A brief introduction

What is that? That word therapy. It always struck me as something that others had and I didn’t need. How wrong was I?

I have learnt that it’s not until we understand ourselves that we can understand others and with that understanding comes acceptance and empathy.

Have you ever wondered why we react in a certain way? Whether we over react or under react to certain situations, why we get on with one person and not the other? It’s  all in our programming, our conditioned responses, those actions that come naturally to us.

    The thing that many of us tend not to think about or even realise maybe, is that at birth we are pretty much a blank cassette so to speak and that all our responses and reactions are taught to us by parents, teachers, media etc. so in fact our whole belief system is that of other people. Lets just put that into simple terms; lets say your mother was scared of spiders, it’s a good chance that you will be as well. In fact, you would probably react in an almost exact way as her without ever checking to see if you actually were scared of them and for what reason. Simple example but it illustrates where I’m going with this.  

 I’m sure we have all heard that if you are told something enough times, over and over again, we start to believe it’s true. If our parents tell us enough times that we are this or that, by the time we mature into adulthood odds are that we believe it of ourselves.

The fact is that many of these unwanted conditioned responses that we have acquired throughout our lives are open to change at a subconscious level with hypnotherapy.

      Anxiety and   panic attacks are also prime examples of problems in today’s life and may stem from some form of childhood trauma. When I say trauma this can be any kind of event that is too great for the child to handle at that time and is pushed down deep into the subconscious.  As Mr. Freud would say, ‘we have screened memories’ Put simply, memories that are put away, maybe disguised and distorted in the mind so as not to cause upset and as I say, too great for the child to deal with, because the child didn’t hold the resources at that time to deal with whatever problem had occurred. Unfortunately the subconscious memory is timeless and if or when triggered, still creates the same affect and response to the body as it did at the initial event. Usually feelings of anxiety (stress) and panic attacks are triggered off later in life, without any realization as to what, why or where they come from.

 This is where hypnotherapy and hypno-analysis comes in.  These memories and other negative experiences can and need to be released in order for us to function unhindered by our emotional baggage.

Oh come on, we all have some of that don’t we?

                                 ANTHONY WOOLF   DHP LAPHP