How Hypnosis Can Help You
Suffering from stress and challenges can be crippling. Even the strongest of us need help navigating our course through life. Counseling and hypnosis can provide valuable support and introduce skills to help you move beyond "just surviving" to thriving and finding a brighter outlook.
STRUGGLING WITH PAST TRAUMA
Do you find that thought intrudes on you when you’re thinking about something else? Are you losing sleep over issues, past or current?
Do you ever re-experience a traumatic event almost as if it is happening again? Perhaps memories of the trauma feel really recent, even if the trauma happened a long time ago. With grief, for example, people can feel like that six-year-old child who experienced death and may find themselves acting like the six-year-old again.
Traumatic memories don’t fade like “normal” memories, usually due to stress until they are processed properly. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy is a wonderful resource to help you effectively process the feelings and traumatic memories.
WHAT IS HYPNOSIS?
There are so many parts to each person, and while one part is in pain or suffering, another part wants to heal, and another part knows how to heal. Hypnosis can access the other parts of people that aren’t always easily available in the everyday routine and the person can then not be so affected by the memories.
Hypnosis is sort of a relaxed, narrowed focus of attention that can help you overcome depression, lift trauma and phobias, reframe thinking, and stop smoking or other addictive habits. It is the deliberate use of imagination, paired with focus and relaxation. It works sort of like when you are dreaming and accessing the other parts of you, your unconscious mind, while you are awake.
Some people say it is sort of like daydreaming. Have you ever come to your exit on the highway and don’t remember the drive to get there? This is a trance state. I remember watching my young niece watching a fashion video. Eyes wide open, her hand that held a potato chip raised halfway to her mouth. She was “entranced” by the presentation of the video. This is how hypnosis works; it is a relaxed focus on an image or a sound such as music. In hypnotherapy, people are focused on the issue chosen for that session.
Thoughts and feelings are so important to the whole-health picture for people. For example, anxiety or depression can be caused by past trauma. Traumatic responses such as the flight or fight response come a lot quicker than the thoughts about the event and can affect a person’s reactions to events for the rest of their life. Many people talk about their immediate responses to, say, loud noises, and they know the response doesn’t make any sense, but they respond before they think about it.
Because emotions are so often stronger than thoughts, it is more effective to change emotions or feelings than it is to change thoughts. Have you noticed that when you change how you feel about something, that the situation can change quickly and permanently?
This is where hypnosis comes in. Hypnosis can change emotions or feelings about things, which can change how you think about and view the world around you. After hypnosis, people have said that they were not sure how it happened, but they feel different about a situation somehow.
WHAT WILL HYPNOSIS DO FOR ME?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Self-esteem
Anxiety
Depression
Grief and Loss
Smoking
Drinking to excess
Unhealthy relationships
Weight loss
Emotional as well as physical pain
Hypnosis can also help you to reframe some past and/or current experiences. Once this is done, you can respond to other people and situations appropriately and neutrally, while honoring your needs and living your truths. This respect and acting for yourself can help you sleep better too.
THE HYPNOSIS REWIND TECHNIQUE
I use an approach called the Rewind Technique. The rewind technique is used for past trauma that still affects people in negative ways, such as intense memories that feel more recent than something that happened long ago. It also helps with overcoming trauma or PTSD symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, loss of sleep, that are affecting current relationships. Past trauma includes incidents that are affecting you more than you wish them to such as a car accident.
The Rewind Technique is relatively new, although the original technique it evolved from was created over 30 years ago. In the therapeutic world, it has been hailed as a bit of a miracle cure as practitioners have discovered just how effective it is. And the research studies are now coming out, which back that up.
A benefit of the rewind technique is that you do not have to go back through the memories in-depth, so the process is easier for you. I don’t even need to know what specifically happened – we can just refer to the incident/s by using code words that we agree on. By not having to go back over the details of the event/s, you can feel safe and secure, in a spa-like atmosphere.
USING HYPNOSIS TO BUILD SELF CONFIDENCE
Perhaps somewhere in the past, somewhere back there, you lost your sense of well-being and confidence. Stress and a lack of self-confidence can muddle your thinking and prevent you from finding solutions. With hypnosis, you can find that inner strength again and can relax with uncertainty. This relaxed outlook can help you more easily find solutions that work uniquely for you, and you can better manage the challenges that life throws your way.
If you or someone you know suffers from PTSD, phobias, anxiety, or addictive habits, we can work together to renew strength, regain a positive outlook, and secure a happier future.
You can contact Dr. Melissa Valentina today at 954-391-5305, for your free 10-minute phone consultation to see if we are a good fit.
