Simply Mindful Hypnotherapy
Office location: 13940 US 441 Suite 210, The Villages, Florida 32159 Phone: (352) 239-2579
Notice:
Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy is a co-operative partnership between the client and the hypnotherapist to create change in both the subconscious and conscious mind. I am a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist CCHt. I am not a Licensed medical doctor or mental health professional. As such, any hypnotherapy services performed are not intended to take the place of professional medical or psychological care and should not be used as a substitute for care, treatment or diagnosis of any condition or ailment you seek assistance with. I do not work on pain or any diagnosed mental or physical conditions without the referral from a state licensed practitioner of the appropiate field of expertise. If you are under the care of a medical or mental health professional for any condition for which you are seeking hypnosis assistance with, please obtain a signed, written referral from your provider prior to using any hypnotherapeutic services. This can be in the form of a written referral or simply a note on a prescription form. Together we can create the change that you need and deserve in your life!
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” - John Lennon
There is so much misinformation out there about hypnosis, we decided that we would set the record straight about exactly what hypnosis is and how it works.
You see, many people still think that hypnosis is about putting someone into a weird state, telling them to do something, and then that thing will happen. But hypnosis doesn't work like that. This is so important to understand. Otherwise, if you don't get immediate and miraculous results, you might get disheartened and give up, and that would be a terrible shame, because hypnosis is the most powerful and ef-fective mind tool available to you.
So how does hypnosis work?
Well, hypnosis 're-educates' your unconscious mind. By that I mean your habitual responses, or instincts.
So, for example, you might think of a certain person and feel nervous. How does that happen? You thought of someone, and even though they weren't in the room, you felt nervous! How did you do that? Well, at some stage, a mini hypnotic state glued together in your mind that particular person and the emotion of anxiety. That's what hypnosis does - it helps you learn - and fast.
So, we can use hypnosis to change this response. We can take deliberate control of the way you feel by relaxing you and having you imagine things that make you feel good, and then have you rehearse doing the problem situation while feeling the way you want to feel.
Sounds simple, doesn't it?
And it is! Of course, there are many subtleties involved as well, but this is the most fundamental use for hypnosis. Changing your emotional reaction - how you feel about something.
Think of the applications...
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If you're a smoker, change how you feel about cigarettes
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If you're trying to lose weight, change how you feel about fatty and sugary foods
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If you dislike public speaking, change how you feel about that
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About exercise, about achieving, about yourself, ...
The list really is endless. And all from one 'simple' tool.
One thing I always make clear to my clients is that hypnosis has not been successful until it has changed the actual situation.
What I mean by that is that it's one thing sitting at home feeling all calm and peaceful about the presentation you've got to do next week, but feeling different at the presentation itself is the only proof that matters.
You can't call yourself 'changed' until you've done what you were aiming to do, while feeling the way you wanted to feel.
And once you've done it, you are changed. Your experience is changed. And no-one can ever take that away from you.
So if the unconscious mind learns so quickly and so effectively, how can we use hypnosis to teach it new things?
Well, the first thing you need to understand is that the unconscious mind needs a clear message about what you want from it.
This is really at the core of all hypnosis. Once you understand this, you will understand the central mechanism of almost all self-help approaches - positive thinking, visualisation, autogenics, the Silva method - all sorts. They (and hundreds of others), all use this 'trick'.
So what do I mean when I say 'give the unconscious mind a clear message'?
Well, think of it like this:
When you can do something without thinking, you have assigned it to your unconscious mind - talking, driving, writing, walking, eating, catching a ball and so on.
And you usually get there by repetition.
But you can get there much more quickly by attaching emotion to it. Here's what I mean:
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You have an embarrassing experience and afterwards, you only need think of it to blush (it's an unconscious response - try blushing deliberately!)
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You have a terrifying experience and afterwards, any situation similar to it makes you feel anxious
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A film makes you laugh and afterwards, just thinking of the scene makes you chuckle
The common factor is all these scenarios is emotion. Emotion makes the 'pattern' stick. The more emotion, the more stuck it gets, and the greater the effect in the future.
Are you starting to see why this is so important?
So, given this fact that emotion causes patterns to 'stick' in the unconscious mind, what happens if you think negatively all the time? Anxiety is the easiest emotion to create - all you need to do is worry!
And what happens then?
The most common mistake (and I mean seriously, startlingly common) is firstly to think of something you don't want to do (like feeling anxious when public speaking, blushing at a party, stumbling over your words at an interview).
Then you feel anxious because you just thought of something scary.
And right away, you begin to 'stick' the pattern! Your unconscious mind has received a clear message about how you want to feel in the situation itself!
This is called negative self hypnosis.
I guess you can imagine how difficult it makes things if you are constantly having to 'battle against yourself' - that is, creating patterns through negative thinking that make it harder for you to perform the way you want.
Using hypnosis a lot trains your brain to focus on what you want, not on what you don't want, giving you control over the contents of your thoughts.
That's why, if you want to get out of your own way, we recommend using hypnosis on a regular basis. This gives you the immediate benefits of the hypnosis itself, plus in the longer term, stops you doing negative self hypnosis and making life difficult for yourself.
In summary
So to sum up, hypnosis works by re-educating the unconscious mind, giving you control over responses that you can't control consciously, or by trying harder.
Simply Mindful Hypnotherapy
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
― John Lennon
How does Hypnosis Work?
There are many theories about the actual mechanics of hypnosis. But before considering how hypnosis works, perhaps the first question should be does hypnosis work? Decades of research and clinical trials have shown that hypnosis can be remarkably effective for a wide variety of conditions. To take a clinical example, a study published in the June 2007 Journal of Pediatrics showed that hypnosis produced a significant drop in the severity and duration of headaches in children, and even a drop in the frequency of the headaches themselves - something like 75%. In the non-clinical field, a University of Iowa meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt showed that hypnosis was three times more effective than nicotine replacement when it came to giving up smoking.
Theories as to how these results are achieved range from the idea that hypnosis produces changes in brain activity, to the thought that the subject has made a sub-concious change in what is basically the "hard drive" of the computer and that this affects all the "programming" of that computer. All of these theories, however, are essentially saying the same thing - hypnosis works by communicating with the unconscious mind.
Conscious and unconscious are really just shorthand terms to describe the general characteristics of the human mind. The "conscious mind" is the part where we tend to "live" - the part you might think of as "you". If there's a little voice reading these words out loud in your head, that's the conscious mind talking. The unconscious mind is everything else! The unconscious mind (sub-concious) controls all of the autonomic processes that you don't have to think about - the heart rate, the blood pressure, tissue growth, cell regeneration, the immune system and so on. It's where our thoughts, memories and accumulated experience reside. It controls our emotions, our habits and our responses to the world.
In many ways, it creates that world for us. The unconscious mind handles about two million bits of sensory information every single second. The conscious mind deals with about seven. That means that the reality you're actually aware of from moment to moment has been brought to your conscious attention by the unconscious, in a sort of Readers' Digest version, choosing seven bits which it thinks are important from the two million it's just processed.
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The conscious mind is more logical, critical and analytical - it's constantly making value judgments. If somebody was to say to you "you really should give up smoking, you know, it's terribly bad for you", you're highly unlikely to become a non-smoker on the spot. You're more likely to come up with a dozen, rational sounding reasons as to why you should carry on smoking, or you might tell them to shove off and mind their own business. Even if you do consciously accept that you should give up smoking, it's not the conscious part of the mind that's keeping the habit in place.
The unconscious part of the mind, on the other hand, is much more accepting. It's also quite literal and tends to take things personally, relating any information it receives to you as an individual. Hypnosis works by bypassing the critical conscious mind (usually through relaxation or linguistic techniques), and speaking directly to the unconscious in a language which it understands - pattern, association and metaphor.
As mentioned earlier, the unconscious mind is basically in charge. The vast majority of things that we do are unconscious, which we can be grateful for - if you had to consciously think about every single thing you did, you wouldn't do anything. However, it can lead us astray. Most problems are things that we've learned how to do at an unconscious level - we've just learned them in an unhelpful way.
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Problems are often an attempt at a solution. This is true even for such apparently self-destructive habits as smoking. Many smokers start in their teens, when smoking is seen as a quick way to fit in, acquire adult status or generally appear cool. Through sheer repetition, the unconscious mind becomes convinced that smoking is serving a vital purpose - that it's "good " for you in some way.
Hypnosis works by updating the unconscious mind with new and more helpful information, like reprogramming a computer. It can be used to change associations, so that cigarettes, for instance, are no longer seen as "little friends", and are more realistically regarded as "toxic killers". It can also be used to mentally rehearse better ways of going about things, such as being able to deal with stressful situations without having to light up.
Since the unconscious mind controls our autonomic bodily processes, physical change can also be achieved through hypnosis. Pain control is a very good example. The mind alters our awareness of pain all the time - professional chefs, for instance, get burnt on a regular basis, but rarely notice it unless it's particularly severe. You'll have experienced this yourself if you've ever discovered a cut or a bruise and wondered how it got there. Physical events are still occurring, but the unconscious has relegated them to the 1,999,993 bits of sensory information you're not aware of every single second. Hypnosis can therefore be used to amplify that same response and apply it to a specific situation, such as the control of headaches.
Hypnosis works, then, by shaping our perception of reality by dealing directly with the unconscious mind, the seat of most of our problems, and most of our solutions too.