Solution Focused Hypnotherapy combines practical, modern and well researched strategies to help people achieve significant positive changes in a relatively short period. This approach integrates two powerful therapeutic tools: Solution Focused talking therapy and Hypnotherapy.
What is Solution Focused Talking Therapy
It is a future-focused, client-centred, brain-based therapy that empowers clients to make sustainable changes.
It is “future focused” because instead of dwelling on past problems, we concentrate on creating solutions. Revisiting past issues can be triggering and lead to hopelessness, but by focusing on your desired future, we can identify your goals and create steps to achieve them.
It is “client centred” because it recognises that you are the expert on your life. You inherently possess the skills, strengths and resources needed to achieve your goals. My role is to guide you in discovering and utilising these inner resources.
It is “brain based” because it leverages the latest neuroscience and helps you understand how the brain works and why we react problematically in certain situations. It explains the roles of our conscious and subconscious minds.
The Conscious Mind is intellectual, rational and optimistic.
The Subconscious Mind acts as primitive guardian, focused solely on survival. It constantly scans for potential dangers and reacts with fight, flight, or freeze responses.
While the subconscious mind’s survival focus is essential, it can misinterpret modern stresses like work pressures or difficult relationships as significant threats and then respond with either fight, flight or freeze, responses that might be inappropriate or disproportionate to the issues. It may develop habits or patterns of behaviour that have in the past kept you feeling safe but are actually not beneficial. For example if avoiding social interactions, losing your temper or emotional overeating kept you feeling safe in the past, your subconscious will keep repeating that behaviour.
Understanding why you respond in a negative way in certain circumstances, is the first and essential step to changing those behaviours.
What is Hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapy is a form of therapy that uses hypnosis or trance, to help individuals achieve a state of relaxed but focused attention.
Hypnosis or trance is perfectly safe and natural. We all go in and out of trance, a state of focused relaxation, many times a day. Think about when somebody is talking to you but you are in a world of your own or when you are driving to a regular place, you arrive and don’t really remember the journey.
It is important to note that even during treatment, my role is simply to guide you into that state of focused relaxation. I do not have power over you. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It is also to note that hypnosis does not change your behaviour, it makes it easier for you to change your behaviour.
So how does it work? Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have our conscious and subconscious minds.
Our conscious mind is rational, logical, optimistic, positive and responsible for our intentional actions.
Our subconscious mind operates below the level of our conscious awareness. In addition to being responsible for our survival, it also stores all of our memories, beliefs, habits and emotions, both our positive but also our negative ones. It influences our behavior and reactions often automatically without conscious interaction, which is why we feel like we can’t stop some negative reactions even though we want to.
When you are under hypnosis, the conscious mind becomes less active and the subconscious becomes more accessible. We can then work directly with it to address deeply rooted issues such as past traumas or habitual negative behaviors or thought patterns. As the subconscious mind is also highly suggestible, we can take this opportunity to modify any unwanted behaviors and begin to action those desires created in your intellectual mind.
Hypnotherapy can help with many conditions where the cause or exacerbation of the problem is rooted in mind.
Hypnotherapy allows the brain to consolidate positive changes faster than solution focused talking therapy alone, so it is an essential part of the therapy.