If you suffer from behavioural problems like biting your nails, teeth grinding, over eating or even smoking or recreational drug use, hypnotherapy can help to overcome these problems.
The National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) in the UK has over 1,800 trained and competent therapists in its directory and many of these NCH members specialise in dealing with problem behaviours.
Paul Howard, marketing director for the NCH, says: “At the NCH we define it as an unwanted habit or a problem behaviour; something you feel you have no control over which affects your life and the lives of those you care about.
“Habits such as overeating or smoking are the most common, but there are many other behaviours that affect people’s lives, make them unhappy or cause a risk to their health and the health of those around them.”
So why does hypnotherapy work? Well, it works directly with your subconscious, bypassing the critical mind and getting to the root of the issue so that changes can be made that support your goals quickly and efficiently.
“The good news is that you are in control,” says Howard. “You can change how you react to certain situations, and you can protect yourself in ways that are healthy and which allow you succeed and grow stronger in body and mind. You just need to know how to change it, and to believe you can.”
And the client is in control even when put into a state of hypnosis by the hypnotherapist.
Hypnosis is a natural state of mind and people are often surprised that they hear every word and could get up and walk out of the room at any moment. This is because whilst in the state of hypnosis, you will just be very relaxed – similar to drifting off to sleep at night, that stage when one is not quite awake and not quite asleep.
You normally feel a sense of weightlessness or heaviness as all muscles relax. Using a range of different techniques, the therapist will relax you, ensure you feel comfortable and then work with you towards achieving the goal of ending that unwanted or problematic behaviour.
After a session you may feel uplifted, lighter and very relaxed. Often change is very subtle, as your therapist will be working with you subconscious mind, and you may just notice a very positive shift in how you are feeling.
Hypnotherapy is an evidence based therapy, with over 70,000 research references worldwide, but which is often misunderstood by the public.
But, to be effective, hypnotherapy requires that the client be committed to change and prepared to make the effort to make that change a reality.
Behavioural improvement in hypnotic treatment is associated with positive initial attitudes toward hypnosis, and change in anxiety expectancy appears to be the central unifying characteristic among otherwise uncorrelated measures of change.
Clinical Hypnotherapy means using advanced methods of hypnosis and other techniques to treat a variety of medical and psychological problems.
It is estimated that over 85 per cent of people will readily respond to hypnotic suggestion and treatment. It may even succeed where other, more conventional methods of treatment have not produced the desired results.
Modern clinical hypnotherapy is an ‘integrative’ field of study. This means that the best elements of many other forms of therapy have been integrated into Clinical Hypnotherapy.
This includes behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and Eye Movement Desensitisation (EMDR).