Hypnosis is a natural state of mind. Have you ever been so absorbed in a book, or so spellbound by a movie that you completely forgot everything around you? Or, when parking your car at your destination, do you sometimes find that you have no idea of how you actually got there? These are examples of everyday hypnosis. Not a deep level of hypnosis – but hypnosis nonetheless. Contrary to what most people believe, hypnosis is not a state of sleep. It does involve the induction of a trance-like condition, but is actually more an enhanced state of awareness, in which the conscious (‘critical’) mind is suppressed and the subconscious mind is wide awake. And that’s where it becomes interesting, because the subconscious mind is immensely creative, playful and imaginative … but also rather chaotic – especially when it comes to its ‘filing system’. Nothing is ever forgotten. Long before we were born, our subconscious mind dutifully started storing every image, sound, smell and feeling that we experienced. Unfortunately, all these memories –happy and painful alike –are ‘dumped’ just anywhere, and it’s difficult for the conscious mind to retrieve them.
The subconscious mind responds to the tremendous amount of information that enters the brain via the senses by creating programmes and automating a great deal of its responses. This is an ingenious system that saves a lot of time – but there is a downside: the programmes are always created with your best interests in mind at the specific moment they were created, and, once established, a programme can run forever as far as the subconscious mind is concerned. An event, a feeling, a thought, even a smell can trigger a certain programme, even when it has become outdated, and is no longer serving your best interests.
That’s where hypnotherapy can help. Let’s take a client who wants to overcome his fear of spiders, for example. Using willpower (a left-brain function) and trying everything he can to convince himself that his fear is unrealistic at a conscious level will most likely fail as long as his subconscious mind retains the terror of the initial experience, the moment that this fear took hold of the person’s mind., If a person is experiencing a problem, be it emotional, psychological or psychosomatic, it is more often than not only an EFFECT of a deeper, underlying mental or emotional CAUSE. It is at these deeper levels of consciousness that a hypnotherapist works to bring about change in the way the client feels, thinks and behaves.
During the hypnotic state, the analytical, left side of the brain is turned off to some extent – the critical factor is bypassed and direct communication with a very alert subconscious mind can be established. It’s possible to travel back through your memories, and find the exact moment at which a ‘programme’ was created. It can be experienced once again, or, if the memory is a very painful one, it can be observed in a dissociated way, as if you were seeing yourself experiencing it from a distance. Either way, understanding the underlying cause of the problem is a very healing experience, and the ‘desensitisation’ of the memory often leads to the complete disappearance of the problem.
Hypnotherapy always is – and must be – a two-way process between the therapist and the client, a partnership in which trust is very important. A person cannot be hypnotised unless he or she understands the process, believes in it, and co-operates – and this cannot be stressed enough. A person in a deeply focused state is very responsive to an idea or image, but this does not mean that a hypnotherapist can simply ‘control’ the person's mind or free will. On the contrary, hypnosis can actually teach people how to master their own states of awareness. The client can come out of the hypnosis at any time. There really is nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Would you like to know more? Please feel free to contact Marika Lee-Schmit, mobile phone no.
0041 (0)79 933 78 28 or e-mail marika@clee.ch.
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