Very few things are worse than not feeling like you normally do due to issues with your mental health. Unfortunately, some individuals will never witness anything like this in their lifetime. However, the truth is that twenty percent of people are affected by mental illness. I belong to the 20 percent group.
In the course of my life, there have been three separate instances in which I hadn’t felt like “me”: When it occurred for the first time, my grandmother had just gone away, and I was probably about 10 years old when I first saw the signs of OCD. When I was in that situation, counseling ended up being the thing that helped me stop the pattern.
Then, when I was a sophomore in my second semester of college, I went through a breakup that led me to a downward spiral of sleeplessness, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and despair. Along with problems with my family’s finances, I was going through a difficult time, and I felt as if I was losing the happy, peaceful, and sleep-loving person I used to be. I had become dissociated from myself, and all I wanted to do was return to the person I had been before the traumatic experience.
Fortunately, I decided to seek help via counseling and, while hesitantly at first, began taking medication for my depression. My symptoms were under control for the better part of seven years. Then, though, life struck once again. My uncle died away at the same time that I lost my job the previous year. I was laid off. It would be an understatement to say that the emotional stress and financial strain did not cause my body to respond properly.
I got PTSD, my sleeplessness returned with a vengeance, the thoughts associated with my OCD were always there, and my anxiety was so crippling that I couldn’t move. The activities I had formerly looked forward to, such as getting dressed up, putting on makeup, going to concerts, writing, and hanging out with friends, were like torment for me.
In desperation, you will do anything to get that “me” feeling back. This meant giving hypnosis a go, an endeavor I had never previously contemplated.
Can Self-Hypnosis Help Anxiety & Depression?
People living with OCD, PTSD, phobias, anxiety, or depression may feel that treatment and medicine are not enough to treat their symptoms at times. Hypnosis is a technique that may help with this. “Anxiety is actually self-hypnosis in a negative way,” explains Fayina Cohen, a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist. “When you [practice] hypnosis, you reprogram the mind with different beliefs,” she adds. She goes on to say that the notions that hypnosis is bogus or that it is used by hippies are just that: stereotypes.
However, because of the negative connotations and widespread skepticism associated with hypnosis, many individuals battling mental health concerns are unaware that hypnosis is a viable choice. Hypnosis was offered to me by my therapist, to whom I give a lot of credit for my progress. Naturally, I reacted the same way as the majority of people do, which is to say, with serious reservations. My imagination conjured a scene in which someone swept a long gold chain attached to a pocket watch over my face as I miraculously lost consciousness.
When you’re so sick that you can hardly function, you’ll do just about everything to get well. That is how I first became interested in trying hypnosis and how I came to believe in its power.
Talk therapy was the first portion of my appointments with my hypnotist. This prepared me for the hypnosis session, which was the second part. My hypnotist followed a script that she had meticulously written, but she altered it each week depending on the problems we were trying to solve. The meetings would last anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes, and for around eight months, I had homework in the form of an audio recording that I was supposed to listen to just before I went to bed.
Although the recordings may not always make a great deal of sense, they include orders intended to be carried out by your subconscious mind. The orders are designed to put you in a state of greater relaxation, comparable to that which one experiences while daydreaming or when driving on an interstate and missing an exit (a phenomenon known as “highway hypnosis”).
‘Your subconscious mind is loaded with negative messages, so it is necessary to have a hypnotist clear this stuff out for you,’ says certified clinical hypnotist Joanne Ferdman of Theta Healing Arts in Huntington, New York. “It is necessary to have a hypnotist clear this stuff out for you,” says Ferdman. “Hypnotherapy is an excellent tool for managing your thoughts, clearing out detrimental experiences, and providing you with uplifting suggestions,”
However, even if your mind is open to these suggestions, hypnosis does not constitute mind control. According to Ferdman, hypnosis is not something that may force a person to act in a way that is contrary to their will. “Your conscious mind already knows what you want to work on. I cannot provide a recommendation to you with which your conscious mind is not 100 percent on board.
When it comes to outcomes, time is different for everyone. Some individuals experience complete improvements in a matter of sessions, including a higher sense of calm, optimism, and feeling of control, while others need more time to begin the healing process. It is contingent on the individual and the condition of their unconscious mind. Ferdman claims that the average person has 60,000 thoughts daily, most of which are negative. Even if you have a strong desire for things to change consciously, it may take longer to perceive the effects of hypnosis if you are dealing with a greater amount of negativity in your life.
Hypnosis is a sequence of reminders given to clients to alleviate their fear and worry. These reminders encourage clients’ brains to move more positively whenever they feel they are being overcome by negativity. In addition, hypnotists sometimes need to clear out past experiences; in these cases, they will perform a technique known as “regression.” During this technique, the hypnotist will take the client back in time to the moment when a traumatic event occurred for the first time, and then they will assist the client in processing the event so that they can let it go from their subconscious.
If you are still here with me and finding this intriguing, you are not the only one. Hypnotists claim that the practice of hypnosis is getting more widespread each year. However, Cohen adds that the proliferation of online educational resources has helped dispel the notion that hypnosis is a real phenomenon. “In the past ten years, I’ve received more phone calls about hypnosis than I ever have in the past,” said the hypnotist.
If you are interested in giving hypnosis a go, the following are some considerations you should bear in mind:
6 Tips for Hypnosis
Find a hypnotist that you feel comfortable with. Then, conduct some research, question them about their training and certification, and see if you can get in touch with any of their previous customers. Confidence in your care provider, whatever their specialty, is vital.
Pay attention to what is driving you to make the change. At first, you may not be completely persuaded of the opportunity’s potential, but if you keep an open mind and keep at it, you’ll probably end up seeing some results.
Hypnosis is a collaborative process. The healing process is one in which you and your hypnotist play an active role together. It takes two people to hypnotize someone, whether you are listening to your hypnotist recite a script or taking in their audio on repeat.
Hypnosis may take effect even if you are not paying attention to what is being spoken. This is because the orders and messages that are embedded in your script by the hypnotist are taken up by the subconscious mind.
Your session is entirely in your control at this point. You are not in a trance, and this does not affect your ability to exercise free will. The role of the hypnotist is only to serve as a facilitator.
You do not have a “strong-will” that prevents you from being hypnotized. You are not giving in or fooling yourself into a state of mind that you do not genuinely want to enter; your hypnotist is assisting you in hypnotizing yourself so that you may achieve the desired results. You are doing this as a component of a comprehensive treatment plan that you and your providers of care work together to develop.
In conclusion, hypnosis was not a quick or simple solution to the problem. I needed perseverance, dedication, and persistence to keep my appointments and listen to my recordings regularly. However, I am quite happy that I decided to give hypnosis a try. I regard it as one of the therapeutic strategies that helped me feel like myself again, and that has made every minute that I have worked on it worthwhile because of how much it has contributed to that feeling.
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