“When small, comes comfort in limits. With gentle exposure, comes growth. And the courage to grow unbound”

(N. Spencer)


When we want to make changes to our behaviours or feelings, we can either work to ease the symptom itself, or we can work to find the underlying cause and resolve it that way.

The first approach simply helps you manage or eliminate the symptom which is often very effective, and the second approach explores the causes of the problem so we can find better ways to suit our needs now.

If we liken ourselves to a garden, Hypnotherapy is like having a good understanding of what is needed to make the garden grow and having the tools needed to gently turn the soil so the flowers can grow faster, and the weeds are less likely to come back.

How Hypnotherapy Works


There are many theories about how hypnotherapy works, but the truth is that these theories don’t really matter in practise. What does matter is that all our behaviours, habits and beliefs have been learned for reasons and in some way serve a purpose for us, either now or at some time in the past. They serve a purpose because your unconscious mind is always doings its best to look after you.

Your unconscious mind responds very well to clear instructions. But most of us give our unconscious minds mixed messages. We want to behave or feel a certain way and then shout at ourselves when we don’t and so we get stuck in cycles.

Although your unconscious is always listening, when in the relaxed state of hypnosis, we are better able to speak directly to it and this is why hypnotherapy is effective. It helps us to bypass our conscious mind and our ego’s so we can get out of our own way. When we ask our conscious mind questions, the answers are often tainted by all the things we think the answers “should” be. But when we ask questions of the unconscious mind, we get more useful and more honest answers. When we make requests of our conscious mind that conflict with our unconscious learning, we create internal tugs-of-war and these are hard to win. But with hypnotherapy, we can teach our unconscious mind new ways. And most importantly, with hypnotherapy, we can have access to all the special resources we might not have even known were there.

So, hypnotherapy works by giving you greater access to your inner filing system, your inner control room, and best of all, your inner treasure chest.

I report a conversation with a colleague who was complaining that he had the same damn stuff in his lunch sack day after day... “So who makes your lunch” I asked. “I do” says he.    (Robert Fulgham)