Using metaphor and storytelling in hypnotherapy

This podcast discusses the use of metaphor and storytelling in the hypnotherapy situation.

For some clients (with an appropriate personality type) it can be a powerful way to approach difficult problems that perhaps the client would rather not tackle head on.

If you have any questions about this approach then do please get in touch.

How regression is used in hypnotherapy - podcast

Here is the podcast on the use of regression that I promised. There is an enormous amount that could be said about regression work but I have tried to keep it relatively simple, including the differences between Past Life and normal regression.


If you have any questions on the technique then please leave a comment on the blog.

Positive suggestion therapy - Podcast

This podcast is an explanation of the positive suggestion therapy used in a hypnotherapy session.

It explains how it can work effectively and what some of the limits may be. If you have any questions related to this then please get in touch.

Please let me know if you find this useful.

What is a hypnotic induction? - podcast

If you ever wanted to find out a little more about the process of hypnosis (especially as it relates to hypnotherapy) take a listen to this podcast.

It highlights the purpose behind the hypnotic induction and the result on the client's mind.
If you have any questions or feedback then please leave a comment. I'll be happy to answer your questions.

Edgar Cayce - what an intriguing life

Edgar Cayce was born in the 19th century and lived through the first half of the 20th.

He is often seen as a seer or prophet. He used a self hypnosis technique to access a source of information (sprirt or other-worldly) that provided information on treatments for medical conditions.

Deeply grounded in a Christian faith his ability to give 'readings' often gave him doubts about how he should use this 'gift'.

Whilst giving his readings in what seemed to be a self-hypnotic state, he was unaware of the information he provided.

He story in written the book Story of Edgar Cayce: There is a river by Thomas Sugrue. http://www.amazon.com/Story-Edgar-Cayce-There-River/dp/0876043759

I am part way through reading the book and find myself absolutely intrigued by the story and the messages in it.

Well worth a look for the enquiring mind.

Moving to Linux part 3, audio recording & mixing

I have recently made the move from Windows to Linux. these few articles will hopefully prove useful to others taking the same journey.

Audio Applications
My work with audio is based on my own need to record, mix and produce self hypnosis tracks for download and for use in my own client sessions. There are other far better resources online for how to set up microphones etc.

To record audio
You can of course record audio straight into your Linux laptop or desktop PC as long as it is equipped with a microphone. The quality is unlikely to be very good though. I have, in the past,  used two different recording studios to record voice tracks ready for mixing. However while the quality is excellent it needs more organisation and of course there are costs.

In the end I purchased an Olympus LS11 voice recorder which will save recordings in MP3 or WAV formats.  The files are transferred to the PC over a USB link. However you get those voice files recorded, you'll want a way to edit out the ums, ahhs and random breath noises.

There really is only one tool for this, and that is Audacity. It is available in both Windows and Linux formats. It is a program that you get better at using the more you engage with it (obvious really but you train your ears at the same time). Tips on how to use Audacity are worth a blog post on their own, maybe I'll do that next.

Take a look at it here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Once you have cut, spliced and otherwise adjusted your voice file, you may wish to mix it with music or sound effects (there are lots of Audacity audio plug-ins freely available as downloads). Audacity can do this but it feels rather clunky compared to a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

I loved Traktion on the Windows platform but its development seemed to be abandoned for a long time. There now seems to be a Linux version so I'll look at this again.

So after much trial and error I settled on Ardour as my DAW. You can see more details about it here http://ardour.org/

I won't pretend to be an expert in Linux audio, I'm not. It is different to Windows but similar enough that I can get reasonable results.

Start with these few applications and a little bit of knowledge about recording and you'll soon have your own tracks (hypnosis or otherwise) mixed and finished.

Moving to Linux part 2. What software will work for you?

I wrote previously about making the move to Linux on a new laptop.

Now I'd like to let you know about some of the programs I have found useful in that move.

If Linux is still a mystery to you, the important thing to know is that it is based around the idea of free software. Not just free in the sense of not costing money but also free to be modified and reused without limit. (For more on the concept check out the father of free software Richard M. Stallman).

What this means in practical terms is that almost all the software you need is free (money) but for convenience, not all the software you want is free (open source). Some software uses chunks of non-open source or commercial code especially in areas like audio and video (think YouTube). For some this lack of Open Source is a very big deal, for others less so.

So what about the practical programs you'll want which may not be part of a standard package installation.

Graphics
Photo editing  and picture manipulation (like Photoshop) Gimp.
This is often installed with the standard distribution.

For vector drawing (like Adobe Illustrator) use Inkscape No CMYK colour though)

For Desktop publishing (like Adobe InDesign) use Scribus.

For a drawing program like (Microsoft Visio) use Dia.

For 2D CAD work consider LibreCAD.

Office Packages (Wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc)
As a general purpose package use Libreoffice. It will just about everything you need as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Some may prefer to use OpenOffice which is available as a free download.

Skype, use Skype there is a native Linux version.

For data storage in the cloud with some great ways to share data use Dropbox. There is a native Linux application.

Video applications (web cam)
To get your webcam working check the following applications. Some may work better than others on your hardware.

Cheese allows you to capture stills and video from your web cam and apply effects too.

Guvcview a more basic webcam application that I found easier to get working on my Asus X53 machine.

Video editing
There seem to be plenty of video editing applications out there but I found two that seems to particularly useful; I have not settled on which one will be my main application yet. The first is Openshot, probably the easier of the two applications to use. It seems to be robust with just enough features to your video edited together. It integrates with Inkscape (see above) for producing fancy titles and graphics (or you can just use what is built in).

The second editing application is Kdenlive. This program seems to have more features including a greater number of effects (video transitions for example) but is possibly slightly less easy to get started with. Try both, the software is free after all!

I'll cover audio and other applications in my next post. So if you are waiting to hear how to record your self hypnosis session, stay tuned!

The main reasons people phone a hypnotherapist

Why do people call a hypnotherapist?
Loss of self confidence
Loss of self esteem
Want to lose weight
Want to quit smoking
Undefined anxiety (sometimes described as free floating anxiety)
Specific fear or phobia (driving, frogs, spiders etc)
Desire to learn a new skill, play musical instrument etc.

So now you know!

Quit smoking with Champix or hypnosis

The quit smoking drug Champix (known as Chantix in the USA) is again in the news after studies indicate that it can actually increase the risk of heart problems when compared to patients who took a dummy pill.

According to the Daily Mail "Champix, which is also known as varenicline, has previously been linked to psychiatric problems, including 37 suicides in the UK and hundreds of cases of suicidal thoughts."

I have seen both positive and negative results from people who have used Champix to stop smoking. It seems to be one way in which smokers who prefer not to take a hypnosis type approach can make the change. It's just that before one takes the drug there seems to be no way to predict what the side effects might be.

Stopping smoking with hypnosis is still the most effective way to become a non-smoker. I believe that I achieve 70-80 % success rates using my 2 sessions, of 2 hours, 1 weeks apart approach.

The drug option can seem like the easy way to make the change; no effort, no time taken, just a pill to swallow.  But I honestly believe that becoming a non-smoker is worth putting time effort and money into.

By the way, if you do want to use my services, then the charge is £195 and about four hours of your time. It's worth though, you'll probably gain 14 years of a extra healthy life. What's that worth to you?

Hypnosis can aid surgery & speed recovery

James Braid, surgeon
 and hypnotist

Of course hypnosis has been used as a surgical aid since the mid 19th century and was pioneered by people like the Scots surgeon James Braid. The advent of modern anaesthetics generally put a stop to most hypnosis in a surgical setting, anaesthesia was generally much faster to deliver than hypnosis. Another famous Scot who used mesmerism (after Anton Mesmer) was James Esdaile. He was a surgeon working in India and used  hypnosis to provide pain relief (analgesia) for his Indian patients. Esdaile encountered many problems when attempting to use his techniques on the European patients though; prejudice meant many felt the technique was only suitable for the lower Indian orders.


Choloroform for most patients provided the next step forward in pain control and hypnosis was for the most part pushed to the margins. However every few years a news story arises as it does today of hypnosis being used successfully in a surgical setting. The Daily Mail today has a story about surgeons in Belgium using the technique in thyroid and breast cancer operations to good effect. The complete story is here.


I think Braid would be pleased that his work still had value 150 years after his death.

Check this out...old chool hypnosis

This is wonderful, a Pathe film clip from 1949 showing stage hypnotist Richard Payne doing what today would be a very mild act.


Worth 4 minutes of your time any day of the week, hypnosis in a smart suit.
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=47986

Bigger Breasts with hypnosis

Well, for some people it would be nice right?
Not for everyone clearly, most men would rather not have Moobs (man boobs) but many might be intrigued by the idea.

It hit the news (again) today as a BBC program called Inside Out (a local magazine that varies from region to region) investigated hypnotherapy.

They were alarmed to find out that is was possible for a cat to be registered with some hypnotherapy organisations. Well I have not seen the program but let sanity reign.

They copied an experiment first done in the USA where a cat got registered with a couple of small member organisations. It worked here in the UK too but not with one of the larger organisations and I still maintain that the only licence needed for the biggest hypnotist in the UK is a TV licence. That square box puts more people in a trance than anything or anyone else.

Any way, back to breasts.....can you make them bigger with hypnosis? One of the chaps involved in the program says that it can work.

If asked, I could guess that the answer is yes, but I just don't know. It's tricky trying to measure this stuff because you would need to devise and experiment that looked at all the possible variables from weight gain to hormonal changes before you could tell if the hypnosis had had a profound effect on the breast tissue.

Still, if any university graduates would like to set up an experiment I'd be happy to take part.

Spotless Mind?

Once again a team has supposedly come up with a way to erase bad memories; according to the Daily Mail newspaper.

According to the paper, a team at Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland could develop a memory-cleansing drug that has the ability to remove any recollection of unhappy or embarrassing incidents, like childhood teasing and upsetting memories of a failed love affair, from people's minds.

We are told that it works by dissolving the membrane around the amygdala; the almond-shaped organ in the brain where mammals store their memories of fear.

It seems to have worked in animals, but do you really want to lose all of your fears? Fear is what keeps us safe from dangerous situations. It is a response that enables us to survive.

So while it may sound like a wonderful way to let go of love affairs that went wrong or a powerful way to deal with PTSD, it may not be possible to use it safely.

Both Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and hypnosis offers real drug free alternatives to this with the advantage that natural useful fears are kept in place.

Hypnosis by TV?

I have often felt that television is the number one hypnotist around the world and often people become very receptive to message that are transmitted by the TV.

This chap has an interesting take on it; he is discussing who the TV in America is responsible for spreading the messages of large corporations and Government departments in the USA but I expect it is very similar here in the UK.

Follow this link to read the story. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mass-Mind-Control-is-Upon-by-Nathan-Janes-090827-627.html

Hypnosis, Coldreading, Mindreading & ESP

The topic for this blog may be rather controversial. It relates to my own personal experiences in one-to-one therapy work, experiences that go back at least five years. I first noticed something odd happening several years ago in the closing minutes of a therapy session, after the client had been returned from hypnosis to an alert state.

I use these few minutes to give suggestions to client about how to use self-hypnosis or talk about the client's situation. Often as I do this I'll imagine and verbalize a situation for the client where, for example, they might use their new found self-confidence. Sometimes a name will come to mind at others a situation.

Perhaps at this point it would be useful to add that I take a pragmatic view of hypnosis and other change techniques; crystals, candles and the like do not have a place in my therapy room. My approach reflects that of my first career. I trained as an Electronics Engineer and I generally expect things to be measurable and repeatable without the need for esoteric methods to make personal change possible.

Perhaps I can best explain things with a recent example; I worked with a young man who lacked self confidence. For the first half of our meeting I took his history to gain a clearer understanding of his situation and then we went into a hypnosis session using positive suggestions and re-use of inner resources to bring about change.

At the end of the session I said to him “I don't know if you'll use this new self confidence to think about asking Mary out or do some other thing.”

Why did I use the name Mary? I don't know; but there was an immediate look of recognition in the client's eyes. “How did you know that?” he asked, quite shocked. “I have had an online conversation with Mary on a dating web site” he said.

As a one off event I would dismiss this as a fluke (Mary was not the actual name, it was a little more unusual). However, this for me, is not that unusual; I think it happens in some form for between 1 in 8 to 1 in 10 clients.

So what the heck is happening?

In the beginning, I dismissed these odd coincidences as flukes, pure chance, but as they seemed to occur regularly I started to look for other explanations. Could I have looked at the situations in which these 'flukes' happened and drawn something from the client history. For situations I imagined that seemed possible, but not for names significant to the client.

I wondered whether I was inadvertently doing some form of 'Coldreading' the kind of technique often used by stage show psychics or mediums. Again this is possible, but unlike stage show mediums, I was working with only one client, not a full audience and so the chance for positive 'hits' would seem to be much diminished.

So I am left with a mystery. As I tune into the client's situation, am I doing some unconscious form of Coldreading or am I tapping into some latent mind reading or ESP skill?

I would love to hear from any other therapists who have had similar experiences; for me it remains a mystery. Write a comment below.

EFT part 2

For this posting I wanted to tell you a bit more about how EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) can be used.

I often make use of the method in conjunction with hypnotherapy, I find that teaching the client how to empower themself to deal with an immediate fear or anxiety often leads to fast and effective change.

As I explain the EFT method to a client, they are often incredulous, sceptical sometimes even mocking that something like this can work. Generally however they have sufficient trust in me to give it a go.

Gary Craig likens the emotional difficulties we have to interference on a TV set. We know the transmitted signal is ok, we know the TV is working perfectly but every now and again the picture will be disrupted by a glitch somewhere in the communications channel.

His view is that a thought or a memory leads not directly to a feeling but it is communicated through the body system and where there is a "glitch" we sometime interpret the thought or memory as a negative emotion, physical pain or psychological blockage.

The idea of the method is to free that 'blockage' so that the mind/body communications flow without interruption and without the negative emotions.

When I first learned about the method I too was sceptical. I trained as an engineer as some of the notions ablout body meridian energy lines just seemed plain weird.

However, EFT does not rely on belief to be sucessful, indeed many of my most sceptical clients have made hugely significant and positive changes in their live.

I have stopped trying to understand at a deep level how the method works; I just know that for many, many people it works very well. If you have been struggling to make changes in your life and have found it a challenge it would be well worth given EFT a try.

Champix (Chantix) and cravings

I met someone recently who decided in the Autumn of 2008 to stop smoking. He had already tried going cold turkey, patches and nasal sprays and knew that they did not work for him.

So he went to the Quit Smoking Clinic at his family Doctor surgery where they prescribed Champix (also known as Chamtix in the USA).


After about 2 weeks of taking the drug he stopped smoking; so far so good. His stomach was knotted with pain each morning and his digestion was not working like it used to but he had stopped smoking.

By January 2009 this man was desperate, because the Champix had done nothing to deal with his cravings. He may not have been smoking but he still had in place all the old links and associations with smoking.

He went back to his Doctor who said why not give the drug another go? The man was not keen, he remembered the stomach cramps. Then as almost an afterthought, the Doctor added "you could try hypnosis for the craving".

What a shame the Doctor did not mention this to the man last October! There would have been , no drugs, no side effects just the change to becoming a non-smoker.

Sadly, at least here in the UK, Doctors are not able to prescribe hypnosis as a quit smoking aid.

When hypnosis has been demonstrated again and again to be more effective than all others forms of therapy for smoking, why is it not something that a Doctor can write a prescription for?

Do you chew your tongue or cheek?

Do you (or someone you know) chew your cheek or tongue?

I worked with a client who had this condition and using that experience went on to develop a hypnotherapy audio track to help deal with this habit.

The tongue chewing often starts in childhood in a similar way to nail biting or thumb sucking as a result of some anxiety or stress. Often some comfort becomes associated with the activity and the person involved subconsciously uses this to deal with other stressful situations.

The outcome of doing this into adulthood can be severe dental problems, jaw misalignment even damage to the nerves in the tongue.

Often the person doing the chewing is completely unaware that they are chewing, but those around them will note the facial contortions and grimaces that occur.

You can download this audio track as an MP3 from the Gift4Life web site by going to the web site here.

You can hear a sample online or buy a CD version of this hypnotherapy by visiting the web site.