Psychotherapy & Hypnotherapy Article

Lasting change can only come about when we become aware of and then release the root cause of our problems.
 
If we were traumatised as small children, often the only way we had of coping with and defending ourselves against abusive people or situations was to block them from our awareness – we did this by tensing and tightening our bodies, by holding our breath and blanking out our surroundings.

In adulthood, we may then tend to continue dealing with threatening situations by using these same defences created in our childhood. So, we need at some point to learn new ways of coping with our emotional pain; we need to release these fearful emotional defences and heal the painful feelings they’re striving to protect. Why is this necessary? Because responding to life’s challenges from the defences learned in childhood, leaves us with a very poor level of self awareness; we become very out of touch with our feelings and the feelings of others. We then suffer from problems in relating to others - we may be easily provoked to anger, jealousy or feelings of hopelessness.

These early coping strategies keep us inhibited, drained and stuck in the same old repetitive patterns of behaviour that keep on creating more problems in our lives. However for the most part, we’re not even AWARE that we keep ourselves defended and shut off in this way. It has become a habitual response that we no longer even question.

These psychological and physical defences require an enormous amount of energy to keep in place – energy that is no longer available to us to use in our daily lives. Our bodies were never designed to continuously hold tension and withstand stress and this can eventually lead to physical illness.

The way to heal and resolve unwanted behaviours like sudden uncontrolled anger, or jealousy, despair or sadness, is to become CONSCIOUS of what underlies this behaviour – what drives us to respond in these ways that later we regret? What kind of defences did we have to create in our early attempts to protect ourselves?

As adults, we need to find ways to become aware of these defences as a means of releasing them. This is where the support and techniques of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy help to identify and uncover these deeply buried defences.
 
Hypnosis gently helps to bypass the controlling, analytical brain and to release the emotional pain that created these defences in the first place. It allows access to these deeper layers of the subconscious mind where we store these habitual responses.
 
We enter a hypnotic state many times throughout the normal course of our day. Examples are: when we experience a sense of timelessness, a long journey which seems to flash by, the pleasant floating sense of drifting off to sleep, becoming lost in daydreams or carried away listening to music.

Therapeutic hypnosis simply uses this natural capacity of the mind in a very specific way to focus deeply within – using the awareness like a magnifying lens to uncover the solutions that are waiting to be found.

In helping us to become conscious of the underlying causes of our behaviour, we are then in a position to make dynamic and lasting changes. We have CHOICE in how we respond to the challenges in our lives. In releasing our emotional pain, anger and fear, the physical tension held in the body is automatically released and in addition, all the energy that was formerly trapped and unavailable to us is then set free.

It is profoundly fulfilling to reconnect to our emotions and our true nature. This freed up energy can then flow into our lives in a creative, life sustaining way; when we no longer need to defend and protect ourselves, our relationships change and deepen and our capacity to be loving greatly increases. New horizons open out for us in every area of our lives.