Organic Hypnotherapy » self hypnosis

Healing Past Trauma

admin — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 23:44:32 +0000

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - Reliving a harrowing event over and over again

The fear that wells up in you is responding to a threat from a deep seated memory of trauma. It sends out signals of the remembered trauma activating the part of the brain which helps us survive trauma. It does this by triggering biological reactions that help us mount that ‘fight or flight’ response in order to get through the event. These biological changes are experienced over and over again, stressing the body and causing extreme anxiety in all areas of your life.

How trauma affects the brain

At a time of extreme fear during a traumatic event in your life, biological changes occur naturally. Your sympathetic nervous system releases adrenaline you experience as your racing heartbeat and accelerated pulse which readies you to make that fight or flight decision, while your para sympathetic nervous system responses are lowered and energy is diverted in order to cope physically with the fight or flight situation.

After the traumatic event the brain needs to recalibrate, taking the information from the situation ready to make a plan for the next time the situation arises, but what happens for people who suffer with PTSD is that that recalibration can hinder you. The amygdala regulates your emotions and the hippocampus records the facts of the events, but during the trauma time distortion gets wildly out of control, and during recalibration everything in your memory can seem completely altered. Studies have shown that in post traumatic stress disorder the hippocampus can actually shrink, therefore doing its job even less and the amygdala expands making it more overly emotive. The recording of emotions and memories stored during the event are fundamentally distorted.

Fear is the biggest contributor to PTSD and the continuance of the problem in your life

This fear leads you to one of three things - Suppression - keeping the fear down and contained unseen and becoming good at quickly pushing it down again if it pops up - Denial - pretending you don’t notice the fear - and Appeasement - giving in to the fear and letting it flow over you, destroying your day-to-day life and often putting you out of commission for hours if not days. Leaving you feeling feeling powerless and hopeless .

Moving towards healing

Start engaging with the fear and the fear of the memory.

“Standing still in the face of fear starts to shift you out of a sensation of being powerless and into a sensation of being powerful. This is a process that takes time but is the essential shift of healing.

Fear contains powerful messages, facts and information useful to healing. The more you connect with, identify and act on these messages the more direct, focused and efficient recovery becomes.

Healing is about more than creating a sensation of safety and control; it’s about directly addressing what we’ve been so afraid of and finding ways to become bigger, more powerful and more strong than the origin of the fear itself.” Michele Rosenthal

So what can help to begin to heal the resulting repetition of the trauma in the daily life of a sufferer?

There are a number of ways to remap your behaviour and thinking. Relaxation helps restore the trauma caused to the brain and by beginning to understand what is happening in the brain, the more you will be able to help your healing process.

Exercise - particularly aerobic exercise - aids stem cell development and regeneration of neurones. Your brain is actually wired to rewire and to heal.

Promote higher reasoning centres in the brain by asking yourself questions like, what you were thinking when you did that behaviour, this encourages receptive and expressive regions in the brain to formulate answers and thoughts, which raises your brain processes to higher levels, rather than just being at reactive levels, therefore back into a more modulated self.

Seek on-going social support and connections, be with other people who have experienced PTSD. Also practice self hypnosis and meditation. All these can change perceptions of yourself, of other people and of the world and situations as you know them. In doing this you can change your processing system from reactive to modulated, through thoughtful executive functions of the frontal region of the brain, and with this you can begin to repair the damage.

The role of Hypnosis in the healing of extreme trauma anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Hypnosis through through a state of focused consciousness provides controlled access to memories that may otherwise be kept out of consciousness in the sub-conscious mind. It involves accessing the dissociated traumatic memories while positively restructuring those memories.

Hypnosis Therapy can be used to help people face and bear a traumatic experience by embedding it in a new context, acknowledging helplessness during the event, and yet linking that experience with memories such as efforts at self-protection during the event and the ability to control the environment at other times.

Hypnosis provides access to memories that are then placed into a broader perspective with a new view of the event and a greater self belief in having survived the event.

On going support can then include self-hypnosis which allows a person to continue this work thereby reduce spontaneous uninvited intrusive memories. Gradually building coping patterns of thinking and behaviour.

With thanks to

Dr David Ziegler, Dr David Spiegel

and Michele Rosenthal - www.healmyptsd.com

Hypnosis for a Healthier, Leaner You

admin — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 23:42:41 +0000

Trying to weight can be the most frustrating and demoralizing way to spend your life. It is so easy to make a habit, whether it is food, or any other habit. What we like to eat most of is not always good for us, and the kinds of foods we don’t often eat are usually the foods that would be best for our health and our bodies.

Research over the last 50 years has argued many different lengths of time to make or break a habit. In the 60s it was thought to be 21 days, but a recent study has found that it can take between 18 days to 254! Now they came up with an average of 66 days but that is not particularly helpful for those of us who may take 254 days to really change our ways …….that’s just over 8 months!

Now think about it, our eating routines and habits, and food preferences, are well established by the time we head for young adulthood. No wonder it is hard to stay on a diet and, of course, by the time we reach middle age, well we are stuck in a rut. Added to that is the problem that our metabolism does change and usually slows up as we grow older, therefore our weight is often compounded by this as well as our bad eating habits.

Hypnosis For Healthy weight loss

So there needs to be a strategy to losing weight that involves longterm change to our thinking and habits. Mostly though, when we try to loose weight we do it for a particular reason, like a wedding to go to, or a vacation, particularly if it involves a swim suit. Or maybe we see the doctor and we are told that our BMI is high and need to lose some weight, so we work hard on that for a few weeks and then let things slip again because we go back to our regular and preferred eating habits. And likewise, after the wedding or the holiday, we return to our regular lives and go back to the usual routine daily habits. Boom – the weight is back before we know it!

This leads to a sense of failure, and then a cycle of failure can be created, with the seesaw of weight loss and weight gain, that can end up making you feel really down on yourself and less likely in the future to attempt a healthy slimming way of eating.

For healthy and successful weight loss you need to take a strategic approach. You need to eat less, sure, and you also need to eat healthy food. You need to have less of the food that has become an unhealthy habit for you, food that is high in calories that provides little in the way of the vitamins, minerals, proteins or healthy carbs that we need to have for a healthy body, and more of the fruits and vegetables that you are probably not in the habit of eating except as a side.

Hypnosis for a healthier, leaner you

Find yourself a healthy-eating book, app, or website and find recipes and foods that you can enjoy day to day. Healthy calories and calorie control is the name of the game, smaller portions, and then some regular exercise that is within your scope of daily life and physical ability. It is pointless trying to keep up an exercise routine that is excessive, just as it is pointless to try and eat so few calories that you are perpetually hungry. Remember healthy calories are the name of the game.

Where we are going here is to design a new routine of eating and exercise that you can really hope to keep to……because here is the crux of the matter: we have developed our eating habits over many, many years and it is extremely likely therefore that breaking those eating habits is going to be nearer that one year mark, not a quick fix diet. One year! Not one month! So yes….indeed….. what is needed, is a change in lifestyle, a complete rework of your way of thinking about and living with food.

It is highly likely that the majority of people you think of as slim are already eating healthily. It is rare that someone is slim while still eating fast food, chips and chocolate and large portions on a regular daily basis. Possibly under the age of thirty, a person may get away with it, but those bad habits will be very ingrained by their thirties and forties when the weight will pile on and boom – changing those bad eating habits is what we are talking about, that is how it works.

So now you will be asking how on earth can I keep it up for a year! Well changing your eating habits, changing your life style is a feat of the mind. Changing your mind is crucial and this is where hypnosis comes in. Your subconscious has all the habitual eating preferences written in from way back. Some of it will be family favorites, some will be secret foods that make you feel good, some will be foods that manufacturers have designed especially for you to want more and more of.

Hypnosis for a healthy life and a healthy body

These three elements are where we can begin. The foods that make you ‘feel good’ are a great place to start with hypnosis. Hypnosis can help root out the feeling that leads to this habitual eating, what is the need that is not being fulfilled that is highlighted by this feeling. Instead of distracting yourself from the feeling with a food and eating too much of it, like chips or chocolate, hypnosis can work on the feelings that are leading to the distracting behavior. Change can be made through the subconscious mind to understand where the feeling came from and rewrite our response to it. Beginning to understand your feelings and emotions is a major part of hypnosis work.

Habitual preferences to foods, often created within the family, in childhood can also be changed through the subconscious in hypnosis. A hypnotherapist can help you change your thoughts about a food through suggestion while in a hypnotic state, reinforced by self-hypnosis at home. That broccoli spear can look mighty inviting when you open the fridge if you want it too! Likewise hypnosis can change your thinking about those foods that are designed commercially to make you want more and more, in the same way, by changing your thinking toward nice yummy healthy food instead of the food that helps you stay overweight and unhealthy.

So hypnosis can change your mind, change your pattern of behavior, but what it can also do is continue to support your mission to be slim and healthy by using self hypnosis and guided suggestions on hypnotic audios to keep you on the path. Then you can go those 8 months and further to change those habits, and have a healthy lean body forever not just for that vacation or wedding.

Life Renewal Self-Hypnosis

Through teaching you self hypnosis, I can help you learn to program yourself for success, live in the moment and become more confident about the future.

Organic Conversational Hypnosis

In state of deep physical and mental relaxation, and a state of focused attention, you can then begin ‘change work’ with me to help you towards your goals.

Call me now to book a free 30 minute consultation
to find out more and see how hypnosis can help you
619 569 6131

Videos and Audios:

Hypnosis for a healthier, leaner you

Audio:

Anxiety and fear

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/cat-h-thomas/hypnosis-relaxation-for-fear-and-anxiety-1/s-VBgyn