About hypnotherapy + PsychotherapY
The methodology behind hypnotherapy and psychotherapy is to not only change problems at the surface, but to address the root of the issue for lasting change.
How it works
In two minds
Each of us has a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. Your conscious mind is everything you are aware of; what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, what’s going on around you, what you remember. It’s responsible for all higher-order conscious activity such as language, abstract thought, rationalising and analysis. Your subconscious is everything else; everything that is outside of your awareness. It is like the hard drive of your brain and body, the domain of your feelings, emotions, memories and urges. Your subconscious stores everything you experience in life – everything you see, taste, smell, feel and think. Have you ever taken a whiff of a candle or a bite of someone’s baking and it took you straight back to your childhood?
Autopilot
In the name of efficiency, your subconscious creates patterns from your past to help you interpret the world you experience in the present and navigate life’s challenges along the way. Without actively changing these patterns, our default, ‘autopilot’ reactions are carried throughout our lives and influence our everyday experiences. Unfortunately, they can have us act in ways that are out of proportion or inappropriate for the situation, out of alignment with what we really want for ourselves, or even detrimental to our lives and relationships.
Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy enables you to access your subconscious mind, allowing you to update the unhelpful patterns that underly your stress, anxiety, depression, procrastination, bad habits, anger and other challenges we so often experience. Entering into hypnosis is merely sinking into a state of relaxation where you can bypass the mind’s conscious critical faculty and experience heightened awareness and suggestibility. Here, you can identify and actively reprogram the part of your subconscious mind that tells you to feel anxious or stressed, that tells you to reach for the chocolate or cigarette, that tells you you aren’t good enough. You get to stop automatically reacting to life and instead act from choice – you get to take the wheel.
The Stress Response
The fight/flight/freeze response is a biological radar system that’s been programmed into humans since prehistoric days. Our cave-dwelling ancestors were often saved by the dramatic changes that took place in their bodies when confronted with danger. However, these days, there’s very little chance a tiger is going to jump out of the bushes and attack us on our way home from the shops.
Our stress response is activated in response to situations – real, imagined or predicted – that may threaten our sense of safety, security or comfort. These days, this is typically in response to modern day non-life-threatening dangers or associations that our brain has made based on past experiences.
Unfortunately, this mechanism still functions the same way it always has – in black-and-white, life-or-death – which is why we find ourselves fighting, fleeing or freezing in different forms throughout our everyday lives. These automatic ‘safety behaviours’ often take the form of us thinking, feeling and doing things that are irrational, inappropriate for the situation or otherwise not what we really want for ourselves.
More than the mind
Our brain and autonomic nervous system (ANS) are inextricably linked. Throughout our day, the oldest part of our brain (located in the brain stem) is constantly scanning our environment, receiving information from the world around us and interpreting it as safe or threatening.
The perception of something stressful or dangerous activates our sympathetic nervous system, the branch of our autonomic nervous system responsible for the fight/flight/freeze response. Once the threat (or stressor) has passed, the parasympathetic branch of our ANS helps our body recover and return to its normal, healthy functioning state.
Over-activation – the problem
This stress activation and recovery cycle is a very normal experience. However, when our sympathetic nervous system is activated too frequently or for too long without adequate recovery, our autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated.
Unfortunately, many of our modern threats don’t have a defined end, meaning we never get to adequately recover. The same is true when our outdated patterns are allowed to persist. The resulting dysregulation manifests as a range of mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioural and even physiological issues such as:
Mental, emotional and spiritual implications:
- Anxiety or depression
- Anger, agitation or irritability
- Difficulty focusing or concentrating
- Feeling frozen, numb or ‘stuck’
- Loss of connection with self, others and the world
Physiological implications:
- Elevated or irregular heart rate
- High blood pressure
- Stomach pain or nausea
- Digestive issues
- Gut issues (constipation, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS))
- Inflammation
- Auto-immune disorders
- Chronic pain
- Heart disease
- Caner
- Brain inflammation
Reacting – the problem
Our reactive fight, flight and freeze response has us think, feel and do things we really don’t want for ourselves. Attempts at managing perceived threats often take the form of:
- Avoidance, procrastination
- Denial, defensiveness
- Argumentativeness, anger, aggression or violence
- Separation from others, isolation
- Engagement in addictive or risk-taking behaviours (adrenaline-seeking, gambling…)
- Escapism (excessive video-game playing…)
- Seek depressant substances like alcohol or marijuana
- Seek stimulants like caffeine, nicotine or hard drugs
- Perfectionism, people-pleasing, overachieving…
All of these things are subconscious attempts to manage a perceived threat and feel safe. Of course, they’re very short-term coping mechanisms (even if they occur consistently) which usually cause more problems and leave us feeling worse in the long run. They don’t help us fully meet our physical, emotional and spiritual needs and wants and we end up having issues in our relationships, our jobs and with ourselves.
Perception – the cause
It’s our brain that determines whether a stimulus is safe or threatening, which means the stress response is triggered by a psychological fear. Slamming on the brakes when the car in front of you suddenly stops, getting spooked by a shadow passing your window at night, or frantically swiping over your hair after walking through a spider web are all examples of appropriate stress activation because there’s a real threat to your safety.
When there is no real threat to your safety present, it’s likely that your brain is acting on a conditioned fear – a perceived or predicted threat, rather than a real one. It’s something your brain considers is or will be dangerous, which is why different things trigger different fight/flight/freeze responses in different people.
Patterns and associations
Sometimes we perceive a situation as threatening because it reminds us of a time in the past that was hurtful, emotionally intense or overwhelming, or traumatic for us. These can include:
- Abuse, neglect, physical or sexual assault
- Accident eg. Car accident
- Natural disaster
- Medical diagnosis
- Unmet emotional needs in childhood or later
- Other hurtful experiences
Modern threats
In reality, fight/flight/freeze response activation in response to modern threats is not about an immediate threat to our life. It’s often a matter of encountering, perceiving to encounter, or the prediction of encountering things like:
- Change, newness or the unknown
- Being outside of our comfort zone
- Losing interpersonal connections
- Experiencing discomfort or pain
- Difficult things
- Loss of security
- Challenges to our beliefs, reality or sense of self
“But I have no control”
Stopping to think about a potentially dangerous situation takes too much precious time, which is why the fight/flight/freeze response takes place so fast that we have no awareness and therefore no control – it’s completely automatic. This primitive survival response takes control and our rational thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) is ‘offline’. This is why we feel we’re at the whim of our thoughts, feelings and actions, and why they are often irrational and lacking consideration of long-term consequences or outcomes.
The good news is that, with understanding of this system, you can actively reprogram how your survival response interprets and responds to the world around you.
Hypnotherapy + psychotherapy with Mel
If you resonate with any of this, I’m here to help. You’re not destined to stay this way forever and you’re not at the mercy of your genes. Scientific studies of neuroplasticity and epigenetics are proving that we can actually rewire the structure of our brains and change the expression of our genes, meaning we can actually take control over our mind-body system and the way it interprets and responds to situations in the first place. Rather than being at the mercy of our outdated survival mechanisms, we get to take the wheel of our own experiences.
Part 1: Improve coping & recovery
The first step is getting to know your triggers and reactions. You can’t change something you’re not aware of. Then, developing healthier ways to ‘cope’ when you’re triggered into fight/flight/freeze, including relaxation and thought/feeling-replacing techniques, which you’ll rehearse in the safe and controlled environment of hypnotherapy. You will also receive an audio recording to listen to outside of our sessions. Repeated practice in hypnosis is what builds new neural pathways and makes implementing your new responses more automatic in your daily life.
part 2: Update your subconscious perception
Our experience of stressful situations has everything to do with how our mind-body system, consciously and unconsciously, perceives our current situation. So, the second step is to look into why your system is perceiving threats that may not really be there. Using hypnotherapy, we can explore the origin of your unhelpful patterns and reframe the story in the subconscious where they were created and continue to reside. This reduces the frequency and intensity of inaccurate threat detections, and therefore less fight/flight/freeze activation.
*Note that this process may not be linear and may not involve all these aspects. Treatment is very personalised and depends greatly on the issue you’re experiencing and what you feel you need.
Free 15 minute phone consultation
This lets me get an idea of what you’re seeking support for and gives you the chance to make sure I am the right person for you. It is my highest priority to offer you a safe, confidential and compassionate space.
Video or in-person sessions are available. My techniques and methods work just as powerfully online as they do in-person.
FREQUENTLY
Asked Questions
Many people don’t know a great deal about hypnotherapy and, as a result, can feel a bit unsure. Below you’ll find answers to some questions that people often ask. If you have any others, please feel free to get in touch with me and I can explain anything else you’d like to know.
For closed accordeon
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What is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is a state of relaxation, during which there is an altered state of conscious awareness (a high degree of focussed attention) and heightened suggestibility. During hypnosis the mind relaxes, lowers its guard by minimising interference from the critical, judgmental conscious mind and the hypnotherapist is able to communicate directly with the subconscious mind.
The subconscious is the storehouse of a person’s total experiences; where the memory of everything that ever happened to a person is stored. During hypnosis long forgotten incidents, which are still affecting a person without them knowing, can be brought back into consciousness allowing the presenting symptoms to subside or disappear.
In the case of medical or mental issues, treating ailments with medications aims to provide relief from the symptoms. What sets hypnotherapy apart is that it can locate the exact cause of the presenting symptoms instead of simply treating the symptoms themselves.
How does hypnotherapy work?
Hypnotherapy works by lowering our brain wave state in order to allow our subconscious mind to explore how past experiences are still affecting us and to receive suggestions for change. It is a very natural state of mind. We actually go into an alpha brain wave state when we are doing a repetitive action that we really don’t need to concentrate on. For example, if you have ever been driving and find you have reached your destination without remembering how you got there, or been so engrossed in a book that you forgot you were reading, you have been in this state of mind. Theta is a deeper state, and is the state we are in right before drifting off to sleep at night. During these times, our mind is much more responsive to suggestion.
Why are hypnotic suggestions so effective?
The reason for hypnotic suggestions being so much more successful than suggestions made in the waking state is that the subconscious mind has no critical faculty and will accept benevolent suggestions made by the hypnotherapist and control the body accordingly. For example, if you were told in everyday waking life that you’ll find it easy to stick to your diet, your conscious, critical mind will probably have you thinking ‘no I won’t, I’ll get hungry!’ and you’ll reject the suggestion. However, when the subconscious mind is told the same suggestion, most clients are truly amazed at the ease with which they are subsequently able to diet.
Can anyone be hypnotised?
Yes, everybody is capable of falling into a hypnotic trance state (except those who are mentally disabled or under the influence of drugs). In fact we all pass through a state very similar to, if not the same as trance when we fall asleep or wake up (a twilight state). However, hypnosis requires participation, so the ease at which a person falls into hypnosis and the depth they reach depends largely on their level of consent and participation.
Am I ever out of control in hypnosis?
No. You are never out of control during a hypnotherapy session. The only suggestions you will receive will be those we have discussed and agreed to prior to hypnosis. You cannot be made to do anything against your will or personal nature and, in fact, you would be shocked out of the hypnotic state immediately if any such action was suggested to you. The hypnotised person is fully aware of everything happening and is able to leave the hypnotic state at any time should they so wish. You may drift into a deeper state during the session work, and that is fine. You will be very relaxed and comfortable at all times.
Generally you will be aware throughout the hypnotic session. Most people come out of a session remembering everything that happened, but feeling very relaxed and rested.
Is hypnosis safe?
Yes. There is no cause whatsoever for concern; hypnosis is a proven therapeutic aid. Modern therapeutic hypnosis is one of the most effective, quickest and safest forms of treatment for the majority of psychological disturbances and emotional problems. Hypnotic treatment is completely safe, and you will find it a very relaxing and pleasant experience. You do not lose consciousness or in any way lose control. The extreme relaxation can lead some people to fall asleep, which is just fine as your mind will keep listening to my voice.
How many sessions would I need?
Hypnotherapy and psychotherapy sessions are very individualised. Many mild challenges that can be addressed through suggestion therapy can be addressed effectively in as few as three sessions. More deep-rooted issues require analytical therapy and analysis, which typically extends beyond three sessions. Treatment will not surpass twelve sessions for any single issue or topic.
During the first or second session, you will be presented with a treatment plan, which will offer a rough guide to the treatment I’m suggesting. The number of sessions required will depend on the progress made throughout treatment and may be adjusted along the way.
Sometimes the number of visits required can be reduced through the use of hypnotic recordings. With many problems and topics, I will provide a recording of the session to be listened to outside of our appointments, to supplement the consultations.
Is hypno-psychotherapy a quick fix?
Hypnosis does not provide miracle cures, although it is a quick and efficient method of dealing with many problems. Some problems can be helped in only a couple of sessions, but multiple sessions are often required to address deep-seated issues and really cement in the changes.
As with most things in life, you get out what you put in. Although the hypnotic session works by bringing you to a very relaxed state, treatment does require your involvement and participation in both the conscious discussions and the trance sessions. You will be given recordings to listen to at home and invited to continue reflecting on the topic and the work we do together outside of the sessions.
Do you offer remote sessions?
Yes, remote sessions are available for anyone who would prefer to do their hypnotherapy sessions in the privacy of their own home. Remote sessions are safe, effective and confidential. You must have a computer with reliable internet connection, headphones, a microphone, and access to a quiet, private room with comfortable chair and/or bed during the session. A recliner is usually ideal, but not necessary.