Hypnotherapy

What is Hypnotherapy

Many people are misled by its Chinese translation and conclude that it is merely a way to put one to sleep. Others are affected by dramatic hypnotic shows and movies. They think that a hypnotist might have magical power and have complete control on one’s mind and can force the latter to disclose his deepest secret or do things that he is unwilling to do.

Frankly speaking, such perception is merely build on people’s vivid imagination and limited knowledge on hypnosis. Once you understand the logic behind, you will find that it is not something mysterious but is rather helpful to help a person to change.

Change of the State of Mind

The word “Hypnosis” is originated from the name of God of Sleep – Hypnos in Greek mythology. It actually is a change from conscious to subconscious either naturally or by hypnotic induction.

A person’s state of mind is divided into four states according to the activity of brain wave:-

When a person is under hypnosis, his frequency is altered to between Beta and Alpha, or above Alpha according to the need of that particular hypnosis section. His conscious mind will be set aside and his subconscious will take control.

Natural and Spontaneous

Hypnosis is a natural state of mind that is entered spontaneously every day. According to Charles Tebbets,

Hypnosis is a natural state of mind. It happens in our daily life naturally more then by hypnotic inductions. Whenever we are attracted by a book or a move, we actually are already in a natural hypnotic state.

Have you ever talked over the phone while traveling? When you end the call, you may find that you have traveled a long way but are unable to recall its detail. Indeed, you are already in a hypnotic state and allow your subconscious leading your way.

Process of Hypnotherapy

A hypnotherapy session basically comprises of three stages:-

1. Induction
Firstly, Hypnotherapist will help you to reach a relax state of mind by using language or little tools like tip of pencil, pendulum or watch. Together with the help of rhythmic deep breath, your mind and body will be led to a relaxed trance state and connect with your subconscious.

2. Suggestion
The trance is deepen to relax the mind and body to a more suggestible state. The hypnotherapist will then assist you to find out the underlying causes of you problems and behavior, followed by giving suggestions according to the needs. These suggestions are in the form of simple langage or imagery.

3. Awakening
The hypnotherapist with then bring you out of hypnosis to the normal state.

When Being Hypnotized, You Feel Like…

When you are being hypnotized, you feel relaxed just like entering the trance state when falling asleep or the moment you are about to wake up.

Your senses like hearing, smelling and touching are highly sensitive. You can converse as usual and can communicate with the hypnotherapist with finger signals. You are highly responsive to the suggestions given and can internalize the ideas more easily.

When you wake up from a hypnotherapy section, you will feel relaxed and refreshed, just like having a good rest. This account for why some people may have queries that they just have fallen asleep instead of being hypnotized.

Functions of Subconscious

Sigmund Freud describes people’s brain as an iceberg. The tip of the ice is our conscious, which only makes up about 10% of the iceberg, whereas the vast invisible part underneath is our subconscious. Its vast potential is pending for us to explore.

Our conscious mind scans through all information. It only accepts ideas that are align with our existing beliefs. For subconscious, it neither has critical or analytical power. It is just a storage center and executes the instructions given like a computer.

Subconscious is very powerful. It is our seats of emotions, permanent memory, imagination, habitual conducts and dynamo that directs our energy. It contains all the experiences we’ve had since birth. Some even believe that it may retain information from one’s past life. It also regulates and controls our involuntary body functions like breathing, digestion, blood circulation and immunity system, etc.

Subconscious is the real you. It consists of desires which govern your thinking and behavior, including both desires that you are aware and unaware of. It hosts your real belief system and sends you subtle messages regarding actions you are contemplating in conscious mind. It is your true self and monitor your action. And until you learn to understand it, you do not know or understand yourself.

Principles of Convincing the Subconscious Mind

Special skills are required to communication with subconscious. Be confident and believe in your power of making a change. Then, concentrate and work on your objective with a relaxed mind, the thing you believe in will eventually happen.

Albert Einstin suggests that imagination is more powerful than knowledge. This is especially true in the world of subconscious where imagination is far more powerful than rational thinking. Symbols, images and imagination should be used for effective communication.

Use simple, positive and straight forward wordings and images. The logic is simple. If I ask you NOT to think of a BLUE elephant, indeed, the image of a blue one will pop up immediately. Use words that suggest an action rather than “try”. Repetition can also enhance the effect.

Besides, subconscious cannot hold two contrary concepts at the same time. Once an idea is formed, it stays there until being replaced. More time is needed to replace those ideas which have been stayed in your subconscious for a longer period.

Bridge to Subconscious

Hypnotherapy is a means to reach our subconscious and conduct therapeutic changes on the subconscious level. It is a bridge to connect our conscious mind with subconscious.

When under hypnosis, we can avoid suppression from conscious mind and dig out roots of problem affecting our thinking and behavior. We can thus accept constructive suggestions given more easily and achieve our aims.

Functions of Hypnotherapy:

Relaxation & Stress Management

Nowadays, the society is getting more complicated. People could obtain satisfaction in materialistic life, however, no guarantee is available for contentment in spiritual life.

The problems we face are also getting more complex: pressure from study and work, problems in love affairs, family problems, economic problems, uncertainties in future, social problems, etc. All are lingering around and haunted us like ghosts.

There are moments when we are burnt out and exhausted from our demanding work, moments when our reward is not in proportion with our efforts, moments when we lose our passion in life and get lost, moments when we feel anxious and despair about our future, moments when we want to make changes but are afraid to take risk, moments when we prefer to maintain the status quo and continue to live a miserable life…..

These are common scenarios that you and I may encounter in our daily lives. Every emotion affects you physically and don’t underestimate their effects. When you are under stress, your muscles and mind will be in a tense state. If your stress have not been released, your body will be maintained in a tense condition, which affects your emotion, your way of thinking, your decision making, analytical power and judgment.

If you live in a stress condition for a prolong period, you will form a negative mindset and feel gray and despair for whatever you encounter. You may start losing your passion in both work and life, and turn to a robot purely for earning a living. Is that the way of life you are longing for?

Actually, pressure can work as one’s motivation. If you choose to escape, it can only be destructive. Victor Hugo says that a shadow is always accompanied by light. It depends on whether you are able to see from a different perspective and look for hope.

Through hypnotherapy, you can explore the source of stress and find a way out. You are also release the tension, negative thinking and suppression you are suffering. Let’s get out from pressure, let yourself fill with energy and face your life with vitality again.

Personal Growth

Who am I? This is a universal question that one may encounter. The world is a stage. We play different roles in different situations, however, how much do you understand about your true self?

We are well aware of our roles in the society: at workplace, we are a loyal staff or an ambitious boss; at home, we will become a child who respects his parents, a husband who loves his wife or a wife who takes good care of her children; in social circle, we will be a humorous guy or a sad person with sour face. When you think twice, are you doing things that you really like to do? Do you take up these roles for satisfying social’s expectations? Or, do you know what your true desires are?

If you take up roles that are set for you without true identification, it often comes along with uneasy feelings like pain, anger, despair, humanity and depression. If you are unable to identify and cope with these feelings, they will be accumulated and keep torturing you.

Hypnotherapy can help you understand your desires and feelings. Through accepting your contradicting and repressed selves, you are able to find out who you really are and achieve a comprehensive personal growth. You can also dig out the hidden causes that affect your behavior and resolve them accordingly. This personal awareness is very powerful. You will be amazed when you find out who you really are!

Improve Sleeping Disorders

People who have sleeping problems will agree that this is an unpleasant experience.

Research shows that most people with sleeping disorders usually have difficulties in falling asleep. They seldom couldn’t sleep for whole night but toss on the bed and fall asleep till dusk. Some of them are unable to sleep soundly, wake up easily, have poor sleeping quality or troubled by nightmares or frequent dreams.

Sleep is an important time for our body to recover both mentally and physically. When you are asleep, your mind and body could be away from outside distraction and take a rest. Your subconscious can take this opportunity to perform its duties. If a person is deprived of sleep, he will be tired, lose temper easily and lack of vitality. He will suffer from emotional and mental problems if the case is serious.

There is no hard and fast rule for improving sleeping problems. Some may choose to do exercise, take a hot bath before going to bed, select diet carefully, listen to music or even take sleeping pills.

Hypnotherapy is a good alternative. It is an effective method to help you reconstruct your sleeping habit. It can help you release your tension in both your mind and body, making you fall asleep soundly and easily.

Pain Relief & Disease Healing

Before the invention of anesthetic, doctors in India had already conducted thousands of operations by using hypnosis as pain control in the 19th Century. Dentists had also hypnotized their patients before pulling out their tooth.

Hypnosis is surely a good alternative for those who don’t like to rely on medication, but rather have their pain like headache controlled in a natural way.

Besides, hypnotherapy is very effective in healing diseases. As mentioned before, subconscious is seat of our involuntary bodily system. We can give direction instructions to our subconscious to deal with that particular disease and speed up the process of recovery. There are also reported cases from cancer patients who have recover by this mental process.

However, I have to stress that hypnotherapy can only be used as a catalyze and supplement for speeding up your recovery. When you are sick, you still have to visit a doctor and receive proper diagnosis.

Improve Self-Esteem & Confidence

Every person is born with confidence. When a child learns to walk, he falls, he struggles and tries again. He keeps falling and trying until he is able to walk on his feet. In his eyes, nothing is impossible, he is like superman and has the power of the whole world to do anything!

But as we grow up, our adventurous mind starts fading. It is replaced by hesitation, worry, fear and uncertainty. We are afraid of failure or being criticized. We thus have reservation and dare not taking a step further bravely just like the time when we were young.

Hypnotherapy can help you understand yourself and rebuild your self-esteem and confidence. It takes you back to the moment when you have started losing faith and wake up this lost virtues of yours.

You will find that you have more potential and are much stronger than you can imagine!

Explore Meaning of Dream

Have you ever made repeated dreams, or what happens in your daily life is similar to detail of your dream? When you are asleep, subconscious tries to convey messages to you in form of dream. Some messages in our dream are straight forward, but some are ambiguous and need interpretation.

Traditional dream analysis decodes meaning of dream according to a set formula. For example, when you dream of losing your teeth, it means so and so. However, every person is a unique entity, this kind of interpretation seems to be too general for representing each individual mind.

According to Frederick Perls, everything appear in your dream has a cause. No matter it is a grass, a tree, a person or a road whatsoever, they are your fragmented thoughts and feelings. They have their unique meanings and are useful resources for finding out your insidious desires and repressed selves.

Hypnotherapist will lead you converse with different parts of your dream by Hypnotic Dreamwork® and Gestalt Therapy. Through the conversation, you will have insights into your insidious desires, being which most of them are often overlooked by you, and yet they play an influential part in governing your behavior and certain emotions that you are unaware of.

Overcome Fear & Phobia

Many people have fears and anxieties.

These fears and anxieties do not disrupt our daily lives unless they are so intense and cause us to avoid situations or objects. They are then labeled a phobia, a disease classified as an anxiety disorder.

Phobias are often caused by traumatic events in a person’s childhood, which are re-experienced in stressful situations later on. Well-known phobias include fear of flying, heights, bridges, water, ghosts, dark, of being alone, of being poor, and public speaking.

If you have a social phobia, you have an intense fear of being embarrassed or humiliated by others. You may have low self-esteem and see everything you do wrong as a major catastrophe. You are easily embarrassed and blush when your anxiety is exposed to others. The more you experience the phobia, the more you may withdraw from life.

Most people are aware of their phobias, but are powerless to stop them once they have taken over the critical-thinking ability of their conscious minds.

The affect-bridge regression technique in hypnotherapy can use sensory recall to go back over events of your life, to find out how, when, where and why a phobia began. This provides you an opportunity to acknowledge it and go beyond it by desensitization in a gradual way.

Weight Management

Do you know that hypnotherapy is an effective way to help you manage your weight?

Most beauty shops help customers to control weight by diet, medication, exercise, and/or machine. However, this might not be so effective in the long run as it just deals with the symptoms (fatness) rather than the cause (mind).

People know pretty well that the main causes for getting fat are over-eating, unhealthy diet and lack of exercise. And yet they are unable to change their habits. This may be due to various reasons like traumas from childhood, pressure from work, or other unknown underlying causes.

Through hypnotherapy, you can understand your existing habits and dig up why they actually happen. You can then replace it with a healthy diet perception and establish healthy way of living as set by yourself. Once the habit is formed, it is more long lasting than rely on medication.

Others

•Smoke Cessation
•Change of Emotion and Mode of Behavior
•Improve Performance in Work and Study
•Improve Memory and Concentration
•Improve Sports Performance
•Self Realization
•Past Life Regression
•And Many Others