What is Hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy differs from many other therapies in that it connects with your unconscious mind. You have within you vast resources to help you generate long-lasting change, and to resolve inner conflict. Many issues arise as a result of over-rehearsed, and therefore seemingly automatic responses to different situations. These may be how you deal with stress, or long standing habits you feel you can't shake, or maybe there's something you want to achieve but something else keeps holding you back. Whatever your need, there is a wide variety of issues hypnotherapy can help you with.

What Is Hypnosis?
The word 'hypnosis' derives from the Greek 'hypnos', meaning 'sleep'. However, in most respects the hypnotic state is entirely different from sleep. Hypnosis is a state of mind, enhanced by mental and physical relaxation, during which your unconscious is able to communicate with your conscious mind.

Can Anyone Be Hypnotised?
It is true that some people are more open to hypnosis than others, but as we all experience trance-states thoughout a regular day it is fair to say that virtually everyone can be hypnotised. Some people who state that they have not been hypnotised may have experienced a light trance-state: research concurrs that the level or depth of trance does not correlate to the beneficial results obtained (GHR). It may be that the outcome of the therapy will develop over time, and at a deeper level, than had at first been realised.

What is a Trance-State?
Do you ever just gaze out of the window and look at nothing in particular... just 'drift away?'

Have you ever driven home only to find that you can't fully remember driving there... you were on auto-pilot?

Have you ever just let your mind float away as you listen to music? Or watched a film that ends too soon?

All of these are trance-states.

Being in a trance state allows that connection between your conscious and your unconscious mind to take place.

Working with the Unconscious Mind
Consider a journey you make every day. It may be that you drive or walk or cycle - whatever form that journey takes, cast your mind back to the first time you made that journey. You were consciously aware of the turns you had to make, the various landmarks along the way you needed to remember in order to get back; stop signs, speed limits, all of these things - and more - were consciously recognised and stored.

Then, there were all the other things that you didn't consciously recognise, but which were nevertheless occuring...

I wonder if you can remember now, as you read this, what the day was like... was it sunny, cold, did it rain?

How were you feeling? Were you nervous, excited, stressed or relaxed and happy?

Can you recall the sounds..?

Unconsciously things are happening all the time. Your breathing happens all the time and you don't have to think about it. But if you do think about it, you can relax by breathing more deeply.

There will be sounds around you. You are not consciously tuned into them, but they are there, and you know what they are...

There will be things in your peripheral vision which you can see but not acknowledge...

...And all the while you will be reading this and making sense of the words you understand.

The conscious mind can accept several pieces of information at once and quantify it - the unconscious assimilates many times that information moment by moment.

Hypnotherapy allows us to utilise that vast unconscious resource, which in turn allows us to make everyday journeys without having to think about them...

This is useful because sometimes we want to travel to our destinations by another route...

...and sometimes we want to travel by different roads but are unsure of how to do this.