What is the Unconscious Mind?
Your unconscious mind stores all the information you are not consciously thinking about. Its job is to look after you and keep you safe. But, it can only do this in keeping with its 'training' and it is here that we can develop behaviour patterns, reactions, thoughts and feelings we don’t want.
Put simply, you hold many beliefs in your unconscious mind and each belief is like a little filter, or sieve. As you go through your day, every experience you have is filtered through your beliefs which then shape the way we experience the world. If I believe birds are scary, I will become scared around them. If I believe birds are lovely, I will enjoy seeing them. But the bird itself, is just a bird.
Because our beliefs shape the way we see the world, we often only see what we expect to see, and only hear what we expect to hear.
What is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is a state of focused attention which you choose to enter and during which, you remain in full control.
We naturally experience hypnosis every day. Sometimes an hypnotic trance resembles that dozey feeling in the morning just before you get up...when you're aware of what is going around you but your thoughts are drifting in that lovely 'just another minute' way. Other times, the hypnotic state is very concentrated and resembles the focus that comes when absorbed in a book or a good film.
Your hypnotic experience will be your own and will be what you need at the time.
“...we do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are...”
(Anais Nin)
What is Hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapy is hypnosis used with therapeutic intent. It is an effective way to encourage change at the unconscious level by changing our filters so we can see the world and ourselves differently. It helps us to bypass our conscious mind so we can get out of our own way, enabling us to change behaviours, unlock our potential, solve our own problems and find the answers that work for us.
Importantly though, hypnotherapy is not a magic wand and change requires you and I to work together in a therapeutic alliance.
We can either work to ease the symptom itself, or we can work to find the underlying cause and resolve it that way. Most commonly, a combination of both approaches works best.