Adults feel the stress of modern loving and all the pressures it brings to bear and so, too, do children – facing stressful feelings from having to deal with bullying, sibling rivalry and playground fights as well as coping with their schoolwork.
And often children react differently to stressful situations from adults and they, too, sometimes find it hard to communicate their feelings – particularly if they see an adult as being at the root of their anxiety.
Working with children during clinical hypnotherapy, said eminent child hypnotherapist Lynda Hudson was ‘rewarding, not always fun and sometimes challenging’.
Speaking at the National Council for Hypnotherapy’s annual Extravaganza in London, The Beckenham,-based therapist said the secret in effective treatment of children was to keep things simple and focus on a solutions approach which was less harmful than delving in to the past.
Paul White, a fellow of the NCH, has helped many children increase their confidence, start to do their homework, go to school, and even improve their marks at school.
He has also helped them with many other problems, like thumb sucking, bed wetting, nightmares, stealing, anger, aggression, and low self-esteem, separation anxiety, bereavement, food related problems and many other issues.
Hypnotherapy is effective for young children and teenagers too.
A study conducted in 2007 showed that hypnotherapy helped psychological treatment in reducing anxiety and feelings of helplessness in students. The effects of hypnotherapy were found to be greater than those of more traditional relaxation techniques, in the research which was conducted at Hampshire Hypnotherapy Centre, and presented to the British Psychological Society.
David Byron, a senior specialist educational psychologist for Hampshire County Council, said hypnotherapy could also be useful to help with a number of other treatments, and that he would like to see the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services nationwide employing people to offer a hypnotherapy service to patients.
Hypnotherapy, says the NCH, works with the subconscious mind to bring about behavioural change.
“Hypnosis is really natural state of mind and is an important part of everyday life,” says the NCH.
“Whenever our mind wanders, daydreams or is focused on something, such as reading a book, driving a familiar route, watching a film we are in a state of hypnosis.”
Hypnotherapy on children often shows that they respond to hypnotherapy far better than adults do. After all, children love to daydream and for much of the time are in a relaxed state or trance.
Lynda Hudson stressed that children are very suggestible and have immense resources and can use their imaginations well, as they enjoy visualising and using their creative strengths.
She added it was important to involve family members in the solution as parents could often have issues which might impact on the child or have a differing opinion on the scale of the problem.
Quite often, in treating children, she said she did not need or use the trance state and questioning, thinking and discussing the problem was a major part of the solution-focused treatment.