What is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is simply a state of complete relaxation, somewhere between being fully awake and being asleep. In fact, all of us pass through brief periods of hypnosis every day: once when falling asleep and once again when waking up. When we are in hypnosis, we are able to get in touch with our inner resources and our subconscious minds.
So what?
Most of us these days have heard of the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’ parts of our minds. These are like the ‘thinking’ and ‘unthinking’ parts of our consciousness. When we are puzzling things out, learning, using logic and being scientific about things we are using our conscious minds. The subconscious deals with automatic actions, such as habits and instinctive reactions.
When we learn to drive a car, at first we need to think about every action: moving the gear stick, steering, left pedal, right pedal and watching the road all at the same time. After some practice, we transfer all these actions into the subconscious part of our minds, and then driving becomes automatic: we no longer need to think about every move. Then, it becomes a lot easier…… and a lot more fun!
Once our actions become habitual and subconsciously driven, they become part of ‘us’, part of who we are. Of course, bad habits can also form as well as good ones, and if we don’t control what goes into our subconscious minds, we can end up with things we don’t like about ourselves as well. The only way to change these, then, is to change our subconscious minds. And that is where hypnosis comes in, because it is a very effective way to reach into the subconscious mind.
What is hypnotherapy, then?
Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis to help people change themselves: to rid themselves of bad habits, to improve performance, to control subconscious actions that they don’t want or need in their lives. Because in hypnosis we are more suggestible and our subconscious minds are more accessible we can make profound and long-lasting changes in our lives. This is done by bypassing the critical, thinking, part of our minds which questions every input and altering the underlying, uncritical, subconscious mind with positive, helpful, suggestions.
Is this better than other therapies?
All forms of therapy have a place and a use at different times and in different circumstances. We cannot say that one or the other is ‘better’; one may just be simply more appropriate at a particular time for us. Hypnotherapy, however, does have the potential for major lasting changes because of the way it works.
So, I’ll be under your control to change me? Scary!
People get all sorts of different misconceptions about hypnosis, based mainly on stage shows. However, you are in total control throughout a hypnotic session: you can hear and comprehend all that is going on, and often people will say ‘I wasn’t hypnotised’ because all they felt was complete relaxation. The reason participants in a stage show do what they do is because they are carefully selected and enjoy showing off already; it’s no surprise that the world’s most successful stage hypnosis show was based in Hollywood!
The fact is that in hypnotherapy, we actually change ourselves. The therapist is only a catalyst for that change, by helping us find the state in which change can occur.