Techniques in Hypnotherapy

The subconscious mind controls our emotions, our self-esteem, our beliefs, our immune systems, and our bodies. It is filled with awesome mysteries and incredible powers. Hypnosis is the primary method used to contact the subconscious mind.

According to Carl Jung, the first modern alchemists were the Inner Guides. These powerful entities live within the subconscious mind and can guide us to health, happiness, relationships, prosperity, and the fulfilment of our spiritual purpose. These Guides can be accessed through hypnosis. Alchemical Hypnotherapy synthesizes techniques from many modern schools and includes Regression Therapy, NLP or Inner Child Work. It was developed by David Quigley and is destined as a tool to help accessing clients to contact their Inner Guides and to assist to self-help.

Aversion Therapy was a popular technique in the 1940's and earlier. The idea of this technique is to link certain habits to negative emotions to make the client change their patterns. Clients were given for example suggestions like "every time you smoke you will feel sick". Although it might be effective in some cases, this technique is nowadays very controversial, because the first and foremost should be the client feeling well. If s/he has been an alcoholic for several years, one session cannot stop him/her from drinking, and the fact that he feels ill or guilty after having drunk a bottle of beer will contribute to him/her feeling even worse and could trigger a reverse effect.

Hypnotherapy is a great tool to rescue the inner child from the trauma, neglect and emotional pain of the past. Our emotional wounds have been dictating our lives and keeping us from loving ourselves and being truly happy. We have to provide new loving parents to the inner child and create within ourselves a loving inner world in which someone is always there to hear and respond to our inner needs. Although Inner Child Work is not a sole hypnotherapy tool, it can be very helpful for the client to make peace with the inner child and heal sad childhood memories that way, especially after Hypnoanalysis.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a fairly recent technique that was developed in the mid seventies at the University of Santa Cruz by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It explores the inner workings of the human mind, for example how we think, how we develop goals and fears etc. With NLP we can make positive changes, create new choices and break free of old habits. It allows the client to take full responsibility to improve their lives. It is also used in business or sport, for example, to increase our inner resources in order to achieve our real potential.

Suggestion Therapy is regarded an old-fashioned technique by many modern hypnotherapists, maybe because it is the traditional and original approach to hypnosis. 'Suggestion' is how one spells out one's goals and instruct the subconscious mind to achieve these goals. Therefore it is important to know how to formulate suggestions and how to apply them. The mind is resistant to change and therefore suggestions are more successful if they are put in a persuasive manner rather than a command. Suggestion therapy is useful for simpler problems such as habit cessation, stress reduction and simple phobias. Generally these kinds of problems can be sorted in only a few sessions. However, it deals with the symptoms only. For this reason it works sometimes only for a short period of time and the clients do have to know the causes in order to establish permanent healing.

Hypnohealing is a method advised by Bill Atkinson-Ball in the early 1960's. He put the fact that the mind heals the body into a healing technique. Every feeling has an affect on the body chemistry. The technique is to check with the subconscious mind whether there is some 'secondary gain' for the client by their illness and then to remove the blockage. The treatment is followed by visualisation techniques, while it is important to allow the client to see his own images of the disease.

Regression Therapy is usually the most fascinating tool to clients, but also the probably most feared one. It is used to discover and help the client by going back to the cause of a problem. This is particularly beneficial for emotional problems. Everything that has happened in our life so far is stored somewhere in the sub-conscious mind. Many of these memories we forget quickly or do not even notice them. Yet they can trigger problems in our health or behaviour. By guiding the client back to those situations they remember it consciously and are able to change certain emotions linked to it. Usually alone the recall of these memories is enough to cure the person. Once the cause is removed or resolved, the permanent relief from symptoms is achieved.

Although quite frequently the causes of a specific problem can be found earlier in our lives, our childhood or birth traumas, sometimes it is necessary to regress further and look for the cause in a past life. One interesting aspect of past life regression work is the time between death and re-birth. During this time tremendous healing takes place and it is a great time to delete certain patterns carried on from one life to another by the soul. However, this technique has to be used carefully in order to avoid confrontations with clients who are very religious and not believing in karma or reincarnation. There are plenty of tapes available for sale on the topic of past life regression. Many people are just curious, and want to try it out. This is very dangerous as one never knows what kind of memories come up during regression. A qualified therapist knows how to handle this and can dissociate the client when events are very painful. Dissociation means, that the client is watching the event like a movie without being actually involved. As the knowledge and understanding of certain things are enough to bring about healing, it is not necessary that a person has to re-live horrible times or painful deaths to heal the symptoms influencing him/her in the present life.

Hypnosis for pain relief has become more and more accepted in recent years. As our body is able to produce substances equal to morphine it is a natural process to access this 'tap' for pain relief or anaesthesia. However, it is important to check first the medical diagnosis before treating the client. Recent research also revealed that it is not so much the suggestions, but alone through the hypnotic state itself, these endorphins are released. It is also a great tool for a woman to go through the pregnancy and birth with ease.

Of course, a certain technique may work very well in one case, but fails in the next. No two problems and certainly no two people are alike. Therefore it is necessary to judge in each individual case, which technique is the most useful to the client. There are many combinations and the most important is to be flexible in order to make the client benefit most from the session.