The Drugs Don't Work!
Can Hypnotherapy heal the problems that traditional treatments
cannot resolve? Is it our attitudes towards bad habits and
illness, that encourages us treat the symptoms and not the
causes?
"Hypnosis" may conjure up images of swinging pendulums and stage
trickery, but it's a technique that's recently undergone
something of a change in attitudes towards its use as a healing
tool. It is also enjoying a renewed interest from the scientific
and medical community as more and more academic studies show
significant positive results. It's also apparent that some
people are more able to progress into a hypnotic state than
others, some people respond and some don't.
There's now some pretty conclusive evidence that Hypnosis is
effective in pain management and very successful in the
treatment of stress, anxiety, fears and phobias. It's widely
used in dealing with habitual problems, especially smoking and
other forms of addiction. It's also used to control certain
psychosomatic problems like seizures and irritable bowel
syndrome.
So, what's hypnotherapy all about? Hypnosis is an altered state
of consciousness, which is a little bit like day-dreaming. Have
you ever driven somewhere and during the journey your mind has
been focused on something completely different to the job of
driving, and when you have arrived at your destination, you
realise that you remember no details of the drive? You were in a
hypnotic trance! You were miles away consciously, but your
sub-conscious mind was driving the car and doing it quite
adequately without the conscious mind interfering, then suddenly
you're back to reality.
Full Conscious Awareness is the state in which we spend most of
our waking hours. In this state, our mind is attentive and uses
logic to reason, evaluate, judge, and make decisions.
Unfortunately, when attempting to make life changes, the
conscious mind often gets in the way of our desires, by creating
doubts and conflict in our thinking.
Hypnosis is special because it opens up a channel of
communication between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind.
It is not sleep, but a relaxed state, where the critical faculty
is bypassed, where we focus and close down the conscious mind,
where we store all of our beliefs and values. We can then allow
ourselves to absorb new values, beliefs and desires, thus
enabling changes that we want to happen, to occur.
At a subconscious level we don't think in the usual way. Our
minds react and we can't distinguish between reality and
unreality, we absorb all the information received through the
senses as true, as real.
In the Hypnotic State, you are "experiencing" without
questioning, without critical judgment or analysis, you are able
to suspend your dis-belief, a little like when you are watching
a movie, and the hypnotherapist can make suggestions that are
very likely to feel real and to permanently alter your values
and beliefs - precisely because your conscious mind is not
getting in the way. You are not "judging" or being "critical" of
the suggestions.
So why is it that some people respond and some don't? Generally,
if two or more emotions are in conflict, the dominant one wins
out over the weaker. Imagination wins out over will power,
emotions win out over logic, the subconscious mind wins out over
the conscious, every time, Our emotions rule. If for some
reason, you will yourself not to allow suggestions to be
accepted, they won't be. The habitual smoker who asks for help
to quit smoking but is not really committed to that goal, cannot
be forced to do so against their will.
By definition, Habits, are those repetitive behaviors that you
do "without thinking." With the critical faculty bypassed and by
using the power of imagination, specific thoughts and
suggestions can be placed in the subconscious where they can
propel someone toward a desired goal or change behavior in a
positive, permanent way.
I am not for a moment suggesting that drug treatments should be
abandoned in every case. There is clearly a time and a place for
drug-based therapies, but all too often people assume that there
is a pill for everything that is wrong and that simply is not
the case.
In many cases drugs are not a cure, we rely too much on the
treatment of symptoms and not enough on the causes of our
problems. A change in attitude towards the way we think about
illness and well-being, may enable us to treat the causes and
eliminate the problems permanently.