Deep Down

Here’s the All-In-One place for general questions and answers for hypnotherapy.

What is hypnosis?
Hypnosis, broadly defined, is focused attention. The focus can be broad or narrow. Such experiences are already part of your day, occurring in those moments when you find yourself daydreaming, spacing out, or lost in thought. At other times we may find our attention highly focused or concentrated, such as when we watch a movie and lose track of the seats and people around us. Both of these states, whether of a broad or narrow focus, yield an openness in which learning occurs.

What is hypnotherapy?
A hypnotherapy session in our clinic combines counselling and trance work. Change doesn’t happen when a therapist attempts to remove symptoms. It happens when the client gets the support they need to use what they know, both consciously and unconsciously, in new ways on behalf of the desired outcome. Client and therapist collaborate to create a focus of attention that engages the client’s conscious and unconscious resources on behalf of clarifying and promoting their interests, their well-being, and their confidence to competently attend to important life issues.

The techniques of we use are rooted in the sophisticated methods pioneered by Milton Erickson, M.D. Erickson affirmed that the unconscious is not an evil force trying to thwart our best intentions, but instead harbors the very resources necessary to support each individual’s desire for change. The hypnotherapist helps the client harness these resources to create new options and change.

What is meant by “unconscious”?
Here, “unconscious” simply means everything that is not in our conscious awareness. Our unconscious intelligence includes the responsivity of our breathing and our heartbeat. It includes the expressiveness of our hands and facial gestures. It includes the attitudes, abilities, and behaviors that we exhibit without having to consciously think about them. For instance, we can walk or catch a ball – both are complex actions. Yet, we don’t have to think about all the steps involved in order to accomplish these tasks. We rely on our unconscious intelligence. Each of us has a lot of beneficial unconscious abilities! And yet, we may have unconscious learnings-understandings we came to as children about money, relationships, who we think we are, our own value-that have outlived their usefulness and now limit us in some way. Fortunately, unconscious learning isn’t just a developmental phase we go through and then that’s it, we’re locked in. Throughout life our unconscious retains its ability to learn something new, or use something we already know in a different way. Hypnotherapy engages these natural learning abilities on behalf of who we are becoming rather than who we’ve been.

What is hypnotherapy good for?
While hypnosis is commonly associated with habit cessation (for example, losing weight or quitting smoking), many hypnotherapists have a much broader range of treatment. A well – trained clinician using hypnotherapy can help clients who suffer from physical symptoms and conditions (including migraine, sexual dysfunctions, high blood pressure, and sleep disorders), psychological symptoms (including anxiety, stress, insomnia, phobias, depression, and the effects of past trauma) and life issues (limiting behaviors, career change, divorce, aging, relationship crises). Other medical applications include pain control, use during dental work, comfort during birth, and enhancing comfort and healing before, during, and after surgical procedures.

What will I experience?
Each client may experience their sessions differently depending on his or her desires, psychology, and unique resources. Client and therapist will sit and talk and have a conversation that engages your natural abilities, both conscious and unconscious. For some, the experience may involve a heightened awareness, for others, a profound relaxation. Others have the experience of being in an engaging conversation yet it is often responsible for an increased sense of well being and desired change.

I’ve never been to a hypnotherapy before. How does a session look like?
The process of a session, ususally lasting 1 hour or slightly over, is with the following components:

• Initial meeting to set up a strategy, including intake and treatment plan that we both agree on. Then hypnosis is introduced and experienced. You receive a customized audio recording after this session providing you opportunity to gain more benefits from future appointments as you can delve deeper into hypnosis. This also provides you extra value with extra personalized relaxation sessions at home at no extro cost.
• Checking what’s new, what changed and what’s different in following up sessions. This ususally takes 1/3 to 1/2 of the session time.
• Trance work – the hypnosis part of the session, during which, most people focus their attention in a way that allows for unconscious learning. The hypnotherapist uses stories, metaphors, direct suggestions, questions, and what looks like normal conversation to help engage unconscious abilities on behalf of what you want. Such an interaction assists in discovering new perceptions and making new meaning of habitual experiences. In the course interacting with the hypnotherapist your natural abilities, both conscious and unconscious, are engaged on behalf of accomplishing the desires and well-being – This usually takes 1/3 of time.
• Teach clients self-hypnosis as a self-care tool to use to strengthen changes after the work is done. This takes the rest of the session time.

How many sessions does it take?
It depends on what you want to accomplish, how what you want to accomplish is connected to the rest of your life, and how quickly you learn what’s important for you to learn in order to accomplish what you want. So, of course, the number of sessions varies from person to person even if they have similar interests. For things like gaining relief from migraine, quitting smoking, or hypnosis for expectant parents, it might be four to six sessions. Making changes in attitudes and behaviors which are limiting is more involved and may evolve over the course of months. On the other hand, with people who were so ready to make a change, one session was all the trigger they needed.