Hypnotherapy is a “talking therapy” where hypnosis is used to help you access, explore, and change unhelpful thoughts, feelings, fears, and behaviours. Those that are stopping you from living your life the way you want to. The therapist utilises active listening, a number of psychotherapy techniques, and always hypnosis. A typical hypnotherapy session will involve client narrative (counselling), exploration of self and feelings, and hypnosis to help access inner resources and help make lasting psychological change.
At its simplest level, it is an altered state of focus. Typically, the therapist will ask you to close your eyes and use your imagination to follow their voice. If there is a good rapport between the client and therapist often a trance-like state is induced. Most clients report feeling deeply relaxed, or a feeling of otherness and expansion, of daydreaming, or simply taking time out. Many clients report a sensation of shifting in and out of awareness. Quite often people feel like they have been “away” or in a sleep that is not quite the same as conventional sleep. People sometimes are aware of pleasant feelings of warmness or tingling as they go through the Hypno session. Hypnotherapy works on the basis that when an altered state is stimulated the client is more open to accepting positive direct suggestions where the creative mind is able to explore and access internal resources to give meaningful insights that provide the solutions and healing sought.
All too often we think of happiness as a fixed state or destination. It’s something that we aim to be, most of the time. We identify things, people, or activities that we hope will make us happy. Then crash when these things don’t seem to make us happy at all, or only momentarily please us. We put our happiness into the hands of externalities, things outside of ourselves over which we have limited or no control. And we forget to take account of the fact that every moment of every day we are beings in motion. Not just physical motion but emotional, mental, and (for many) spiritual. We are fluid, constantly evolving, changing, experiencing, and shifting. In order to feel mostly happy, most of the time we have to develop an ability to mark moments of happiness as they arise. To choose to recognise them and then smile. This means training ourselves to bring into conscious awareness those little pockets of joy that pepper our day. Those moments fall under the radar. The smile from a stranger and the great smell of coffee. The little boy skipping down the street and your faithful pet settling down on your lap. The rain running down the windowpane and the pattern of sunlight on the ground through tree branches. Little moments that lift our day. If we let them. It is easy to mark and notice the big things; the promotion at work, the marriage proposal, the holiday abroad, etc. But these things don’t happen every day and the moments of bliss they inspire don’t last forever.
If we make a choice and habit around noticing tiny moments of joy, they start to weave together. They become joined up and form the majority impression of our experience. And that is the true secret of happiness. Watch a small child at play, see how they do it. Learn from them. They are masters of appreciating the little things. Once you start making a habit of noticing how much you enjoy little things, you start knitting together a life filled mostly with enjoyment and appreciation. A little bit like that old saying. “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”. But the currency here is happiness. In a world where we are programmed to focus primarily on the negative, this is a skill that needs to be activated and practiced. Hypnotherapy can help with this.