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About
Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy
Hypnosis,
or “trance”, is a natural and normal state of consciousness
that we enter into on an ongoing basis in the course of
daily living. Every time you focus your attention for a few
moments on something or someone you find pleasing (your most
relaxing holiday, someone you love), you begin to enter into
a relaxed, almost dreamy state if imagination that is known
as a “trance state.” In fact, you are “in trance” when you
are “entranced” by anything: when you become completely
engrossed in a good book or a movie or drift off into a
daydream. Hypnosis on its own is safe and relaxing, but it
is not in itself therapeutic.
Hypnotherapy,
is therapy that utilises
this relaxed state of focused attention for an agreed-upon
purpose. In this dreamy, relaxed state it is possible to
distract or bypass the prejudices of the everyday conscious
mind and thereby again more open access to the unconscious
part of the mind. This is where the huge library or database
exists of every thought, emotion, experience, idea, opinion
or belief that you have ever had. But while the
subconscious mind stores this information and matches it to
new incoming information, it never analyses new information
as it comes in. It simply continues to experience new information
by matching it to its perception of the old event at the time the memory
was created. This means that if a memory was formed in
childhood, with a child’s understanding of events, then the
memory can remain fixed in an unhelpful response to events
the unconscious mind finds similar. Hypnosis can facilitate
a change by bypassing the conscious mind, allowing the
unconscious mind to receive new information that can then be
processed in a more adaptive or healthier fashion.
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"Nothing is unless our thinking
makes it so."
-
William Shakespeare |
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