How can hypnotherapy help with anxiety and/or a lack of confidence?
Hypnotherapy for anxiety
It seems very unlikely to me that anyone is born anxious, or lacking in confidence. These are ‘learned’ behaviours, and hypno-analysis is an excellent tool for helping people to ‘un-learn’ them. The way that they are learned in the first place is that at some time, usually in childhood, an event occurs which causes the child to feel a specific emotion – let us say fear.
What should happen is that the emotion should be expressed – and that is usually what happens. However, if the child is for some reason prevented from expressing the emotion, it becomes repressed instead. Repressed emotions become trapped in the subconscious mind, and when that happens the person then feels them frequently or even constantly. Once this has occurred, expressing the emotions no longer releases them, and the person has then become chronically fearful, to use our example.
We all know people who feel one specific emotion frequently or constantly – anger, guilt and fear are probably the most common. In fact most people have trapped emotions, to a greater or lesser extent. We regard people who do not as being ‘emotionally mature’. So how can those trapped emotions be released?
This is where hypnosis comes into it’s own. When a person is hypnotised, they are deeply relaxed, and in this state they have far greater recall of events from long ago. Usefully, they are also far more aware of how they felt at the time the remembered events occurred. If they then express the emotion they felt at the time, it is released from the subconscious mind, and the event will no longer affect them. The repressed emotion will cease to have any further influence on their day to day behaviour.
Many clients tell me that even after one session it feels as if I have taken a burden from them that they did not know they were carrying. If you’re interested in hypnotherapy for anxiety, read the testimonial from John for an excellent example of how this therapy worked for him.