Solution Focused Hypnotherapy & Hypno-EMDR

Hypnosis is a focused state of awareness, an altered state of consciousness, not sleep, you are aware of everything that is happening throughout your session, relaxed and focused.  We naturally drift in and out of a trance state several times a day without realizing it.  When we are driving and arrive at our destination but can’t remember the whole of the journey, or when we are daydreaming.

Our mind is separated into the conscious and the subconscious, a good analogy is, when we look at our desktop on the computer and everything you see, everything you can interact with on the screen is the conscious and everything you don’t see, all the programs, the operating system , everything that runs the computer is the subconscious.  The conscious is our judgmental and critical ‘gatekeeper.’  The subconscious is our operating system, the processing system, the part of us that controls our vital functions, like breathing, or our heart beating.  It is also the storage for our memories, our beliefs and our emotions. It is where our habits and behaviours become the norm when they have been critically accepted by the conscious mind.  The subconscious is where our manual is effectively stored and from there our life ‘programme’ is run from, based on everything that has ever happened and our interactions with the present moment.

Hypnotherapy works with both the conscious and the subconscious mind using a range of techniques that appeal to both, to change behaviour responses, alleviate and relearn emotional responses.  Yvonne also works with you out of hypnosis, offering powerful tools for your toolbox to compliment your treatment sessions.

Hypnotherapy offers you a powerful option to help relearn how to access your resources, stop unhelpful patterns and really make those changes you want for yourself.  It is crucial that you want to and are ready to make these changes. 

Hypnotherapy is client led and personal to you. 

Yvonne tailors your sessions specifically to your consultation, to your goals and your desire for change, therefore every session uses tried and tested techniques but is tailored to you and therefore is unique to you.

Anxiety is an emotion, that triggers a response in our body, more often than not, the fight or flight response we know of as panic attacks, freezing or a heightened sense of awareness of our heartbeat or other processes.  This can lead to being fearful of fear itself and can be so debilitating to a person, leading to avoidance behaviour, or impacting on areas of their life including work, travel, home life.  Anxious behaviours can also lead to other factors such as self-medication with alcohol, drugs and can also be involved in exacerbating other mental illnesses including, depression or OCD.  The stresses of being anxious day to day can lead to stress which is not good for health. 

Anxiety is treated in hypnosis by not re-traumatising the person, we do not ever do this in order to alleviate anxious symptoms.  Instead hypnotherapists treat the person holistically looking at where the anxiousness came from, what impact it has and what will help going forward in life to alleviate the issues being experienced now.  Anxious behaviour and thought patterns are unhelpful patterns of thought that have formed, sometimes a long time ago and essentially when we have anxious feelings or thoughts, it is our subconscious trying to get us to deal with what is immediately happening that we are not dealing with.  The harder we try and suppress it the louder it shouts, until it is the only thing we are aware of and often we are unaware anymore of what it is that we are anxious about, it feels like we are anxious about everything.  Sometimes we have anxiety and we think it is happening for no reason, but there is always a reason, we are just not hearing it because of all the noise, all the anxious thoughts that are going on in our heads. 

Hypnosis is wonderful for talking directly to the ‘part’ of us that is shouting the loudest. As hypnotherapists we can communicate directly to the subconscious part of us that is triggering our anxious behaviours and by working with this ‘part’ we can work on what is happening and what changes can be made to ‘quieten’ down the responses.  We never ‘stop’ anxiety because we all need a certain level of anxiety for really dangerous things, but for day to day stuff, we can certainly dial it down and by doing this, you can lead a life that is free of this continuous loop of anxiousness you may be in just now.

Using hypnosis to address fears and phobias can be a powerful way of diminishing or eliminating debilitating behaviours when faced with the object of our fear.

At some point in our lives an initial event has occurred which has then led us to develop a fear or phobia, often a debilitating one.  Quite often we are unaware or have no idea where this initial event happened or what happened to make us react in the way we do.  Sometimes, we can have an idea where it might have come from, but a lot of the time it may have happened in childhood and we have no memory of it at all.  Sometimes phobias can be learned from our care-givers and we learn from a young age that something scares our elders so we need to be wary of it too.  Whatever way it began, whether we remember it or not, hypnosis is, hands down, a truly effective and often quick way of getting rid of, or becoming less fearful of whatever it is that makes us want to run for the hills when we see or experience the object or situation we fear the most.  Also our fears and phobias are not in our conscious behaviour, they are subconscious driven and result in behaviour like panic attacks, avoidance or debilitating behaviour.  None of this is our fault and with this realization, hypnosis can work on these subconscious unhelpful patterns and make lasting change.

Hypnotherapy uses a variety of techniques - from addressing gently where the originating event that led to the phobia was, to diminishing or eliminating the fear altogether.  By using behavioural and cognitive techniques hypnotherapy is a safe place to really work on those phobias that have an impact on your life.  From spiders to flying, dentists to heights, the list is endless.  Hypnosis does not re-traumatise you and at no point will you be ever be in a situation you are uncomfortable with, I also do not have a box of spiders handy.

Often a single session is all that is needed, but be prepared that depending on progress another session may be required.  Everyone is different.

Tried and tested techniques are utilised to address even long held phobias, putting you back in control again and empowering you to get on with your life.

Applying powerful EMDR techniques within the hypnotherapy session brings about lasting change from thoughts and images/behaviours that still cause you disturbance long after the initial event has occurred.  Yvonne also teaches you tools that will help you in your recovery including self-soothing and calming techniques.

Hypno-EMDR helps people with emotional distress and behaviours often from disturbing events that have happened to them.  Often when a person has had a disturbing event, the memories from that event don't get processed properly and result in distressing memories, thoughts and emotions.

So for example, say your mind was like the hallway of your house.  A disturbing event takes place and your mind tries to file it away but it freezes and all of a sudden there is a box in your hall with all these memories, including images, smells, sounds, sensations etc. all in this box, higgledypiggledy.  Every time you come in to the hall you have to try and get passed this box, but everytime you do a sheet of paper (a sound or image) gets stuck to you and gets in the way of what you should be doing, because it's not filed properly and is misfiled, you may notice that parts of the memory appear when you think of something else and this disturbs you.  Hypn-EMDR helps file these memories properly and accurately as well as refile any misfiled memories associated with the original event, which means you don't keep on having to try and get past it, or have it in the way anymore.  Once it is filed properly, it is no longer disturbing for you.

By using these powerful modalities together we create significant change for you.  Please note, Yvonne works with client led stabilisation, not therapist led, which we find is more empowering for you.

Past Life Regression Therapy is a wonderful therapeutic tool to gain insight into why behaviours or repeating patterns keep happening to you in the present lifetime.  By exploring our past lives we can send forgiveness, healing and gain insight as well as letting go of karmic contracts.  PLRT also can help us find resources for what is happening in this lifetime, enabling us to remember our strengths and resiliences and apply them to this lifetime.

Often the last thing about weight management is the actual weight problem.  Anxiety, fears, unhelpful behaviours and habitual patterns are prevalent in most cases, whether emotional eating or habitual eating is the thing the client most wants help with.

Hypnotherapy for weight management is not a diet, it is a whole programme of change, working on the inner and outer self, developing new lasting habits for change and personal growth.  If you are ready to make the changes, commitment is key.  Hypnosis is not a magic wand for weight management, it is a collaborative process between Yvonne and you.  Tasks and self-development between sessions are a part of this process for lasting change.