Interactive Hypnotherapy and Body Insecurity
August 16th, 2011 by Deborah Marshall-Warren PGCE, Dip Hyp, EmFHS
Jane Fonda was one of the pioneers of exercise videos for women, and later admitted to undergoing cosmetic surgery to keep her figure. She puts her ‘body insecurities’ down to her upbringing and suggests that her late father, the actor Henry Fonda, contributed to them. She said “He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: unless you look perfect you’re not going to be loved.” [Daily Mail 12 August 2011]
Interactive hypnotherapy is specific in that it allows you to access a key event, when a father, such as Jane’s said something that implied that to be loved one must be perfect ― to the conversation in the past that is ʹfeedingʹ your experience of yourself. The process lets you go directly to the specific ʹbody insecurity fileʹ that is influencing your experience of yourself right now, and open it and edit it.
Fast-track interactive hypnotherapy can take you to specific influencing events and experiences in any particular year. You can go directly to the first day of school, when you felt abandoned, rejected, frightened and insecure ― having been left there by a parent whom you implored not to leave you. You can go directly to the eleven-year-old who overheard her parentʹs best friend comparing her with a sibling. You can go directly to the thirteenth year, to the teenager humiliated and feeling dirty when she discovered she was bleeding. You can go directly to your seventeenth year to the young woman who submitted to a termination and to this day has experienced a sense of guilt and shame and blushes for ʹno apparent reason at allʹ. Of course you may say that you knew about each and every one of those events. What you may not have known is how a particular event has been impacting on your life up to this point.
Fay, may not be compared with Jane Fonda, however, as an example of how the father figure can have a long lasting influencing effect on later patterns of behaviour, be it in relationship to our bodies or with respect to our minds, Fay provides a flavour of this. Fay wanted each successive boyfriend to spend all of his spare time with her, a desire that naturally strained every relationship. In hypnosis Fay met her father and discovered that she was desirous of his time and attention too. Her fatherʹs response to young Fayʹs natural inclination to be with him was, ʺI canʹt spend all my time with you.ʺ Hypnotherapy can give you a sense of enlightenment and surprisingly immediate links with past and present personal circumstances. You gain accurate clarity and understanding about what really happened. It can help foster another perspective. Constructively and positively you discover that it was as painful and traumatic for your parent to leave you on that first day at school as it was for you. It did not mean that your parent was abandoning you. Your parent continued to love you all through that first day. The eleven-year-old ʹugly ducklingʹ can meet her beautiful and successful ʹswanʹ. She will be amazed, delighted and so happy to discover her.
Within the hypnosis you can reassure and assuage the fear and shock of the emerging young woman within you and speak to any peers or others who may have contributed to confusion on the first day you experienced menstruation. As to the seventeen-year-old inner self, you can reassure her that she made the right decision at the time, and that if she had not made that decision then she may not have been able to step through the doors which have opened for her now ― be it a job, an opportunity, or a relationship. After the grieving the way is open for the seventeen-year-old you to begin to grow up into her successful future, and for you to move forward into the future free from looking forever at the past. With this new clarity and understanding comes freedom from the feelings of ʹshameʹ. So the symptoms of blushing, which until now had unconsciously been fuelled by ʹshameʹ, will become less and less, and indeed may immediately disappear.