CarrylWas trying to stop feeling shaky this morning so fired up a #PaulMcKenna #hypnotherapy that I haven’t used in years, though I listened to them repeatedly for maybe a decade. The music was instantly relaxing, it boosted my mood more than it’s been in perhaps over a year, and the shaking has been a lot better. Did wipe energy again, though. Still, the improvement is otherwise still there. I forget how good his stuff is.
Serge from BabkaIt's great that this is working for you.
Little known fact... I'm a certified hypnotist and have done therapeutic hypnosis in the past. I stopped in large part because I had so few clients that I let my certification lapse and then let my website (The Geeky Hypnotist) shut down as well.
If you'd like any suggestions on techniques beyond the ones you're using now, let me know!
@serge hey, that’s interesting, it’s good stuff. I’m curious, I’ve tried many other types of audio (YouTube has frequencies, reiki, meditations) and some do more than others
My personal opinion is that kinetic hypnosis techniques can be extremely powerful in handling acute anxiety.
There's a lot of research (and personal experiences) that show that the mind ascribes an emotional state to the body's situation. It can then feedback on itself when the event occurs.
The way this works is you may have an elevated heart rate or some other sign of autonomic system activation and your mind looks for a reason you feel this way and finds some reasons. Then those thoughts keep the emotional state going, which in turn continues the bodily response.
The secondary part of automomic system activation is that it reduces cognitive flexibility, making it harder to break the cycle.
Let me restate that all more simply:
You have some sign of anxiety in your body and your brain attempts to explain it. If it can't, it will dig in and find something, a memory or a thought to latch onto.
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Then when you're anxious, it's harder to think. That makes it harder to break the cycle.
Then the next time we have the same type of event, the brain gets used to addressing it the same way, and we create a bit of a feedback loop.
There are multiple ways to break the feedback loop. My preferred theraputic metholody was to use a two pronged approach, largely not using hypnosis, or using hypnosis only as a supplement to the other techniques.
Firstly I would teach techniques to calm the body down, thereby breaking the autonomic nervous system feedback loop.
Those techniques largely came from or were inspired by techniques taught by Melissa Tiers in her book 'The Anti-Anxiety Toolkit: Rapid techniques to rewire the brain"
Then I would follow up by suggesting Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) techniques in situations where the client was unable to function normally.
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For example, if a client had a car accident and was unable to drive since, we could use ACT values based goal focus and resiliency techniques to get them back to driving.
Then I'd use hypnosis as a means of helping the client by (re)experiencing the challenging situation but this time they have both the tools we'd worked through as well as using hypnosis itself to make the experience more controlled. Then we (hypnotist and client) can work through the situation together until it's workable/tolerable.
I know other hypnotists might use different techniques and focus more on hypnosis and trance, but I found that hypnosis was only one tool in my larger toolkit and my approach was to work with the client to build a toolkit of their own, filled with things that would empower them and not need me.
The downside of my approach is that I didn't aim to have repeat clients, and for client who expected the typical "Hypnotist talks at you and cures you.", I wasn't that.
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@serge Hey, I’m sorry for the delay in replying. I’ve been very foggy with fatigue.
I hadn’t heard of kinetic hypnosis. I get you on the emotional state to the body’s situation, though I hadn’t seen it explained quite like this in such detail. Recently I’ve found somatic exercises and meditations for the nervous system to be pretty good.
Ive heard of ACT, though it’s not one I’ve tried. I’ve done a few things, painful amount really, and only those that go at least to the subconscious were much use longterm. I don’t get much acute anxiety anymore, but burnout on a few things that repeatedly don’t work out and need the right situation/people.
I’m not sure what many therapists mean by resilience since it sounds like “be tougher”, on the surface I find it a blaming word tbh, but in the somatic method, it’s creating more capacity in the nervous system.