raven@drizzle.com (206) 527-8060

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NLP Counselor & Ericksonian Hypnotherapist

Hypnotherapy is a useful technique for making life changes.  We can work  on very specific areas of your life, and in working together, "rearrange the furniture" to give you access to strengths and skills and personal balance.

Two of my Ericksonian Hypnosis teachers gave an answer to the question "what is hypnosis" as follows: one answered, "there is no such thing as hypnosis," and the other said "everything is hypnosis". This seems like a convoluted non-answer until you examine it further. Reading this article makes use of a different part of your awareness for example than, say, watching a movie or cooking a meal. These states of awareness in turn are different than your awareness when making love, which (hopefully) is different than your awareness while sleeping. Each of the five things I've mentioned call for a different state of awareness, or consciousness, ones that we shift into and out of pretty effortlessly in normal life. Hypnosis is simply focusing your awareness in a structured shift, or series of shifts, that can enable you to do some useful things mentally. Often this is aided by a person who has been trained in ways to help guide you into different states, although with the right learning a person can do it themselves, in which case it is given the fancy name auto-hypnosis.

So, from this you can see that the old movie image of a narrow-eyed man looking at you wildly and causing you to go murder your loved one while you sleep, holds no validity. In fact, in the 200 years since Anton Mesmer, not once has anyone been convicted of a crime committed in trance, or of compelling a crime by trance.

So if hypnosis isn't this subjugation of the will by another, but merely guided shifts in awareness, what is it good for? The answer to that question is something we are only just beginning to learn, however here are some of the things we've discovered - drugless pain control, changing behaviors (from smoking and eating disorders to relieving non-physical impotence and relating to others), relieving phobias, increasing memory retention and accessing past memories. Often we can regain the mental fexibility and delight of our younger self. Built up layers of patterning and behaviors can keep us from accessing the wonderful creative aspects of ourselves that can look afresh and learn anew.

 

 

 

 

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