to form fibrin to hold the platelets in place and eventually form the protective clot. And I bet you didn’t have anything to do with then rushing white blood cells to gobble up any invading micro-organisms to prevent infection.

And then there’s the whole process of making an invisible, or almost invisible, mend that follows on from this initial reaction to bleeding.

Supply & Demand

Fat is survival. When food is in short supply, fat is deposited. Now you would think that fat would be laid down when food is plentiful. So consider this: from the days when our body systems evolved. Plentiful food would have been frequent small meals (fruits & berries eaten while they were gathered). Eating would stop once the stomach was full – because there was plenty more where that came from. In these circumstances there is no need for fat deposits.

But infrequent meals and very large meals when eating is continued after the stomach is full (a successful hunt after several days without game), is a very strong message to the body that food supply is uncertain so fat deposition would be helpful.

Most people who are overweight eat past fullness. This tells your body food shortage.

Most people who are overweight get little exercise. This tells your body that there is no food to find, so conserve energy.

Most people who are overweight go on diets. This tells your body that food is in short supply.

And what your body does when food is in short supply is to LAY DOWN FAT and conserve energy.

Energy conservation

Now I mentioned the simple maths that is the basis for the calorie reduction diet plans designed to help you lose weight. Because your body is intelligent, when food is in short supply and it needs energy (Calories) it does something quite brilliant. It burns up lean muscle rather than burning up fat. The reason it does this is that lean muscle tissue uses up calories by simply being there. Take two people in the same room sitting watching tv, one very fat, the other very fit. The fit one is burning up many times more calories than the fat one. This is because lean muscle tissue burns calories just by existing. A fit individual will use up 500-700 Calories a day just lying in bed. So the intelligence of the body says – we need to get rid of lean muscle because food is in short supply and we will stand a better chance of survival if we save our fat calories for real emergencies.

The consequence of this of course is that, as you diet, your muscle/fat ratio slowly shifts in the direction of more fat. The effect of this is that your body’s metabolic rate is lowered (your intelligent body’s energy conservation planning). Making it ever harder to lose weight the next time you start a diet. So next time you start a diet you will give up sooner because each time you repeat the cycle – it gets harder to lose weight.

If you diet regularly all you are doing is accumulating more and more fat, making it harder and harder to lose weight – because the weight loss is largely from muscle loss and you have less muscle to lose.

You cannot fight this.

You cannot effectively lose weight, long-term, like this.

Lose weight without dieting

If you want to lose weight, you have to work with your body’s intelligence, not against it.

You may not appreciate that you don’t have to diet to lose weight. You just have to eat differently. But you can still eat what you want. It sounds too good to be true. And it gets better. It can be fairly effortless. No more fighting. No more will power battles.

More details are available on my website.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

Categories
Uncategorized

Hypnosis or Magic?

I find myself in a strange occupation – hypnotherapy. I consider it strange because even people who come to me for my expertise in it don’t really have any idea about what it is or what it can do. Many of them expect something akin to magic, and even though I go to great pains to explain that magic it isn’t, I sometimes find myself producing magical results. And that gets me to think about magic. True magic is akin to what religious people might call miracles. Only mere mortals, like myself, are not allowed to perform miracles, that is the realm of God and his/her/its minions.

Yet on occasion I have indeed produced results that if I proclaimed myself as a messiah, might well be termed Miracle. I must admit I’m much happier calling it magic. But what exactly is the difference between miracle/magic and something else?

I believe that the only difference is TIME. If I take six sessions to bring about a change and some progress is visible between each session then that is therapy. And it looks a lot like physical healing. If I take ten minutes to bring about the same change then that is miracle/magic.

It does not seem to matter that the result is the same either way, fast is what gets the praise, fast is what gets people talking.

And yet I know from my experience working with people that fast is frequently the very worst way to bring about profound change. The problem with fast is that there is no adaptation. If you have had a problem for a long time, then you have adapted to it. You live your life around it, you adjust your activities based on the problem. If in a moment the problem is gone then all of the coping strategies are instantly redundant and there is a psychological chasm now. This is an inability to deal with life without the problem.

When change time is slower, it is much easier to adapt. You do it quite naturally a little bit at a time.

Another aspect of the Time problem is that most of us have been taught that nothing worthwhile comes easily. So although we might all want instant healing, if we get it, effortlessly, then we do not value or appreciate it. We doubt its effectiveness. I’ve removed or reduced quite severe pain in a matter of minutes, and my patients leave wondering whether or not I’ve somehow tricked them (after all, the doctors’ said nothing can be done), or when it will return. Now I know that if you spend most of your waking time wondering when the pain is going to return then it probably will because the mind is focused on pain and the mind produces what it focusses upon.

So the benefits of slower ‘healing’ are that it allows adaptation to the beneficial change and that there is actually a price (the time spent in therapy and the cost of that therapy) so it must be worthwhile, therefore it will be valued and appreciated. From the patient’s point of view they actually worked quite hard turning up for appointments and listening to me talking for an hour and a half and they paid quite a bit of money for that privilege. These things make the healing acceptable.

The only problem is that they wanted what they didn’t really want – magic!

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy