07983 850095     oliviawilsonhypnotherapy@gmail.com

What is hypnosis?

There are many misconceptions about hypnosis, and for that reason I have to tell you first what these are. It is not a state of sleep, as suggested by its name (hypnos is the Greek word for sleep). You will find that you are very much conscious and awake throughout the session and will remember everything that has gone on throughout the session.

Another misconception is that you are going to be “put under” and the therapist takes control of your mind. In reality you can only be hypnotised if you allow yourself to be hypnotised. Nobody can hypnotise you against your will. You will be very aware of everything that went on during the session and many people think that they have not been hypnotised, as they were so “awake” during the session. You always remain in control of your own mind.

So what is hypnosis. Hypnosis is a trance state which is being induced through relaxation. The first thing is to learn how to relax your whole body, and then your mind. Once you have learnt this, you can do this again at home any time you want and increase the benefits. Relaxation alone can have a lot of benefits for things like stress or high blood pressure, and once you have learnt it, you can use it again and again. As sessions are all via Skype, after the session you can repeat what I have taught you in the same place, which will help you to get back into it quicker and more easily, and therefore increase the benefits.

Once the trance state is achieved, we can do some work with it. This is taylored to your individual problem and can involve a variety of methods, including some derived from psychology, psychotherapy, NLP, etc. It has been found that these can achieve results much more rapidly if done under hypnosis.

Hypnosis falls into 2 broad areas, analytical and suggestive. Analytical hypnosis is where we find out the cause of your problem, which is usually something that happened in childhood, or could have happened at another time in your life, or even in a previous life, or sometimes something comes up which may just be symbolical and just have a meaning to you, and the therapist may not understand fully what it means, but it usually works for you. Suggestive hypnotherapy is where the therapist makes suggestions to you (in particular to your subconscious mind) while you are under hypnosis. The contents of these suggestions will be discussed with you before the hypnosis begins and are usually things which you want to get out of the session, for example for stopping smoking or loosing weight. The idea is that these suggestions then get processed by the subconscious mind and taken up into the person’s belief system and therefore get followed and achieve a positive result. I will generally give you some homework to do, so that you can continue reinforcing what has been done in the session after the session is over.

So what can hypnotherapy be used for then? It can be applied to many situations in life and the main ones that I offer are the following, although this is not an exhaustive list:

Stop Smoking / Weight Loss / Relaxation / Problems with Sleeping / Problems with Eating / Stress / Generally Wanting to Feel Better / Coping with Life / Anxieties and Fears / Emotional Problems and Upsets / Confidence / Exam Nerves / Physical Ailments / Dealing with Illness and Diseases / Pain / Unwanted Habits /High Blood Pressure / Strokes

One of my special interests is to help people who have suffered strokes. Hypnotherapy can speed up the recovery and make your other treatments by doctors and physiotherapists, etc. more effective. The way this works is by regressing you into a time before the stroke, when you had the full use of your body. You can then feel how your affected side felt and worked when it was fully functional and this feeling is brought into the present. This can stimulate the brain to acknowledge that the affected side exists and then start to repair the damage.

If you want help with something that is not on this list, please do not hesitate to email me. The chances are that I may be able to help.

Hypnosis can help you to gain a much more positive outlook on life and therefore completely turn your life around.

Sometimes it may not be necessary to go through a formal hypnosis session. For example, I once explained to a person who was experiencing stress how to relax and to take some time doing this and then look at tasks to do not as an unmanageable mountain, but just as an accumulation of individual tasks which can be done one at a time, and then do them one at a time, giving each one full attention and not worrying about the others while doing this one. The person came back to me after a few days and told me that they were feeling much better and not stressed anymore.

One thing I would like to stress, is that hypnotherapy is not a substitute for conventional medicine. You still have to carry on with any conventional treatments you are under, although it has been found that in conditions such as high blood pressure, in some cases the medications could gradually be reduced over a period of time, of course under the supervision of the doctor.