Anxiety can take many forms, ranging from feeling ill at ease in social situations to full blown panic attacks. It can be a result of your current life circumstances, a response to the stress or uncertainty of everyday life, or a reaction to experiences from your past. 

Sometimes there can appear to be no obvious reason for you to feel anxious. Each person’s complex make up – including family background, life experience, personality traits and our physical health affect how anxiety can impact upon us.

Whatever the cause, or the specific symptoms, there is no doubt that anxiety can affect our everyday lives, our relationships and our physical and emotional health.

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Anxiety can help with both the symptoms and the underlying causes of anxiety.  

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Anxiety can help you to:

• explore and address any issues in your past or current life circumstances that are contributing to your experience of anxiety

• change the way your mind responds to triggering thoughts and situations

• reframe unhelpful beliefs and catastrophic thinking

• learn practical skills and strategies, including self hypnosis, mindfulness and rapid relaxation techniques, to support you through stressful  situations 

Causes of chronic (long term) pain are varied and can result from specific injuries and health issues, including arthritis and cancer to non-specific issues such as neurological problems or fibromyalgia.

Whatever the cause chronic pain can be an isolating, frightening and emotionally debilitating condition.  Concerns about the pain worsening, fear of losing independence, a sense of grief and loss and worries about the future are common.  Put together with a dependence on medication, disturbed sleep and a reluctance to exercise for fear of making the pain worse, sufferers of chronic pain may feel that there is no way to move forward.

Chronic pain is a complex issue in that our thoughts and emotions play a part in the way we experience and manage pain. 

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Chronic Pain can help you to understand and regulate the way that your brain responds to pain signals.

• support you to find out what you can change and how to best manage what you can't change

• calm your parasympathetic nervous system using strategies such as self-hypnosis and progressive relaxation to reduce and alleviate pain and change the way your brain interprets pain

• build your confidence and motivation to adopt lifestyle changes that can benefit your overall sense of wellbeing

Depression can be a result of the ongoing stress and anxiety of everyday life, both in our immediate environment and in the wider world. Whatever its cause depression can become a cyclic trap that prevents you from doing the very things that you know could make you feel better. 

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Depression can help you break that cycle

• build your motivation to adopt lifestyle changes that can benefit your overall sense of wellbeing

• reframe unhelpful thinking, beliefs and self-talk

• explore and address any issues in your past or current life circumstances that are contributing to those unhelpful thoughts

• let go of unhelpful coping mechanisms including self-medication

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Irrational Fears & Phobias uses a method of gentle systematic desensitisation to change your automatic responses to your triggers. 

You will be supported at every step of the way as you:

• identify and address the root cause of your irrational fears or phobias

• practise using relaxation, breathing and anchoring techniques to quickly diffuse your response to your triggers

• strengthen your confidence in your ability to create permanent changes in your subconscious mind

Insomnia an be a result of underlying anxiety, health issues or environmental factors such as noise, light, other people or an uncomfortable sleeping set up.

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Insomnia includes learning practical skills and strategies such as self hypnosis and rapid relaxation techniques that can help you to release tension from your body and your mind. 

We may also explore and address any underlying issues, concerns and life circumstances that may be affecting your ability to get to sleep, or the quality of your sleep.

Compulsive behaviors, obsessive thoughts and repetitive behaviors are often symptoms of anxiety. They can be a result of our unconscious attempt to control our environment, to control others or to control our self so that we feel safe and secure.

Even though we may be aware that our thoughts or behaviours may be irrational it can seem that stopping them is out of our control.

Hypnotherapy & Counselling for anxiety can help to explore and address any issues that contribute to anxiety and use hypnosis to develop the calm mind set to let go of your unwanted thoughts and behaviours.

Trauma is a physical and emotional response to experiencing or witnessing a distressing event or series of events. Those responses can linger long after the event has passed, resulting in the condition known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  Trauma can also be passed down through families or cultural heritage.  When  parents, grandparents or ancestors were subject to physical and/or emotional abuse the effects of their experience may carry through generations.

Trauma can be a very isolating experience.  It can be difficult to talk about it with anyone who hasn’t shared your experience and difficult to fit in with the everyday world where everything carries on as normal despite what you have been through.

It can be accompanied by feelings of guilt and shame, extreme emotional reactions such as anger, insomnia, overwhelming sadness and acute anxiety.  Specific sounds, scents, sensations or situations can trigger an anxiety or stress response even when there is no immediate or apparent threat.

How Hypnotherapy Can Help

Hypnotherapy and Counselling provides a gentle and effective way for you to process and release trauma responses in a safe and controlled environment.   The best result is for you to find a place of acceptance in your mind where the trauma becomes something that happened to you, not something that defines you in the present or the future. 

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to working with trauma but here is a general description of what you can expect.

Because trauma can be a very isolating experience, the first step is often to feel safe enough to talk about, to share, and be fully heard and recognised in what you have experienced.

This may be a very gradual process that may involve reprocessing traumatic memories.  You will be supported at every step of the way using relaxation, breathing and anchoring techniques to quickly diffuse any anxiety symptoms  or overwhelming emotions as they arise. 

The next step may be to use hypnosis to begin to gently disconnect your past experience from the present.  A process of systematic desensitisation can help you to change your automatic response to triggers and you can learn techniques and strategies to remain calm in stressful situations. 

 We look at how trauma is affecting your life in the present and  explore and address any unhelpful coping mechanisms such as self-medication that you have developed.   

We address lifestyle issues such as how to improve the quality of your sleep and how to manage stress and anxiety using practical skills, resources and strategies drawn from CBT, somatic therapy and mindfulness practices.

Anxiety & stress can affect all the systems of our body, contributing to a wide range of emotional and physical health issues.  In our busy and complex world we are more or less constantly exposed to stress arising from day to day pressures, personal responsibilities and global events.

When we turn to unhelpful coping mechanisms or self medication as ways to ‘switch off’ we can find ourselves trapped in a cycle of stress from which it is difficult to break free.

On an emotional level stress can result in anxiety, irritability, fear, anger, insomnia, depression and an inability to make decisions. 

On a physical level it can trigger inflammatory responses and suppress our immune system, making us more prone to illness.  It can be the cause, or the result of, a wide range of health problems including chronic pain, digestive disorders and high blood pressure.

Finding effective ways to manage stress is essential for our wellbeing. We may not be able to remove sources of stress from our life but Hypnotherapy & Counselling for Stress & Anxiety can help you to effectively manage its impact.