How Hypnotherapy Can Help With Anxiety
The DSM defines anxiety as, “Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or school performance).” Perhaps you’ve had anxiety your entire life and tried everything to “fix it”. Here’s the thing, after working with clients, anxiety isn’t just “one thing” nor do you have to live with it for the rest of your life. That is not to say you will never become worried and life will be all butterflies and rainbows.
So… How do we overcome anxiety?
The secret is using a feeling based approach and breaking down anxiety into smaller parts. Anxiety is a lot like this: You go to a buffet (your brain) and you pile on all of this food on to your plate (thoughts). You pile your food so high that the it begins to overlap and run together. You get back to the table and you become overwhelmed at all of the food on your plate. You call me and say I am so overwhelmed and having all of this anxiety about all of this food on my plate and we schedule a session.
You come in for the session and we are first going to acknowledge that there is a ton of food on your plate. But then, we are going to break down the different types of food on your plate. Each food brings it’s own feeling, so we are going to go through the food, one by one, working though the feelings and why you feel that way for each food. WHILE, coming up with strategies that can help you manage how much food you have on your plate.
For instance, you know you shouldn’t eat a particular food because it hurts your stomach. We dig deeper and we find that you feel like you have to eat it, because if you don’t, the guest you came with to the buffet may be upset. So we know that in this particular instance, we may have to work through boundaries so you are not piling your plate with food that doesn’t make you feel good.
Perhaps in our investigation, we find that you don’t like to eat sweets, but you indulge because you feel lonely and are emotionally eating the food. Therefore we would regress to when this became an issue for you, find ways to resolve it, and rebuild the foundation with that food so you can eat it when you want versus fulfilling an emotional need.
Maybe, we continue through our buffet (the mind) and we find that you have placed certain food (thoughts) on your plate because you know it is going to upset someone else. We investigate and we find you are carrying anger towards something the person did a long time ago that is still unresolved. In this instance, we work through the anger, down to the core emotions, and we resolve them by creating a safe space for you to express your emotions.
So as you can see, anxiety isn’t just one thing. It’s usually many issues piled on top of each other. Therefore to overcome anxiety using hypnosis, we must first accept that yes, there are layers and that it can take time to sift through the layers. After acceptance, we can then allow ourself the grace to find strategies and solutions to become more mindful of WHY we are having anxiety in a particular instance.
Why The Why Matters & How To Use a Feelings Based Approach To Overcome Anxiety
Understanding the why is perhaps the most important aspect of overcoming anxiety, but we must understand the why through a feelings based approach. Simply saying I have anxiety because I had a crap childhood is not enough. We know what your parents did, but are you allowing yourself the space to feel how your parents made you feel? Because that is what the anxiety is responding to, your feelings. So perhaps we rephrase and now we say, I am anxious because I am worried I am going to be rejected. This means there is a part of you that does feel rejected at this moment, even if that scenario hasn’t happened yet. WE must then find that part that feels rejected, allow them to state their case and express their feelings. After this has been done, The client then becomes the mentor of reason to this version of themself, rewiring their neural pathways.
But we must allow ourself to release the old energy that keeps trying to be expressed because we cannot build a new version of ourself on a poor emotional foundation. Clearing our old emotions allows for us to create pathways that are strengthened by feelings. Otherwise, we are going to be fighting old feelings as we try to overcome anxiety, which is very ineffective.