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Self-Hypnosis
vs One-to-One Treatment.
If
you can do it yourself, why pay for expensive therapy? After
all, with DIY jobs around the house you often end up with
a better quality job than when you pay a so-called professional
to do it for you.
Self-hypnosis
is great for those times when you want to just re-program
your automatic thinking and behavioural processes. The very
act of spending time every day with you, caring for you, in
a state of deep relaxation, is hugely beneficial. Using your
imagination, in this state of deep relaxation, to set up an
intention for your future and to plant messages in your subconscious
mind without conscious interference is an excellent way to
manufacture beneficial change in your life.
When
you visit a skilled hypnotherapist you are with someone who
is listening to you and caring for you. To have someone listen
to your story, without judgement, is of itself hugely therapeutic.
You are also with someone who notices details - what you talk
about, what you don't talk about; what your mood state is;
and most importantly - a skilled therapist will notice and
seek to address the real causes of problems.
Let
me give you an example: say you have a problem with confidence.
The
self-hypnosis route would perhaps have you repeating a mantra
along the lines of "I am filled with confidence in all
situations" or "I feel confident and find myself
expressing my thoughts and ideas fearlessly in meetings and
conversations". Accompanied, maybe by a visualisation
of you, in a situation where you have lacked confidence, behaving
in a confident manner and feeling feelings of success and
achievement.
A
hypnotherapist would probably have you engaging in that sort
of visualisation during your therapy anyway, so why bother
paying all that money when you can get it for free if you
DIY.
Well,
for me at least, lack of confidence is not as simple as that.
Lack of confidence is about fundamental belief in self, and
it is this belief in self, or rather lack of belief in self
that I would seek to correct using hypnotherapy. Lack of belief
in self is the result of early programming by those adults
who had the greatest impact on our development as young minds.
So the problem is quite deep rooted and consequently needs
gentle, loving guidance to discover how this lack of belief
in self came to be present. In other words it is important
to teach, and experience, the huge difference between something
you believe about you and something that is true about you.
This doesn't happen with self-hypnosis. So if your lack of
confidence is the result of one highly critical parent always
finding fault, then therapy would seek to correct this; if
it is the result of over protective parents who were excessively
fearful of you taking risks - like climbing trees, or going
out alone - then therapy has a different problem to solve.
There are other reasons why an individual might lack confidence
- early classroom experiences with a teacher who doesn't love
children or the job, or a highly sensitive physiology…
The problem with self-therapy is the lack of experience at
understanding self, and correcting the right problem.
Another
area where an experienced therapist is beneficial is in the
area of challenge. We are constantly making up ideas about
our world that simply aren't true. More than one person in
my consulting room has considered themselves a total failure.
They've never succeeded at anything and they never will. If
you believe that you believe it and because you believe it
you will not seek to change it because no one seeks to change
what they see as a truth. But if you believe that you always
fail at everything you do, doing self-hypnosis to achieve
success isn't addressing the fundamental belief that is in
error. It's like using self-hypnosis to win the lottery and
never bothering to buy a ticket.
However,
as soon as anyone tells me they are a total failure, or they
never succeed at anything, I have to challenge it. And my
challenge is always successful and I can always point out
several occasions in anyone's life when they have been successful.
They just never see it because their erroneous belief about
themselves blinds them to their successes. What I also do
is challenge the meaning of success to them. Usually it's
lots of money, promotions, material possessions, good relationships,
and so on. They fail to see small successes, like still being
alive after x number of years, like having raised beautiful
children, like passing a driving test, like honouring others
by being punctual, like gifts to charity, like small acts
of kindness to strangers… there are successes in everyone's
life. The real problem with feelings of failure in life is
an inability to see, to honour, and to appreciate the small
successes. Just allowing someone to look at themselves and
their life from a different perspective is like lifting a
huge burden off their back, and that's even before the hypnosis
starts and is used then to reinforce these new learnings.
So
your friendly neighbourhood hypnotherapist is actually providing
you with something more than you can do for yourself. The
best course of action is to have a consultation or two with
a hypnotherapist in order to establish what the real problem
is and to receive guidance and training in how to use self-hypnosis
most effectively. That way you get the best of both worlds.
Self-hypnosis
is highly beneficial and I would encourage you to try it out,
just recognise that it has limitations
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