Hypnosis for anxiety - calming the inner bodyguard

For most clients, anxiety is seen as a horrible form of psychological illness which makes them feel dizzy, shaky, nauseous and generally fearful all the time. The anxious feelings will seem horrendous, especially when they do not understand why they are there. A client will want these feelings to vanish in an instant and are generally impatient for results which may take a little time to achieve. To them, anxiety is a thing to be eradicated, vanquished or destroyed but with a different approach it is possible to make friends with anxiety and then to control it. With professional hypnosis for anxiety, the problem can be alleviated and in many cases removed completely.

Generally, hypnotherapy clinics will spend some time talking to clients before any hypnosis takes place, to help them understand how anxiety works. Just by understanding and reframing the way that a client thinks about the problem can make a massive difference to the way they feel about their anxiety.

Anxiety help at the initial hypnosis sessions

The hypnotherapist will explain how the subconscious has a number of jobs, including keeping the client safe and well - it acts as a form of bodyguard. Its job is to keep the client out of danger. If it senses trouble, then it will do the very best it can to signal that all is not well so that the you can escape the situation. There are however a number of problems with the way your bodyguard communicates to you.

Firstly instead of telling you clearly what the issue is, it can only signal to you that there is a problem by giving you the horrible feelings of dread. This clearly is an inefficient system but the intent of the signal is to keep you safe rather than to punish you. Secondly, the bodyguard will have started its role many years ago in early childhood. It may have experienced a situation that upset, frightened or embarrassed you as a young child and decided that from that point on if you encountered a similar situation, you would need to be warned that there was potential danger. The problem is, what may have frightened you as a child may no longer be a problem to you as an adult.

A perfect example of this would be a group of children playing when they were young. They decided to play hide and seek and one of the children hid in a cupboard. The other children decided to play a prank on that child and locked the cupboard so it was unable to get out. The child realises that they are trapped and starts to feel increasingly fearful as they fear they will never be able to escape the situation. Of course at some point the child was let out or was rescued by an adult, but the inner bodyguard decides from that point on, similar situations need to be avoided in case they become trapped again.

As an adult, this inner bodyguard remembers the original situation and is on high alert in certain situations where it is reminded of the problem. So as an adult, if the client decides to step into a lift, go on an underground train or an aeroplane, the bodyguard starts to create feelings of fear and panic to warn that there is potential danger. The adult of course has long forgotten the incident as a child and is unable to understand why they are experiencing these horrible problems.

Expert hypnosis for anxiety

A good hypnotherapist has a number of tools in their arsenal to be able to help clients suffering from anxiety. They are able to help to relax the client using a hypnotic trance and guide them to a place where they feel calmer and more in control. During the trance they are able to give positive suggestions for change in order to reframe the way the mind is thinking about the problem. They may use additional NLP, CBT or coaching techniques to help reduce the feelings of fear and help their client take control. They may also use regression hypnosis to help the client remember the original problem, so that a new perspective is given to the problem. Over a series of sessions if everything is progressing well, the client should see a gradual reduction of their symptoms until finally the inner bodyguard relaxes and steps into the background.

Hypnosis for anxiety is different for everyone - some problems may be more complex than others. Although some people may experience a significant change in just a couple of sessions, a typical client would expect to see a hypnotherapist for somewhere between three to six sessions. The important thing to note is that with a little patience, stress reduction, hypnosis and reframing, it is possible to manage, reduce and even eradicate anxiety.