“Can hypnotherapy help me?” It’s a question Tunbridge Wells based hypnotherapist Karen Martin is frequently asked.
Hypnotherapy is a greatly misunderstood practice. It is often associated with the typical swaying pocket watch and the words ‘look straight into my eyes… you’re feeling sleepy…’. Stage hypnosis adds to the confusion by encouraging hapless volunteers to do ludicrous things for the entertainment of an audience. Far from being a sort of amusement, real hypnosis provides individuals with the opportunity to change adverse habits, like overindulging or cigarette smoking, through working with the subconscious. However, it’s prudent to ask ‘Will hypnotherapy work for me?’ if you’re toying with trying it out for yourself. With so many common myths surrounding this practice, it is important to learn the truth about hypnosis and how it can bring favourable changes to your life.
How it Works
The hypnotherapist can swap undesirable beliefs or behaviours by making use of suggestion and imagery to re-wire the unconscious mind. Unlike the conscious mind, which only stores a small amount of what we encounter, the subconscious remembers everything, by and large without us knowing about it. By accessing this complicated ‘unseen’ network of forgotten past memories and deep rooted current beliefs, the hypnotherapist can help the individual to produce new, more advantageous patterns of behaviour by working directly with the source.
A frequent misunderstanding is the fact that hypnotherapists make people fall asleep. However, what in fact occurs is that the person is guided into a significantly relaxed state of mind.
Some people don’t even realise how relaxed they’ve become until they are brought back into a fully alert state of mind. Or it may appear to them that their state of mind hasn’t been altered at all, as awareness of activities around them like the hypnotherapist’s words or noises externally remain consistent throughout the session. But many people can be surprised by how little they can remember later, as often a degree of amnesia is a symptom of hypnosis.
Real effects
Karen said: “Many of my clients have had life-changing results through our hypnotherapy sessions. As a result, I get many visits by recommendation from those wanting to deal with issues like smoking, destructive addictions, depression, anxiety and panic, obesity, insomnia, and more. Countless celebrities, like Kevin Costner, Orlando Bloom, Sophie Dahl and Matt Damon have also publicly endorsed the benefits of hypnotherapy.”
Hypnotherapy is by no means a recent fad or passing craze. In the 1890’s, the British Medical Association commissioned an assessment to determine the nature and effects of hypnosis: “The Committee are of opinion,” it reported, “that as a therapeutic agent hypnotism is frequently effective in relieving pain, procuring sleep, and alleviating many functional ailments [i.e. psycho-somatic complaints and anxiety disorders].” Even Albert Einstein is claimed to have used hypnotherapy!
Having more than a century of favourable feedback, and countless personal successes, hypnosis now has a history of success and is continuing to be developed as an effective therapy as we discover more about the neuroscience behind the strategies employed.
A clinical hypnotherapist, master NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) practitioner, Karen keeps pace with progress while treating a wide range of conditions and disorders. Anxiety in its many forms, from phobias to panic disorders, and behavioural change, like weight management and smoking cessation, are issues she specialises in and has a consistent track record of successfully treating. Karen also teaches hypnotherapy and counselling on university accredited Chrysalis Courses.
In answer to the question: “Will hypnotherapy work for me?” she replies: “We are all capable of entering hypnosis given the right circumstances. It is a normal state of awareness which we go in and out of spontaneously throughout our daily lives and is no more unusual than sleeping in that regard. As a hypnotherapist, it’s my job to make sure whoever I’m working with understands the process, is motivated to change and trusts me to help them.”