How does hypnotherapy help us to create healthy relationships?

Have you ever heard the saying “Hurt people, hurt people”? Often when we’ve been through past experiences of not getting our needs met, this causes inner wounds and limiting beliefs around whether we are loveable.  If we have suffered neglect, lack of support or even abuse during childhood, we begin to create subconscious beliefs about not trusting others and relationships being unsafe. We can even develop the belief that people who are meant to love us may neglect us, reject us or worse, hurt us intentionally.

As children limiting beliefs form, because before the age of seven to eight the subconscious is a bit like a sponge. It absorbs messages from our environment & the people around us; our parents, teachers, siblings, family and friends. The conscious part of the mind doesn’t fully develop until we’re a bit older and the conscious mind is our rational, logical filter. Because this part is not fully functioning when we’re really young all of the ideas and preconceptions that we pick up from the world around us go straight into the subconscious and we can come to conclusions without knowing any better.

When we’re little, the world revolves around us. If something that happens to us hurts us physically or mentally, we can turn this belief in on ourselves. In other words, we may conclude that if people who are meant to take care of us shout at us, ignore us, don’t spend any time with us or physically hurt us, it must be our fault. This is where the beliefs like “I am not enough” or “I am not loveable” or “I’m different and people don’t like me” come from. We may believe that people that are meant to love us will hurt us or reject us. 

The subconscious doesn’t have any concept of reality or fantasy & this is why it can hold onto these limiting beliefs, which are outdated and most probably weren’t even true in the first place. Yes, we may have had negative experiences with people in our early years, but this doesn’t mean that we will always be treated this way or that there is nothing we can do about it now. But unless these beliefs are identified, challenged and cleared, they will continue to affect our relationships with others. The dynamics of our very early relationships, such as those with our parents are often repeated in our adult relationships. This is because the beliefs are still under the surface, about how we’ve experienced others and how they make us feel. Or how we experienced our parents treating each other too!

We may project a significant person’s attitudes and the way they made us feel in childhood onto a current partner or someone important and close in our life today. Until we uncover the limiting beliefs underneath certain patterns in our lives now, we will continue to let similar behaviours and their outcomes dominate our adult relationships.

Awareness is the first step to healing our childhood ‘wounds’ and loving ourselves more. Once we truly love, respect and value ourselves we can wholly love, value & respect others too and they will do the same for us. We can then heal our relationships or attract healthier, more balanced & loving people to us

Hypnotherapy can help us to access and change limiting beliefs by communicating directly with the subconscious mind. When we change these thoughts/feelings and beliefs our actions, communication and focus change and this changes our outcomes in life, especially our important relationships.