Hypnosis For Depression
Modern Hypnotherapy techniques have proven to be very effective in helping to treat depressive illness.
Hypnosis can help you develop ways to integrate this new behavior into your unconscious, so that you are not continually struggling to escape the depression. Many clients don’t realize that hypnotherapy has made any changes, until they look back many months or years later. This is the way it should be, well away from your conscious mind.
The key point is that escaping depressive thoughts are difficult for your conscious mind to do, but, easy for your unconscious. It is a matter of preparing your unconscious and then releasing control.
The goal is to disrupt the habitual ways of thinking:
- To stop taking bad experiences personally
- To stop thinking that criticisms and and events are permanent and not temporary
- To stop thinking that some bad event will affect all of your life and not just a small part of it
Areas For Hypnotherapeutic Work
Under hypnosis cognitive, behavioral and psychotherapeutic techniques can be used to teach new skills to interpret life’s events in a more empowering way.
- You need to remember and focus on the good events in your past, not the bad ones. If you can’t remember any particularly good moments then manufacture some. For example, take a scene from a film and turn it into a personal memory as if you were daydreaming. Recalling a manufactured daydream is as powerful as recalling an actual memory.
- You must focus your mind on what you can look forward to in life. Anything that you hold predominantly in your mind will begin to direct your mind to fulfill it (The Law of Concentrated Attention). Maintaining your focus on the future and certainly not the past
- You can push a negative, unhappy thought out of your mind and pull in a more positive one. This works on the Principle of Substitution. Your conscious mind can only really focus on one thing at a time.So, by having a number of good positive pre-prepared thoughts or images, you can concentrate on these and prevent negative thoughts taking control. It may sound strange but basically you are installing a happy switch that you can imagine and use when you need it.
- You have to break out of the old ritual pattern of behaviour. You need to create a new habitual way of thinking so that every time the circumstances occur that would normally trigger a deepening depression, you behave differently.
- You can learn to relax your whole body and switch off that busy inner voice that loops round and round and keeps you fixed on the one thing you are trying to escape.
- Banish anything depressing or upsetting from your life. We encourage people to stop watching the news on television.