What is Hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy is a connection of two words – hypnosis and therapy.  Hypnosis itself is not a treatment (apart from being relaxing), but is needed to perform the treatment (the therapy).  Many people confuse the two and focus on the hypnosis rather than the therapy.  The purpose is to use the benefit of the trance state, where conscious and subconscious minds are communicating, to aid therapy.  The role of the hypnotherapist is to use his skills and make suggestions to help client solve their problems (physical or psychological) while in the trance state.

Hypnosis as a therapy requires expertise from the therapist and a willingness to co-operate from the client.  It is not someone doing something to someone else just as a driving instructor is not making the learner drive – he is teaching, supporting, providing ways and means to practice what is taught, being a guide until the learner can drive alone.  So it is with hypnotherapy. 

Imagine you are in a room and an unpleasant smell is disturbing your concentration.  You search the room but cannot find the cause, so you hope it will go away by itself.  The next day the smell is still there and you try to put it to the back of your mind but it keeps interfering with your enjoyment of the day.  You search some more but still without success.  At night you begin to worry that the smell will still be there in the morning and your sleep is disturbed.  This situation continues, distracting you and altering your personality so that friends comment on the change.

Eventually you decide to search outside the room.  Opening a cupboard under the stairs you discover some food left over from a picnic.  Immediately you feel better, you are in control.  After a few days the smell has completely gone and you return to your former self.

Our problems are often similar to the unpleasant smell; they prevent us from being ourselves and achieving our real potential.  We tend to search for solutions in places we know, in spite of the fact that we are not achieving results.  Hypnosis helps us ‘look under the stairs’ to remove the cause of our problem.  It is in essence a way of learning about ourselves without conflict or confrontation.

How Does It Work?

To understand that question we first have to understand how our minds works because we have two minds in one.  We have a conscious mind and also a subconscious mind.

As you can see the conscious mind surrounds the subconscious mind and in a way protects it from the outside world.  The reason that the conscious mind does this is because the subconscious mind is like a fertile plot of soil and if something gets put into this soil the subconscious will begin to act upon that information.  The conscious mind is where we spend most of our time.  All our rational thought processes are performed by this part of the mind.  The conscious mind also performs a number of activities in our life.

1.  Rational /Analytical.  This part of the mind likes to rationalize the things the we do and give us reasons why we act in a particular fashion.  The smoker may say, “I smoke because it calms and relaxes me” (the truth is that smoking raises blood pressure and heart rate), or "I just haven't got the willpower to stop smoking".

2.  Willpower.  Our conscious mind is were we get our willpower from, which many people believe is there to make long term changes in their lives.  The fact is that willpower is just like adrenaline and because its like adrenaline it will start strong but gradual get weaker and weaker.  So you put the cigarettes down convinced that you'll never smoker again only to find yourself smoking again a few days later, telling yourself, "I haven't got the willpower to stop".

3.  Short Term Memory.  This is the memory we need just to get through the average day.  With this memory we can remember 5 to 9 bits of information at any one time.

Overall the conscious mind is a very weak mind when compared to the power of the subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is awesomely powerful.  It can make you into anything you would like to be; thin, happy, sad, a non-smoker, it is the real us.  The subconscious mind is like a fertile plot of soil and will grow anything that is placed into it no questions asked and just like the conscious mind it performs certain activities.

1. Imagination. This is how we perceive the world around us. Some people have a positive outlook on life, whilst others have a negative outlook.  It’s our imagination that makes will power useless, because imagination will always overrule willpower.

2.  Emotions.  Our subconscious mind is our feeling level mind.  All our emotions good and bad come from this part of us. Our subconscious cannot talk to us, so it uses emotions and feelings to communicate to us.

3.  Permanent Memory.  The subconscious permanent memory is infinite, it can never get full and it never forgets anything. 

4.  Protective.  Our subconscious mind must and will protect us against dangers, real or imagined.   The subconscious cannot judge what is real and what is imagined.  Something imagined by the subconscious mind is as if it’s actually happening.

5.  Lazy.  The last part of the subconscious mind is a negative part of us.  Although the subconscious is so powerful, it is also the laziest part of us.  It doesn’t like to do the work that is required to accept positive suggestions to give us change in areas where we would like to have change.  It likes to keep things the way they are, it takes too much work to make change in a positive way.

The subconscious mind is like a fertile plot of soil, and if a thought, an idea, or a suggestion enters the subconscious mind it must be made into reality.  To stop this, the subconscious mind employs wants known as the critical faculty.

The critical faculty lives in the conscious mind but takes its orders directly from the subconscious mind.  The critical faculty is like the door into the subconscious mind.  It as only one job and that job is to compare all suggestions that we receive or give ourselves with the suggestions already held in the subconscious mind.  If the suggestion matches what is already in the subconscious the suggestion is allowed to enter.  But if the suggestion does not match what is already in the subconscious it is rejected and is not allowed to enter.

If we did not have a critical faculty then we would not be able to function properly.  The reason we would not be able to function properly is because our critical faculty is there to stop suggestions from entering the subconscious mind.  Without it we could never learn.  People would be able to tell you that a square is actually a triangle and if they repeated it enough you would then actually believe them.  But because we have a critical faculty this can not happen because all incoming suggestions are stopped. 

To see your own critical faculty in action and to discover just what it does, just take a look at this triangle.

This is what your critical faculty did when you looked at that shape.  First you read the sentence and then you looked at the shape.  You then probably thought I had made a typing error, or I was a little mad.  Now the reason this happened is because your own critical faculty stopped the suggestions. 

If I would have said look at this square then that would have not appeared strange to you because that information would have matched the information held in your subconscious permanent memory.

Its our critical faculty that can sometimes make change seem impossible because the change that we want does not match the information already held within the subconscious mind.  An example of this would be somebody who decides that they want to stop smoking.  Now because this information does not match the information held within the subconscious mind the suggestion will be rejected. 

The critical faculty stops suggestions from entering the subconscious mind.  Now because of this it is extremely hard to make long term change in our life.  Suggestion of change we may give ourselves are being constantly compared with the old suggestions already held in the subconscious mind and are rejected.

So how do we get a suggestion into the subconscious mind?  Well at Quit For Good we use something called hypnosis, which allows to bypasses the critical faculty that is blocking access to our subconscious mind.  Now most people who are ignorant of hypnosis think this is all hypnosis is.  But if this was all that hypnosis was then many of the scare stories you may have heard about hypnosis may be true.  Things like an hypnotist can control you or they can get you to do anything they want you to do and you’ve have to do it.  But if this was all hypnosis was then hypnotists could do that but we are not that vulnerable.

The reason for this is because the instant our critical faculty is bypassed we go into a very deep state of hypnosis.  When we’re in this deep state of hypnosis it is not what you’d expect it to feel like.  Our body if we are using a relaxation type of hypnosis are very relaxed but the more we go into hypnosis the more our conscious mind becomes alert.  In the deeper levels of hypnosis your conscious mind is 2 to 300% more alert than you are right now.  All of your 5 senses are hundreds of times better than they are right now.  When you are in hypnosis you are not asleep but extremely alert.  Probably more alert and clear minded than you’ve ever been before.

When you’re in hypnosis your conscious mind takes on a different role.  I want you to think of it as playing the role of the guardian of the gates protecting you.  When you receive a suggestion in hypnosis you will hear loud and clear.  When you hear the suggestions it is your choice whether  you want to accept it or reject it.  Which decision you make will determine whether that suggestion is allowed to enter the subconscious mind or whether it is rejected.  If it is allowed to enter the subconscious mind then change will begin but if it is rejected it will not be allowed to enter the subconscious mind and there will be no change.

The only time a suggestion is allowed to enter your subconscious mind is when you want to accept the suggestions that the hypnotists is giving to you.  Now that’s how easy it is to create change in your life using hypnosis but it’s down to you.  An hypnotists can’t force the suggestions into your subconscious you have to accept the suggestions.

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