Hypnotherapy for Anxiety
Hypnotherapy is particularly effective in treating anxiety. But not all hypnotherapy is the same. Like anything, its usefulness is where the power of value is.
Hungry To Know More – Anxiety In Your Mind
A hungry person given a loaf of bread, will have a meal or two. But teach someone to make their own bread and give them access to ingredients? Now they have empowered possibilities. That’s something more useful, more valuable.
That’s the difference that the partnership of strategic psychotherapy and clinical hypnosis has to offer. And why strategic hypnotherapy for anxiety is so effective. Let me explain.
In reality, human beings are creatures rather vulnerable to the natural world. The buildings and utilities we’ve built to live, work and play in are in many ways, reflective of our natural vulnerability. We’ve built a world around our vulnerabilities, to keep us safe. And in many ways, we may thrive.
So what’s going on when we are living in a world of suffering in our minds and don’t feel safe, even there?
Anxiety is often talked about like it’s something that happens to us, something that we can’t control. Have you read that anxiety is fear based? This is somewhat valid. It is, obviously, a bit simplistic. And that’s okay. Simplifying things can help us better understand, and therefore, soothe our thoughts about it.
And it makes sense, right? Once we had to fear being eaten by insert scary carnivore here. You can see how the rationale goes. But it is more than that. Our bodies house our minds, not separate to our body, but as a pretty important part of it. Like, we’re dead without it important.
Anxiety is a bit like living with the insert scary carnivore here in our own mind.
Feeling Anxiety – Thinking Anxiety
There is a lot of information out there about the role played by our emotions and the connectivity of our emotions to our body. Ever heard the phrase ‘gut feeling’? We might even have been taught to rely on our emotions, our intuition, our ‘gut feeling’.
The physical reality, is that we experience living in the world through our senses. But we aren’t empty shells. We make sense (or nonsense) out of our experiences, through our feelings and our thoughts about the world we encounter. Our neurology, our brain, our minds does that.
We experience living in the world through the interpretations made by our mind. And that’s why the way we think, is so important. I like to call these our ‘thinking skills’.
With our thinking skills, we are selective about how we interpret our experiences in the world. We then choose certain actions or behaviours based on the interaction of our thoughts and feelings. Feelings are just feelings. They’re not behaviour and they don’t actually drive behaviour, they influence behaviour depending on how much you choose.. If you don’t believe you have a choice, then I’d say to you, you’ve just identified a skill you have yet to master.
Choice is, in fact, a fundamental power of the human experience. Choice is a fundamental thinking skill. This perspective is why the partnership of Strategic Psychotherapy with Clinical Hypnosis has something more useful and powerful to offer you.
Because the evidence is clear, that utilising clinical hypnosis improves the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatments that aim to teach you better thinking skills. To teach you to the skills to tame the scary carnivore in your mind, faster.
Learning Thinking Skills To Tame Anxiety
It’s not about forgetting your experiences, but about learning to choose to act with wisdom over other feelings. Wisdom is not taught, it’s learnt through experience. It’s a thinking skill. So what do you think?
Developing those skills is about dismantling how you do anxiety in your life. Because anxiety is something you do.
Can you remember a time when you felt really worried about something? So worried you felt butterflies in your stomach, your heart beat faster, you may even have felt it as a whole body experience. Now can you remember a time when you had been worried, and it all came to nothing? Perhaps after all, you even had a good experience?
Have you ever been in a situation that was stressful and managed to keep your cool and do what was needed to be done in the circumstances? Have you ever been brave? Have you ever been resilient? These kinds of behaviours demonstrate choice.
That’s a resource we can work with to dismantle anxiety.
Dismantling anxiety for you, is about demystifying your thinking (cognitive) patterns. Throughout your life experience, you will have created all sorts of patterns of interaction between thoughts and feelings in all sorts of situations.
It’s in the detail of how your patterns operate, that we have opportunities to develop better thinking skills so that rather than learning how to NOT do anxiety, you learn how to DO better in all areas of life. That’s what we aim for together at Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy.
Where we understand how effective hypnotherapy for anxiety is amongst the many therapeutic options available out there.
Read more deeply on our Anxiety page here.
