So a lot of people resist taking the plunge and using hypnotherapy to regain control of various parts of their lives because of their quite reasonable fear of the unknown.
We have all seen enough movies or TV shows to ‘know’ that hypnosis is scary.
Just the other day I had a client seeking reassurance that I wasn’t “going to do anything ‘weird’ like that chicken thing” to her.
We had a laugh at the time but I thought about it some more and realised that this is a big barrier to seeking out my professional help.
People often just assume that there is some sort of trick or scam involved.
They find the concept fascinating but they aren’t willing to expose ‘themselves’ to the risk that maybe, just maybe, I can do the things that I say I can.
They are often caught on tenterhooks, a dilemma of ‘either they can do what they say they can in which case I make myself very vulnerable to a complete stranger, or they can’t and I’ve just been taken for a ride by a con-artist!’
So I get a lot of people that sit on the fence, in a similar war to how a lot of people hold off going to see a doctor until it’s so late that it’s going to take a miracle to prevent permanent harm.
All this is a long wind up to what I actually thought I might talk about. If you were to book an appointment with me, what can you expect to happen?
First thing you might notice is that I’m going to talk, I’m going to talk a lot!
The next thing that you might notice depends a bit on you. No two people are exactly the same. Some people are so open and trusting that they sink into a deep relaxed state and suddenly seem to come awake feeling refreshed and strangely free of the nagging compulsion that had been with them.
I regard those people who are so willing to give their trust to me as a precious gift. I can help their unconscious mind find great outcomes straight off the bat and they have a powerful immediate experience.
They are pretty rare though, most people have, to some degree or another a quite different experience. Most people find themselves going through the session still being largely aware.
They are listening to me, perhaps even occasionally asking themselves questions like:
“when am I going to feel like I’m hypnotised?”
or
“am I even doing this right?”
These are quite natural thoughts to have, I occasionally even have my clients leave feeling just as skeptical after their initial session, as when they arrived.
Most of the time, people become a believer later that day or sometime during the week, when they, or someone else around them, notices them doing something that seems out of character for them.
Perhaps eating a salad for the first time ever, or taking the stairs. I’ve lost track of the times a client has come to their second session and started with the line “You won’t believe what happened to me!”
The thing that I like most about these stories are that they rarely have anything directly to do with things that I have suggested.
People take advantage of the hypnotic state to change their own minds and their own habits. They decide what healthy looks like to them and suddenly find that it is easy to follow through with that.
All the annoying baggage that was holding them back has been suddenly tidied up and put away by them.
I suppose that the thing I want to say most is that the control is always in your hands, what you would get out of a session is largely up to you and how much you make of the opportunity is largely up to you too.
The experience is very little like what you might have seen on the TV and I like to think of it as more a chance for you to take back control than to give it up to me.
