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.
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Les and Mark had been close friends for many years as part of the same intake in the airforce. During those working years they were best mates and supportive to each other.
They had each gotten married, had children and had lots of BBQ’s and family get-togethers. After 20 years or so, both left the airforce and went in different directions. Les took an overseas assignment and Mark got a job locally as an engineer making tanks for the wine industry. Both were leading different lives and they eventually lost touch with each other. About a year ago, Les returned to New Zealand and settled in Blenheim again. He tried to look up Mark with no success, but one day by chance he bumped into Mark. He was horrified to see his old mate fallen on hard times, out of work, couldn’t get a job, and he would not tell Les where he was living. He pretended to Les that everything was fine, but Les could see through the façade. Les caught up with other mutual acquaintances and found out what had actually happened to Mark. He had developed an addiction to gambling and was unable to pass any pokie machine without having a go. He would gamble up to $500 at a time. During this period of time he lost his house, his marriage and his family and ended up in assisted accommodation. Les was so upset he researched how he could help his old friend and came across an article in his wife’s copy of This and That. He gave me a call and asked whether I could assist. I said yes, because hypnotherapy helps deal with addiction - and gambling is an addiction. He talked to Mark, and at first Mark denied that he had a problem. This went on for several weeks, but eventually Les’s persistence paid off and Mark agreed to give hypnotherapy a go. I followed up with Mark a few week ago after his two sessions with me. His transformation was immediately noticeable. I had given him strategies to make sure he never put himself in temptations way and to my delight he had used those tools and had managed to control the urge to gamble again. Mark told me that without his friend, Les, he would never have come this far and is so grateful for the friendship. Fred has a fear of spiders
One sight of the eight legged creatures and Fred is out the door - fast. But Fred - a 24 year old landscape gardener - didn't want his fear of spiders to hold him back in life. So he confronted his fear face-on by... er... ...having a huge black spider tattooed onto the side of his face. I'm not entirely sure how it will make his fear of spiders go away... but it certainly made his girlfriend go away (she dumped him flat as soon as she saw his spider tat.) You know what? I think Fred would have saved himself a whole heap of trouble by going to a hypnotist who could have cured him of his spider phobia. So how can I help people overcome fears and thoughts that irrationally get in their way? Why are people scared of flying, when the stats prove that they are more likely to get run over? Why can people not remember a dressage test, or a dog agility course, even though they know them very well beforehand? Why do people freeze when playing a certain type of golf shot? There are, of course, hundreds of examples. All these fears and phobias, anxieties and habits have once upon a time, and for some reason, been learnt, and have become automatic behaviours. But the good news is that, providing a change is really wanted, then the habit can be changed into something more beneficial and effective. This applies also to smoking and weight management. So I will always ask the question: “do you want to change?” I often get calls from people who want their husbands, mothers, sons to stop smoking, drinking, lose weight, but I will never work with someone if the desire to change their life is not theirs. In order to change any habits, fears and phobias, no matter how much you want the change for someone else, the change will not last unless YOU, yourself want it. I saw a client recently who came to me because she was really frightened of flying. She hadn’t wanted to do anything about it, because she really did not enjoy the idea of travelling until…. Her husband desperately wanted to go to Australia, and, so fed up with his wife’s fears, told her he would take her best friend. That changed her mind very fast! As she left my clinic, she said “Do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going to apply for a passport”! I later heard that she was now happily getting on a plane and holidaying with her husband! Fears, phobias, bad habits, anxieties CAN be changed. Hypnotherapy is the easiest means to get you from where you are now to where you want to be. Let’s be honest, things have been tough in New Zealand recently. Economic hardship, lockdowns, extreme weather causing massive chaos.
It’s no wonder that good, honest, hardworking Kiwi’s are feeling stressed and stretched to their limits. The bills and expenses keep mounting up, and it seems like everyday just brings more bad news. But I’d like to offer a ray of hope. A chance that tomorrow could be a better day. To help you bring back some of those lost feelings of joy. Of feeling confident in yourself, and ready to face any challenge that comes your way. See stress and anxiety is created within our minds. We generate it as a self-defense mechanism, to keep us feeling small to try to protect us from danger. But imagine if you could take control of your mind, and lovingly remind yourself that you are actually a strong and capable and brave person. To teach your mind to remove stress and anxiety, and instead fill you with a sense of serene calm. Sound crazy? Imagine the next time life threw a challenge at you and you thought "I can handle this - bring it on!" How powerful and in control would that make you feel? That's what hypnotherapy is, and that's what hypnotherapy can do for you. We go through a process of gently reminding your mind to dislike and avoid stressful and anxiety inducing thoughts, while at the same time learning to love and even crave healthy, joyful states of being. And the best part is you remain completely in control the entire time. If you’re interested to find out more, click the button and get in touch. I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have. I am now offering a complete online hypnotherapy service across all New Zealand through zoom. I'm here to support you on your journey. This is what resilience in the face of adversity looks like.
Cyclone Gabrielle was a slap in the face that many of us are still grappling with the concept of, let alone the ramifications. It sometimes seems as though each time things are just starting to look better, something else comes along to give New Zealand another good kicking. Those metaphors seem appropriate given the recent statistics that say family harm is up by some 60% in those areas most affected by Cyclone Gabrielle. For many, the stress is unmanageable. When things get grim, it would seem that many turn on the people around them, when it seems like we should all be pulling together. It’s easy to get caught up in that tendency towards self absorption, to get stuck on “How has this affected me”? And to think of yourself first, that’s fair enough, in an emergency sometimes you have to look after yourself first just so you can look after other people. And it’s easy to go all doom and gloom! When you do so though, you blind yourself to the good too. I have a friend who was incredibly proud of how he had set up his new house. About a month and a half ago he was posting photos of his dedicated gaming room, showing off what must have represented years of work, painting tiny little miniature figurines and specialist hand-built, table sized landscapes to display them all on. It’s all destroyed now! His posts though have all been in good humour, he thinks he might be able to rescue maybe 20% of the figures. He’s chosen to focus instead on the relief efforts, the volunteers and how lucky he is that his family is safe. I think that’s the core of what resilience is, to shake yourself out of the “woe is me” mentality and instead look outside to see how you can help others and how they can help you. We are often told that being stoic, that ‘toughening’ up or showing grit, displays the true measure of a person. I believe that is just the sign of a very lonely person though. I believe that you show your true self when you reach out to help however you can. When you recognise that no man is an island, that sometimes it’s okay to not be okay but to be able to recognise when other people have it worse. That’s when you can show your true character. There is going to be a lot of rebuilding, there are going to be less presents from the government to the general public as they focus on things like buying back unsafe land and building stronger infrastructure given the likelihood of more extreme weather events in the future. New Zealand is not yet done with Cyclone Gabrielle and we won’t be for some time. There is going to be a lot of anxiety in the future, I fully expect that I will get a few calls from people wanting help dealing with a crippling fear of future extreme events. There will be job uncertainty as entire industries have been destroyed. Short term, many who lack savings and live paycheque to paycheque will have been devastated even if they weren’t directly affected. Even my own business, safely having dodged the weather, is down massively thanks to bigger emergencies and internet connectivity issues. I’ve been thankful every day since. We are all in this together though, and we are stronger, to quote former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, as a team of 5 million. Love her or hate her, she was right. The best way to heal ourselves is to reach out to each other and, maybe it’s naïve of me to think so, but I believe that exemplifies the core of New Zealand values and our potential resilience in the face of adversity. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” A short heart-warming story for whomever may need a little brightness today:
Juliette (name changed for privacy of course) had in a previous happy marriage, gone through two courses of IVF to try and start her family. It was emotionally difficult, to say the least. The IVF team warned her that because she was a smoker, she would reduce her chances of a successful conception. However, she could not kick the habit no matter how hard she tried. The IVF treatment failed and the stress of the process and failure, coupled with the stress from her husband, who was a non-smoker, meant that the marriage also didn’t survive. In April last year, I got a phone call from Juliette, in a panic, begging for an urgent appointment. She was in a new relationship with a childhood friend, whom she had re-met online soon after her marriage failed. Now 42 years old, she was totally astonished to find herself 6 weeks pregnant. Unfortunately she was still smoking and she desperately wanted to quit, as she didn’t want to put her baby at risk. As with all my hypnotherapy clients who want to give up a difficult habit, I took her through my sessions, spaced a week apart. The first session for the addiction and the second for the habit. The second session reinforced the fact she no longer needed to smoke. After the first session she was amazed how easy it was to totally stop, after all these years, with no cravings whatsoever. This was in her eyes a small miracle after all the time that she had been enslaved by cigarettes. I also helped her to manage her fears of losing her baby by considerably reducing her anxiety. By the second session, she said she felt as though she was floating out of my clinic! I was so happy when Juliette rang me to tell me she had had a beautiful healthy baby girl and to thank me for saving both of their lives. ❤️ Click here to eOne of the things I love most about my work is the large diversity of goals and aspirations my clients have. Everyday brings new challenges, and new opportunities to help people just like you, to reach their highest potential in life.
To illustrate this, I’d like to share with you Evelyn’s story (name changed for privacy of course). A few years back, Evelyn approached me to help her resolve a troubling issue she was having. See, Eveyln competed nationally in rifling. And she was good. Very good. One of the best in New Zealand in her category in fact. However, she knew she was capable of doing even better. The problem was that in sets of ten shots, she would land the first 7 shots flawlessly, but invariably choke on the last two or three shots. She took her sport very seriously, investing time and money to compete and she was even more invested in doing well. There was no apparent reason for her misses, but every time it came to those last few critical attempts at the target she would over-think, and miss the shot. Now, similar to golf, riflers invariably have a rhythm or routine leading up to each shot. Unfortunately sometimes those patterns or bad habits which have been so deeply ingrained, can be self-sabotaging, and in Evelyn’s case, she’d get excited every time she’d approach the end of her set. She’d start thinking: “this time I’m going to make it, I’m going to have a great run through.” The distracting thoughts then increased her heart rate, and she’d try to overcompensate, and then invariably miss the target. Desperate for a solution, we worked together to find the answer. I helped her to create a new thought pattern habit, that whenever she put her finger on the trigger it was as if she was taking her first shot, calm and relaxed. Shortly after our sessions, she went to the qualifiers for the NZ international team. As you can imagine tensions were high. Just after her ranging shot to make sure her gun was sighted in, the unimaginable happened: her scope fell apart, and the lenses popped out. She was now completely unable to even see the target, but by the rules of the competition she had to continue. Scrambling, she tried tying her scope back together with string. That took so long that after a couple shots that were nowhere near the target her spotter was called away to help someone else. So there she was, a useless scope, a gun that wasn’t sighted in, two shots wasted and no spotter. She told me quite frankly that, under normal circumstances she would have gone to pieces right then and there. What happened instead was quite spectacular. She took a deep breath, relaxed, and thought up a new plan. She took off the broken x10 scope, replaced it with a spare x7 scope that she had with her. This scope under normal circumstances would not have nearly enough zoom, but she was calm and working with the resources she had available. She then proceeded to hit the target perfectly. Every time she squeezed the trigger, she said she heard my voice in the back of her mind reminding her of the process and felt a total zen-like calm. She made it to the Nationals team and proceeded to join the international competition, representing NZ around the world and making us all proud. And for this I say thank you Evelyn. Last word on this: If you’ve been struggling, if you feel you have a bad habit that is holding you back in life, including negative thoughts, negative beliefs, poor self-talk, constant self-doubt, whether on the sports field, in the office, or in your relationships, let’s talk and see if we can help you to break free. If you’re curious to find ways to ‘un-stuck’ yourself, schedule a free 15 min discovery call and I’ll show you what hypnotherapy can do for you. dit. Story time: I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about what people can expect from weight loss hypnotherapy.
I do a few types with different focuses but the most common is VGB or Virtual Gastric Banding. Some clients are nervous about trying hypnotherapy for the first time, because they’re unsure what to expect. So I wanted to share a real story, of a real client experience, to help shed some light on the matter. I have of course changed the name for privacy. Sarah came to me with a laundry list of things that she wanted to change in her life. This is great because the better a client can articulate their goals, the better results they tend to have. She wanted increased energy levels, she wanted to be able to buy off the rack clothes, she wanted to be, in her own words “all around happy and healthy and free from being scared of other people’s judgment.” She found that she was constantly exhausted, she was going through menopause which wasn’t helping and she was finding exercise a chore even though she wanted to get back into social basketball. During the session we discussed how hypnosis and habits work, I performed a few simple demonstrations to help set her mind at ease and then we got into it. The session itself often doesn’t feel very dramatic unless I’m helping with chronic pain or anxiety. I often have people initially leave with hopeful but unconvinced looks on their faces at this point. But this is where the magic starts. I usually try to have a week between sessions, this allows new habits to start to settle and the results to start to become more obvious. In this case however, our next session was ten days later due to scheduling conflicts. Sarah had found the week ‘interesting’ (her own words). She started to find that having a small plate at mealtimes felt like more than enough. In fact, on a couple of occasions she had tried to eat a bit more and found that the imaginary band around her stomach made eating more unappealing. Usually people just lose interest in eating more but that momentary feeling of discomfort isn’t uncommon. She talked about how much energy she had and complained that she had actually had to reduce her bra size and kept having to hitch her socks up. Remember that this is just after 10 days! I spent the rest of the session reinforcing good habits. Session three came along, demonstrating why I do four sessions. We again had a ten day gap, this time because the country had decided to stop being the Land of the Long White Cloud and instead become the Land of the Long Damp Pond. Flooding had hit much of the North and South Islands and Sarah had been dealing with a family member's house being waterlogged which meant they were displaced for a few weeks. Anyway, she had noticed a few old bad habits creeping back in while she was dealing with all the disruption. Still, to her surprise she found she was able to forgive herself for the occasional slip up. Besides, to her delight, she hadn’t once touched take-out since our first session. Our fourth and final session she was back on track. It was seven days since our previous session and, to be blunt, I could see that she was a different person than the one I first met four weeks beforehand. She was smiling a lot more, she seemed to be much more focused and confident too. I had to laugh though when she described her situation to me. Again, in her own words, she “hadn’t lost a huge amount to date!” When I asked her what that meant, she said “Eight and a half kg!” I wanted to talk about motivation because so many people have this impulse to define themselves by what they fail to do rather than what they actually accomplish.
I see this all the time, I see beautiful, funny, and sensitive people who just read a litany of all the things wrong in their life, an inventory of their mistakes and the times they fell short. They come to me hoping that I can turn them into a different person and I want to shake their shoulders and show them the person I can see. Someone who has taken that massive step of getting my help. Someone who is motivated to improve and move forward. In short, someone who has made the worthy decision to be the person that I can see is already there. The people who achieve the greatest successes when I work with them are invariably the people who let go of their baggage. The people who, instead of saying they “have always smoked”, say they are “done with smoking.” The people who, instead of saying “I’m fat”, say “I’m becoming a size and shape that I am happy with.” I’m reminded of a screenshot I came across a while back. Someone contacted the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, love him or hate him, Arnold has accomplished quite a lot in his life and this is the whole conversation: The message I take away from this is that you shouldn’t allow yourself to be defined by the times you didn’t measure up to the standards you would like. Instead, use those moments to inform your future efforts and acknowledge those moments when you actually did something, accomplished something or moved a step closer to a goal. This is something that is often easier said than done, sometimes the urge to curl up in a ball and pretend that the world can’t hurt us can be overwhelming. However the world isn’t actually cruel, sometimes we are given nothing but bad options and choices but it’s not because the Universe hates you. That is all in your head, sometimes you get given opportunities and sometimes they get taken away. What matters is what you choose to do about it and whether you recognise an opportunity when it comes along? One thing I guarantee though, is that you are never going to notice an opportunity coming up if you spend your life looking backwards, and seeing all those moments that should have been life lessons, instead become chains that hold you back. Sometimes trying, and only getting some of the way there is useful, we learn something about ourselves or we get closer to success next time. Only if you allow yourself to do so though. I think we all tend to sometimes get pessimistic and down on ourselves but, as Arnold suggests, that is just “useless talk” and, as he also says, “don’t be afraid to ask for help.” Just hours after I wrote my last newsletter, I found out that a friend of mine, who I have known for at least 25 years, had lost a long-term battle with depression, and taken his own life.
I’m still processing how I feel and, even though we hadn’t been in touch since before COVID, it’s still deeply painful. The thing that stands out to me is that I didn’t even realise that he suffered from depression, he did a remarkable job of concealing it and always seemed to be the life of any discussions. He was animated, passionate and happy to make a joke, even at his own expense. That’s certainly how I am going to remember him, but it is seemingly at odds with this new thing that I learnt with his passing. I did some research in my attempts to understand how I was clueless. In some part of my mind, I felt that my experience in hypnotism should have somehow brought warning signs to my attention even with our sporadic meetings over the last several years. The official figures suggest that about 1 in 6 kiwis suffer from depression at some stage in their life and it can hit anyone. It seems that women are more likely to be affected than men although women are also much more likely to do something about it and seek help. It can even affect children. Depression presents a range of symptoms that are classed as mild to severe and can be recognised by constantly feeling down or hopeless regardless of circumstance, maybe losing interest in things you once enjoyed. Often this is combined with sleep problems or negative feelings in general. There is some degree of stigma associated with depression which is why it can come as a surprise when the occasional celebrity admits to suffering from depression. I want to emphasize that it’s not a sign of ‘weakness’ to suffer depression and I would argue that it is a sign of strength instead to seek help. I also suspect that the official figures are wrong. From anecdotal evidence alone, based on my interactions with clients who don’t believe themselves to be depressed but seem to exhibit those symptoms I suspect that a lot more than 1 in 6 battle with depression at some point in their lives. The good news is that it is treatable. Embattled though our healthcare system is, there are various pharmacological solutions to the more extreme cases. The rest of the time a simple lifestyle change, or psychological therapy can make a world of difference. And don’t forget, hypnotherapy can help too. I would never suggest replacing conventional healthcare, but the reality is that I have different tools at my disposal that your classically trained psychiatrist does not, just as they can prescribe drugs that I could not. With an overworked healthcare system that is under supported though, I believe that hypnosis can be a valuable tool and supplement to beating many forms of depression. Even though it saddens me that I failed to notice my friend’s troubles or help him, I can and have helped people that came to me for depression or depression symptoms. I guess the thing I most want to share here is that it is not a failing if you have to, reach out for help when negative feelings threaten to overwhelm you. If not me, then someone is out there and willing to offer support. Take advantage of them if you need to because no one will think less of you for doing so, and it could make a world of difference. When you’re ready, let’s talk. |
Daniel
Certified hypnotherapist. Archives
April 2023
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