CONDITIONS I CAN HELP WITH
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy has many great benefits, which helps with a variety of conditions.
ADDICTIONS
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy for addiction aims to get to the root of the problem by inducing a state of heightened awareness in the client. In this relaxed state, the client is more receptive to suggestions and ideas that are compatible with their goals. This allows me to offer ideas about the substance or activity that the client is addicted to, in order to help them gain control over their addiction.
I will provide the support and guidance required to alter ingrained behavioural patterns. This enables a client to treat the underlying cause of their addictive behaviour and rebuild their emotional strength.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works in relation to addiction. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we develop addictions and also help clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the client's motivation to make positive changes.
ANGER MANAGEMENT
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy can help those with anger management problems in several ways. The initial aim will be to understand the root cause of your anger. Anger management problems often stem from past experiences. These experiences can shape your behaviour and belief system. So, while you may think another person or situation is causing your anger, it may well come from yourself. Once this is understood, I can begin work in changing this.
To do so, I will work on a conscious and unconscious level to help change your negative thought processes. Doing this may involve relaxation techniques and suggestions to help control your anger.
The hope is that this will change your reaction to anger triggers. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and angry, you should feel calmer and more relaxed. Feeling calmer in stressful situations helps you to think more clearly so you can react in a more appropriate way.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works in relation to anger, how we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we become angry and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future. Anger is merely a primitive way of increasing our strength to defend ourselves against wild animals and other wild tribesman. This would be an entirely appropriate reaction in caveman times, however not appropriate when we are in a queue at the bank or stuck in traffic.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
ANXIETY & PANIC ATTACKS
Anxiety is a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, that can be mild or severe.
Everyone has feelings of anxiety at some point in their life – for example, you may feel worried and anxious about sitting an exam, or having a medical test or job interview.
During times like these, feeling anxious can be perfectly normal. But some people find it hard to control their worries. Their feelings of anxiety are more constant and can often affect their daily lives. Anxiety is caused by negative thinking. It's not the events in a person's life that necessarily cause the perception of crisis. Every negative thought is converted into anxiety, we can create anxiety by negatively forecasting the future, such as ‘I will never be able to afford a car’, or ‘I will never get that job’. Or small things, such as ‘ that meeting isn’t going to go well’. We can also negatively introspect about the past.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works, how anxiety is created. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of anxiety and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
CONFIDENCE AND LOW SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem is how we perceive ourselves; what we think about ourselves and how much we value ourselves. Our self-esteem is made up of thoughts and opinions, often formed in our early years, about who we are and what we’re capable of. These thoughts and opinions tend to be influenced by experiences we have and/or the people we’re surrounded by. For example, someone with a particularly critical parent, or someone who was bullied at school may find they struggle with low self-esteem.
The beliefs we have about ourselves can feel ingrained and difficult to change. The good news is that they can be changed, it just takes work. There are several ways you can help yourself raise your self-esteem, including personal development work (such as developing self-compassion and setting yourself small challenges) and hypnotherapy. Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy can be very effective for improving self-esteem as it works directly with the subconscious – where the negative thoughts about ourselves live.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works in relation to low confidence. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
DEPRESSION
Depression is a common mental health problem that causes people to experience low mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-esteem, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration. Most people go through periods of feeling down, but when you’re depressed you feel persistently sad for weeks or months, rather than just a few days. Some people think depression is trivial and not a genuine health condition. They’re wrong – it is a real illness with real symptoms. Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or something you can “snap out of” by “pulling yourself together”.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain, how depression is created. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive future visualisation, and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
WEIGHT RELATED ISSUES
People who develop eating disorders have a distorted relationship with eating, typically to help them cope with underlying emotional pain. Their attitude towards food and themselves become skewed, and they can find their thoughts consumed with what they’re eating (or not eating).
For some, eating disorders involve them eating less than they need, and for others eating more than they need. They may become preoccupied with their bodies, the way they look and their weight. Anyone can develop an eating disorder at any stage of life, though current statistics show young women are most commonly affected.
Eating disorders are serious conditions and early intervention is important to increase the chance of recovery. There are several approaches to eating disorder treatment that people can try, including hypnotherapy.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy for eating disorders can be helpful, whether it’s used to understand underlying causes, encourage more positive thinking patterns or ease anxiety.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
EXAM NERVES
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy is a common method used for helping control exam nerves as it can help boost confidence and reduce feelings of anxiety.
It can help you develop the ability to access the calm state of mind needed to sit an exam, or cope with a potentially overwhelming situation. The power of suggestion and visualisation techniques can encourage an individual to clear their racing mind, and approach the exam with a cool, focused head.
Your mind knows the information you need to pass the exam, but when experiencing exam stress or anxiety, your ability to focus and concentrate will suffer.
Hypnotherapy will help you recall the information easily and correctly, as well as help restore your self-belief.
SLEEPING ISSUES
Sleep is something everybody needs. It plays a vital role in both our physical and mental health. But sleeping problems, such as insomnia, can make it difficult for some people to get enough sleep. As well as making you feel tired, lack of sleep can lead to physical illness and increase your risk of heart disease. Mentally, not getting enough sleep can lead to anxiety and can make it hard for you to concentrate.
While some sleeping problems will have an obvious cause, others may not. Hypnotherapy for insomnia can be helpful if you are unsure why you are having difficulties sleeping. When suffering from insomnia for a long period, the patterns of sleep disturbances can become embedded in your subconscious. Hypnosis for insomnia aims to communicate with this and suggest positive changes.
These suggestions will look to break the negative thought patterns causing the problem. An important part of hypnotherapy for insomnia is teaching you how to relax. For some people, physical or mental tension can make sleeping difficult.
During the initial consultation, I will explain how the brain works. How we suffer in the way we do and what we can do about it. This explanation will help clients gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do and also helps clients identify how they want their lives to be in the future.
Subsequent weekly sessions will focus on positive, future visualisation and hypnosis.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the therapy relies on the clients motivation to make positive changes.
PERCEPTION OF PAIN
Stress and anxiety are common side effects of pain and can even make the sensation feel worse. The way the mind responds to pain also links to the perception of physical sensations. Helping to reduce stress and change the thought patterns related to pain can therefore make a huge difference to pain perception.
For this, many opt for hypnotherapy. When clients are in guided hypnosis, they focus on relaxation and letting go of distracting thoughts. This temporarily tunes out the conscious part of your mind, opening up to the power of suggestion.
Rather than convincing clients that pain doesn’t exist, hypnosis for pain aims to manage any fear and anxiety they may have relating to the pain. It also helps to reduce stress and relax the nervous system to help it become less reactive to pain.
Hypnosis for pain also refocuses the mind away from the pain and onto something more pleasant. For example, I will ask clients to imagine that they are somewhere nice, like a beach. Using visualisation techniques they may be asked to describe the place in more detail. Thinking about what the sea looks like, the warmth of the sun and the feeling of sand between your toes will help to distract you from your pain.
PHOBIAS
Fear is a natural and healthy response we all have to danger. It’s a survival instinct designed to help us avoid and escape threatening situations. Phobias, however, are different. To start with, phobias are more intense than fears – they can lead to severe anxiety and panic attacks for some people.
Phobias develop when someone has an exaggerated or unrealistic fear surrounding a certain situation or object. If this situation or object is common in day-to-day life, the phobia can restrict a person’s life, holding them back from doing what they want to do and causing a lot of distress. Many phobias exist in our subconscious and are learned responses. This makes them particularly vulnerable to hypnotherapy.
Hypnotherapy can help you unlearn the fear response, build up your exposure to the phobia and in time ease the associated anxiety. A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder. Often you’ll feel the symptoms when you come into contact with the phobia, but for some people, the symptoms can come on simply from thinking about it. When you come across the source of your phobia, you’re likely to feel incredibly scared, nervous and anxious. You may also feel physical symptoms of fear and anxiety, such as:
dizziness/lightheadedness
sweating
fast heartbeat and/or palpitations
nausea
shaking
an upset stomach
If the source of the phobia is something you don’t come into contact with often, this phobia may not interfere with your everyday life. If it is something you are likely to come into contact with day-to-day, however, your phobia may have a larger impact on your life.
Specific phobias
Also known as ‘simple phobias’ this type tends to centre around a specific object, animal, situation or activity. These tend to develop in our youth and may become less severe as we grow older. Examples of specific phobias include:
animal phobias (eg. spiders, snakes or dogs)
environmental phobias (eg. heights, germs, open water)
situational phobias (flying or visiting the dentist)
bodily phobias (eg. having injections, vomit or blood)
sexual phobias (eg. fear of getting a sexually transmitted infection or performance anxiety)
other (eg. certain objects or food items)
Phobias work on a subconscious level. This means that no matter how much we tell ourselves that XYZ isn’t life-threatening, our minds and bodies still react with fear. The aim of hypnotherapy is to communicate with the subconscious and change the way clients feel and behave towards the phobia.
The great news is that I can work quickly, normally 4 sessions is sufficient to address phobias as long as clients are only experiencing low levels of stress.
SPORTS PERFORMANCE
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy can be extremely beneficial for individual athletes as well as sports teams. It’s not only professional athletes that can benefit, though.
Amateur sports people can come across a vast amount of pressure and can benefit from sports hypnosis just as much as professionals.
Perhaps you have committed yourself to a tough physical challenge and are worried about completing it. Whatever your reason, if you are looking to make a change to your mindset in order to improve your physical performance, hypnotherapy could benefit you. Sports hypnosis can be helpful for coaches and managers, too.
The techniques hypnotherapy will teach you are invaluable skills to pass on to your athletes.
STOP SMOKING (1 X 2HR SESSION)
Scientific evidence shows that cigarette smoking is the greatest single cause of illness and premature death in the UK – but we already know that, so why do we continue to smoke when we know the risks? Why did we start? Why do we continue after that first awful puff? Why can’t we stop?
Because our subconscious mind has been programmed by advertising and false self-programming to believe that “It’s difficult to stop” “I need it” “It helps me cope with stress”. In fact smoking is a major cause of anxiety and depression.
The 2-hour session includes an initial consultation, where I gather information about when you started smoking, why you started and why you are still smoking. More critically, how the mind works in relation to smoking. In many ways this is the most important part of the process as it is this that will stay with you long after this process is over. I am not just interested in you being smoke free tomorrow, next week or next month. I am interested in 5 years time when you have had a tough day or had an argument.
The second part of the process is guided hypnosis, this helps you to use your mind in a fundamentally different way in relation to what you want to change.
You will be given a guided relaxation mp3 at the end of the session to listen to each night for 2 weeks, which reinforces this process.
Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy helps clients regain control of their lives and move forward positively and effectively. The effectiveness of the stop smoking session relies on the client's motivation to stop smoking.
WEIGHT MANAGEMENT
We are constantly bombarded with TV programmes, advertising and social media feeds full of pictures of food. The presence of these can make the temptation to veer away from healthy or intuitive eating very strong. We may have developed certain negative mindsets around what we put in our bodies too.
Hypnotherapy can be an effective method in challenging these mindsets and moments of temptation, and living a healthier life. Lots of people try and fail to lose weight for a number of reasons. These reasons are often unconscious, making it hard for us to overcome them.
Hypnotherapy aims to expose these reasons, allowing clients to finally break through barriers that may have been preventing them from losing weight for many years. The aim is to make you feel confident about your body, change negative thoughts about eating and help you lose weight responsibly without impacting your emotional well-being. By targeting the unconscious mind with powerful suggestion techniques, I can help you develop a positive relationship with food and exercise which is key to healthy weight loss and long-term weight management. One of the most commonly asked questions in hypnotherapy consultations is – will hypnotherapy for weight loss work for me? The answer to that is it’s hard to know until you try it yourself.
While it certainly won’t work in the same way for everyone, the process of talking about developing good habits, and getting rid of bad habits, should help plant a new level of awareness when it comes to food and exercise. An important thing to remember is that hypnotherapy is a complementary therapy, and therefore should be used alongside a healthy eating plan and exercise regime.
If you want advice about eating better and exercising, you may find it useful to speak to your doctor or a nutrition professional. It is often a combined effort of all these things that leads to success.