Life changing hypnotic techniques.
In this article I am using the story of Todd to show how a person can get free from depression, anger, anxiety and guilt. Todd (the name has been changed for confidentiality) is a 45 year old man, married for 20 years and with two children. He had been weighed down by depression for most of his life.
The interesting thing about Todd is that he is successful, seems to have a wonderful family life, and the people who know him would never guess that he is depressed and is feeling like running away from all his responsibilities. When he came to see me he thought there was no hope for getting free of the suffering he was feeling.
Setting the first goal:
When he came to see me he feared he wouldn’t be able to get free of the suffering he was feeling. His chest was so tight that he said it was hard to take a full breath.
Since Todd was in crisis, my goal was to help him to get some relief from the tightness in his chest and to have him feel hope that he could get free of the depression. He had tried many things to try to get relief, had great insight but couldn’t find peace. He used alcohol to numb his feelings, but that didn’t help for long, and when drinking he lashed out in anger at his family. This added to his self hatred, adding guilt about the anger he directed at everyone when he was drunk. Although he had been sober for 5 years he was afraid his had ruined his relationships and that added to his depression.
It might be hard to imagine that a man who had accomplished so much in his life could feel so down that he’d want to run away or feel the need to be hospitalized. Yet, so many times it is the successful people who are suffering in silence. And, for Todd he added to the suffering feeling he should be able to deal better with things.
The first shift came during our first meeting (it was a long one of 3 hours). It amazed Todd that he was able to stay clear enough to use the techniques of NLP and hypnosis I was showing him. Yet, even while in the depth of depression he did great and the tight vise gripping his chest that was making it hard for him to breath lessened. This was such a major change the first of many.
The steps:
Being aware of what the depression feels like in the body is actually the first step in getting free of it. The body gives us important information that I use in many different ways. When you set a baseline of how it feels in the body it give us one way to measure change in the positive direction. And for Todd we would come back to the feeling in his chest many times to measure changes.
The next step is to uncover the underlying roots of that are trigging the emotions. In our next session Todd tapped into a memory: he is standing in the living room, a green carpet under his feet, and a wet spot on it. He is 2 years old. His chest is so tight he can hardly breath, his mother looks so scary, her face red and her mouth open in a scream. He can remember the words she is screaming, you’ll never amount to anything, you are a bad. He feels wounded a 2 year old trying to do the best he can and he doesn’t understand. This is the root experience, the first event in a long chain of events of feeling like there is something wrong with him. And in addition we also are able to uncover the anger that he pushed down again and again in his life in order to survive.
Things aren’t always as they seem:
At two Todd didn’t have the life experience to understand that his mother was exhausted, fearful and depressed. He instead formed a belief that there was something terribly wrong with him. And this belief continued to impact on everything he did in life.
Getting relief from depression and anger is a step-by-step process. Although there is no way it can be completely released in one session it can be changed. And for many it only takes months not years to get totally freed and to live life again with passion and joy. That is my ultimate goal when working with my clients to help them to get freed from the limiting beliefs, to get out from under the guilt, depression and anger that is suffocating them. And for Todd once we uncovered the limiting belief, it was possible to move to the next steps, so that depression is gone and the limiting belief is change to a life enhancing one.
This process is like peeling back the layers, as the heaviest depression was lifted Todd was able to see more clearly, and create the goals for how he wants his life to be. We go deeper and uncover even the unconscious desires and that is what sets passion and motivation into life.
Some ideas:
To move towards your highest goals and to feel freed and passion in his life, we clear out any emotion that is holding you back from potential and passion in life. Because similar emotions are connected, stung together on the timeline of life, when we get to the root we can clear out whole chains of guilt, anger, sadness, fear etc. that holding us back from our desires.
Typically when I am helping a client to clear an emotion I ask them to pick one emotion to start with. I like them to choose an emotion that when released will change their life in a major way. In Todd’s case anger and depression were linked together, he felt them as almost one feeling in his body. So we used the feeling of anger and depression to do the regression all the way back to his childhood where these feelings got stuck. That is when the memory of his 2 year old self came to him.
Many times people are not aware of the body and what the feelings are about. For them we need to get them connected again with the body so we can use the important information it is giving us.
Some Early Pioneers of Regression.
What I did with Todd is called regression, going back to early events in life. At times people will go back to past life events that are impacting on them in the present. In the book Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss MD, written many years ago, he offers information on regression and the mind. He was a pioneer using hypnosis to track back a client to a past life. One thing that is very different today in doing regression, is that it no longer takes years and years to get to the root of present day issues.
We have come a long way from the long, arduous process that Dr Weiss went though using hypnotic regression. I have helped clients to get totally free in just a few months. The changes seem miraculous that people can hardly believe the changes. As a hypnotherapist I owe a debt to Dr. Brian Weiss, he opened my mind when I was young to studying the mind. And he had the courage to recognize the benefits of hypnosis and regression as a viable therapeutic modality.
About the string of emotions:
To understand the emotional linking, I describe it a string of pearls, where each pearl represents an event with the same emotional feeling or vibration.
In this way we can think of the depression pearls as a long string of events going all the way back on the life line. The emotion of anger is a different string of emotional pearls. And shame, guild, fear etc each have their own string of emotional pearls. For Todd the feeling in his chest linked us to the earlier pearls of emotion, and we kept tracking it back until we got to the root event.
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