Did you know that a combination of hypnotherapy and counselling is a powerful tool that can help you overcome trauma? If you are looking to overcome trauma in your life, hypnotherapy is a non-invasive treatment that can help you resolve any obstacles that are preventing you from living your best life – healthy and happy.
What is hypnotherapy?
- Hypnotherapy is the process of using counselling and hypnosis to: unlock your unconscious processes; and guide you to creative solutions and deeper realisations of what is at the core of your issue/s.
- Hypnotherapy provides a safe space for you to receive support.
- Hypnotherapy can help you resolve the parts of yourself that may still be stuck in negative experiences from your past.
While you may have the impression that hypnotherapy might be predominantly used to help with behavioural issues like quitting smoking, losing weight or reducing stress, there is a wide evidence base for hypnotherapy to help overcome the deeper stresses of trauma.
What is trauma?
Trauma is the emotional, psychological and physiological residue leftover from heightened stress that accompanies experiences of threat, violence, and life-challenging events.
Traumatic experiences overwhelm your capacity to cope. That same capacity is influenced by hundreds of personal variables.
Working through and processing trauma in the safety of a hypnotherapy session can help you find supportive ways to adapt – in a protective way – to the impact trauma is having on your life.
What do the effects of trauma look like?
Trauma can manifest itself in various ways and include:
- impact on your sleep, including nightmares and racing thoughts when you try to sleep.
- anxiety and panic.
- phobias and irrational fears.
- depression and feelings of helplessness.
- irritability, mood swings and emotional outbursts.
How does hypnotherapy help to overcome trauma?
When you think of hypnosis, you may imagine what you’ve seen on TV during stage hypnosis or in a movie. Clinical hypnosis is very different – it cannot make you do anything that you don’t want to do. When you’re in hypnosis, it is called being in a ‘trance state’.
Trance is like being in deep meditation. Your body will be relaxed and you’ll usually feel incredibly calm and relaxed. In this relaxed state you are able to access your subconscious mind, those deeper parts of yourself that are sometimes not immediately apparent.
Over 90% of your mind is subconscious and this is where our most deep-seated beliefs and values are stored. By accessing this part of ourselves, we can make significant changes in our lives. Using hypnotherapy to overcome trauma can help to release emotions and past traumas so that you can heal and live a fulfilling life.
Hypnotherapy techniques that we use at Shift to help you overcome trauma
It is in the safety of the relaxed state of hypnosis that you can more easily process the triggers and the psychological residue from your traumatic experience/s.
This means you can begin to build a bridge between the trauma experience and the present so you can teach your mind and body to trust that it – you – are now safe.
Three pillars of overcoming trauma in hypnotherapy
1. Release
One of the first stages of overcoming trauma through hypnotherapy is being able to look at the traumatic event, experience or emotion with a degree of distance that the trance offers – without the anxiety or the re-traumatising that happens when you have to tell your story again.
In the safety of hypnosis, with support and guidance, you can begin to release the intensity of the emotions, the fearful energy, and the painful stories.
2. Reframe
In hypnosis, it is possible to see where your trigger was first pulled, yet be able to place some distance between you and this event. In this space, we can begin to use our kind, compassionate, adult wisdom to see the bigger picture and reframe the experience.
Making meaning from our pain allows our brain and nervous system to process and integrate and move out of the ‘fight, flight and fear’ state into a peaceful, calming and understanding state.
3. Recreate
Giving your unconscious mind the opportunity to recreate the traumatic experience in hypnosis from what was terrifying into something that is safe, more positive and more grounding is powerful. This is because your unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what is real and vividly imagined. This is why we can experience all the anxieties over something that is in the past, or in the future.
We can use this part of our brains to help overcome trauma by re-imagining the “trigger” moment into something that is empowering for us.
What hypnotherapy techniques do we use at Shift?
When you are in hypnosis, several techniques can be used to facilitate building this bridge in your healing process. Some of these techniques to overcome trauma in hypnotherapy are:
Time Line Therapy to overcome trauma
This is gently and safely going back to points in the timeline of your life where you may have experienced trauma that is causing you issues today.
This does not mean that you will be re-traumatised all over again. It allows you to briefly look at the strong emotions that were present in that moment of time with the intention of finding a different relationship to your past experience.
We can then facilitate the release of stored emotions or help you to make the realisations that you need to truly heal and to find freedom from the past psychological residue that is impacting you and your life.
Parts Therapy to overcome trauma
Looking at the different parts of yourself. Which ones are more dominant? Which ones do we want to bring forward? For example, there may be a part of you that is motivated for change, to connect differently with people, to challenge the negative self-talk, but the part of you that is frightened, withdrawn and stressed is more dominant.
We can work to bring forward the calm, self-compassionate and brave parts of ourselves in this type of therapy.
Past Life Regression Therapy to overcome trauma
Past life regressions help us to access past trauma that can be impacting us in this lifetime. By going back, we can see that incidents that have happened in previous lifetimes can be imprinted on us, causing us to relive the same emotional turmoil in this lifetime. If you’re new to this or it seems a bit far out, we recommend reading the book Many Masters, Many Lives by psychiatrist Brian Weiss.
Emotional Detox Therapy to overcome trauma
This is where we identify emotions that you are holding onto and take you through a process to release them using guided visualisations under hypnosis.
I am ready. How can I see a Shift Hypnotherapist?
Hypnotherapy appointments at Shift at Brisbane Natural Health can be done online, from anywhere in the world. We help our patients using hypnotherapy every day to work through all kinds of issues, including overcoming trauma. We can help you work through any life issues you want to address and heal from.
At Shift, our hypnotherapist Gary Cosier uses a combination of hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and other techniques to help you to shift your mind. Gary will give you an in-depth understanding of human development and the impact your environment can have on your everyday life – on decision-making, emotional stress, depression, weight management, self-esteem, sleep patterns and many other life issues that can affect your well-being.
He also specialises in sports psychotherapy and hypnosis to support you through your exercise journey.
