Wellness Institute Blog

There has been a great deal of published research into the use of hypnosis with fears and phobias.

Does an unhappy childhood necessarily mean that you must suffer for the rest of your life?  Some people such as Oprah Winfrey and others have taken their difficult beginnings and used them as stepping stones to success. Others seem to just continue to be pulled down by shame, fear and depression as their lives catapult into one disappointment after another. Many folks with abusive childhoods end up either in the criminal justice system, the mental health system, or the welfare line. What is the difference and how can I, as a therapist, change the unhealthy patterns into stepping stones to success for myself and my clients?

Allostatic load is “the wear and tear that results from chronic overactivity or underactivity of allostatic systems.” Hypnotherapy is an effective treatment for the conditions that result.

Hypnosis is a tool with many useful applications dermatologic. It involves guiding the patient into a trance state for a specific purpose such as relaxation, pain reduction, or habit modification.

Many couples or individuals come into therapy with frustrating patterns that they can’t seem to break through. Many have tried all different types of therapies, taken courses and read books. In general, if these endeavors have mostly engaged the conscious mind, then the couple has only used 10% of their overall mental resources and thus have spent a large amount of their resources. The majority of people believe that if they could just figure things out, which will solve the problem. This is certainly true in mathematics, science and technology. However, the human brain is much more complex than that.

The human brain is composed of two basic parts: the conscious mind, which is about 10% of our capabilities and the subconscious mind, which engages the other 90% (we discuss this more in one of our more popular blog articles discussing the difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy). So when a client goes to a talk therapist, cognitive behaviorist or any of the other “thinking type” therapies, they are only paying to treat 10% of their mind, i.e., the conscious part.

The Conscious and the Subconscious Mind

Resistance is exhausting; however, millions of people struggle with their own resistance on a daily basis. How do we create internal resistance? If we can think of this like a pulley, which has immense power to lift things, it is easier to understand. It is the tugging, the pulling from opposite ends that actually creates the power to lift a heavy object. However, it also takes a lot of energy in order to lift or move an object. When this pulling and tugging is going on internally, it is exhausting!

There are three main traditional ways anxiety has been treated.

1. Medication is usually offered to the anxiety ridden patient as the first line of treatment. This may work for some people, but it is more like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. You need to keep reapplying the band-aid daily in the hopes that the wound will eventually get better. And the band-aid may not be big enough to cover the wound. There will be more bleeding and maybe an infection will set in and before you know it you may have to go to the emergency room because adequate treatment was not given at the beginning.
2. Some people will go to a counselor or take a stress reduction class, in hopes of getting some relief. This would be like putting the band-aid to treat the gaping wound on another part of the body. So let’s say the wound is on your left leg and then you put the band-aid on the right leg. It obviously will not stop the bleeding at all.
3. Some people try to ignore it or get used to their anxiety for many years until the symptoms demand attention. Perhaps the person is so anxious that he is driving his family crazy and his wife wants a divorce. Or he begins to self-medicate his anxiety with alcohol, drugs, sex, food or gambling. Then he is referred to AA or put on a diet or sent to a marriage counselor. Again, the symptoms are being treated without going to the source of the anxiety and the so-called treatment will not solve the problem at all.