Why would I try hypnotherapy?

So perhaps you’ve been recommended CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy) you have tried talk therapy or even another type of psychotherapy. It either hasn’t worked to resolve your problem or maybe it hasn’t completely done that. Perhaps it’s even made things worse. The truth is you’ve done everything you can consciously to fix this issue and yet there it is. I’m here to tell you that’s a good thing.

Why?

Because that problem or issue is completely out of your conscious control (if it wasn’t you wouldn’t be reading this). Wouldn’t it makes sense to work directly with the part of you that created and maintains that problem in the first place?

Historically hypnotherapy is the mother of all psychotherapies and where the “talking cure” began but as psychology evolved from the Freudian conception of the “unconscious mind” as a dangerous place where things should be kept as far away as possible, practitioners continued their work in the belief that the conscious mind is where change takes place. The idea was that understanding “why” you have your problems will eventually fix those problems. Now there is no doubt that some insight is absolutely needed to make change, but not as much as you might think.

Anyone who has spent years in counselling or talk therapy with little or no results will tell you thinking ABOUT your problems doesn’t solve those problems and often creates even more problems that you started with. For example, talking about trauma may be helpful to begin with, but if the therapist doesn’t know how to change those unconscious responses you risk being retraumatized again and again.

Even well-meaning therapists who operate on the assumption that change is slow, hard and painful will (through no fault of their own) hypnotize you into believing this, simply because they do not have the ability to affect those changes and you get trained into this. There is also a financial incentive for this as these therapists rely on repeat business.

Many modalities that actually are effective for things like trauma, such as EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) have been taken from the world of hypnosis and Neuro Linguistic Programming into modern psychology.

A 1995 groundbreaking meta-analysis study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, compared CBT treatment without hypnosis to identical treatment with hypnosis concluded that “the average client receiving cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy benefited more than at least 70% of clients receiving the same treatment without hypnosis.”

Why is that?

Because hypnotherapy works to change your problems at the level that they are created and maintained.

If you are tired of going from therapist to therapist, or simply if you want to go directly to the source of that issue and be rid of it then you might consider how much easier (and cheaper in the long run) it would be for you to get in touch and make an appointment to try hypnotherapy for a change.

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