Hypnosis- A New Solution to Behavioural Disorders

Hypnosis has gained a lot of currency in recent years, as the medical profession bows to the idea that alternative or complementary therapies can be just as effective, if not more so, than courses of pills and potions. On its way, hypnotherapy has had to conquer an association with hypnotism that bears the same kind of relation to hypnotherapy as astrology does to astronomy. Treating people for ingrained habits, fears and behaviours using a suggestion technique applied while they are in a particularly receptive state is both benevolent and practical – unlike the hypnotic sideshow routines the older remember from stage shows and the younger from fashionable TV programmes, which did so much to confuse the public imagination. Hypnosis is as far removed from this kind of travelling pedlar hokum as it’s possible to get: it’s a serious, skilled and often extremely effective way of delivering treatment to people whose behaviours and psyche cause them to do things they don’t want to do.

Hypnotherapy works by engaging with a patient’s subconscious and programming it with the consciously expressed wishes of that patient. So, for example: if a person wishes to give up smoking, a hypnotherapy treatment can instil a certain set of ideas into that person’s subconscious. Once the subconscious believes that it is no longer a smoker, or has been taught to associate the desire to smoke with a command to ignore that desire, the person in question stops smoking. Hypnosis of this kind works equally well on pretty much all learned behaviours (habits) and quite a few innate fears. Hypnotherapy is able to provide an excellent structure on which to build a foundation of new and positive behaviours: the behaviour of not smoking, for example, or the behaviour of eating less fatty food.

The idea is simple enough, which is why it is so effective. Rather than bowing to the tyranny of the subconscious, which tends to make us do things we might no longer have a wish to do; or fighting it, which is what we do when we force ourselves into diets, or try and go cold turkey from nicotine; hypnosis persuades the subconscious, when it is in its most receptive state, to alter itself. That way, the patient no longer needs to fight his or her own personality – because the damaging bits of that personality have been altered. The subconscious, once it has been persuaded that smoking is bad, does all the hard work for the smoker, or the drinker, or the violent person: it stops those damaging behaviours from happening because it doesn’t believe they are a part of its makeup any more. Indeed, people who have undergone hypnosis treatment to help them give up smoking frequently say that they can’t even remember what smoking is like – a fact that shows just how powerful the technique can be. The urge is no longer there and so even the most hardened smoker is suddenly bereft of a desire to do further damage to his or her health.

Hypnotherapy is non invasive, non drug based – and it works. What more recommendation does one need?