Hypnotherapy

Clinical hypnosis (also known as hypnotherapy) is an effective tool for facilitating the changes people want in their lives.  Hypnosis has helped many people achieve their goals and has been used successfully to help people overcome a range of difficulties.

We realise that everyone is unique and our aim at Life Unlimited is to ensure that your needs are met as an individual rather than using the same approach for everyone.  The starting point is to help you discover your desired outcomes and then use the style of intervention that fits best for you.  Many people who are not familiar with hypnosis prefer to experience a light trance state and this is sufficient for dealing with most issues.  You will feel comfortable and relaxed so that the desirable changes you have identified can be embedded in your mind and acted upon in the future. 

Elizabeth is a qualified hypnotherapist who works with the latest and most effective methods for rapid change, meaning fewer sessions and lower costs for clients.  Experience suggests that the majority of people can easily be guided into a trance state sufficient for creating beneficial changes.  Elizabeth combines hypnosis with a range of other techniques depending on the clients' needs including NLP, emotional freedom technique, eye movement desensitisation reprocessing, timelines therapy and coaching.  Many issues take only between 2 - 5 sessions to overcome.

In order to understand how hypnosis works, the first thing to recognise is that we have both a conscious and an unconscious mind.  Our conscious mind contains everything we are paying attention to at a certain moment in time.  In the unconscious, all the information we might need is stored ready for our use.  If I ask you the question, 'what does an orange look like?' you will probably find that you have the ability to picture an orange before the end of this sentence.  The image of the orange was stored in your unconscious and was made conscious by the question.

Hypnosis is effective at solving many problems that cannot be dealt with consciously.  Using a light trance relaxes the conscious mind and allows desirable ways of thinking and behaving in the future to be embedded in the unconscious mind.  Trance is a natural state of awareness and is present whenever we are fully absorbed in an activity.  It is like a conscious suspension of disbelief.  Think of a film or programme you saw where the events taking place were quite far-fetched yet despite this you jumped when something surprising happened.  This is because you had allowed yourself to be absorbed in the drama and had put yourself in the character's place.  At the same time, you knew that it was make-believe and no-one could have convinced you that it was really happening.

Compare this to young children, however, who are quite willing to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Clause.  Their imaginations are much more active because their conscious mind has not yet been hardened to believing in what is possible and what is not.  The great thing about children is they believe that anything is possible.  If you ask a child what she wants to be when she grows up she will say 'an airline pilot'.  She won't add that this is very unlikely, given that it is a male-dominated profession and she would need impeccable health and exceptional qualifications.  An adult, however, will convince herself that it's an impossible dream and will have a host of reasonable excuses that will prevent her from trying.

Yet we know of many people who achieved feats that seemed impossible.  Often we decide this is because they are different from us in some way and we are probably right.  They are prepared to believe in themselves enough to overcome everyone else's reasonable objections.  There is nothing wrong, however, in having a strong conscious mind.  Children are vulnerable because of their open minds and as adults we need to protect ourselves from those who would exploit us.  We need to be consciously in control in most situations and to weigh things up when making decisions.  However, sometimes it is also helpful to release some of the control of the conscious mind to allow us to achieve some of our goals and aims in an effortless and pleasant way.

The goal of the hypnotherapist is to facilitate you in relaxing your conscious mind to achieve the outcomes you would like, just as the goal of the filmmaker is to gain that same cooperation from you for your entertainment.  You choose to allow yourself to be absorbed in the suggestions made by the therapist because you recognise both consciously and unconsciously the benefits of playing along with them. 

Stage hypnosis often creates wariness as people are startled by the surprising ways in which people are prepared to humiliate themselves in public!  They are horrified to think of themselves in this position and it seems that the stage hypnotist is very powerful to control people's behaviour in this way.  It makes some people wary of visiting a hypnotherapist.  The real skill of the stage hypnotist, however, is in picking people who are keen to be in the limelight and happy to play along with any suggestions that will get them attention.  Think how reality TV celebrities behave in front of millions of viewers, and no-one put them in a trance first, did they?  I remember one celebrity attaching bunny ears made of leaves and hopping around like a rabbit on a TV show set in the jungle but there were no hypnotists around.

The truth about hypnosis is that you will always be acting in your own best interests and rather than being passively asleep during a session, you are in contact with the inner wisdom that enables you to make positive changes in your life.  Visit the About Us page to find out how to make an appointment or call us for a chat.