Hypnosis is a completely natural state which occurs between wakefulness and sleep. Everybody experiences it every time they wake or fall asleep, but we are mostly unaware of it. Formal Hypnosis and the techniques used to elicit Hypnosis have been around for thousands of years – meditation, yoga and many other eastern mystical disciplines all make use of Hypnotic phenomena. Hypnotherapy is the merging of Hypnosis and specific therapeutic techniques and I use these techniques every day to help resolve my Clients many different anxieties.

Hypnosis can't make you do anything you don't want to!

Hypnosis cannot make you do anything you do not want to do! My clients remain fully in control throughout their relaxing therapeutic Hypnosis experience. If you are now wondering just how the stage Hypnotist gets members of the audience to do ridiculous things then read on. Quite simply he asks for volunteers and only those people who are game for a laugh will volunteer to take part. Out of those people he will then select the most suggestible people for his show (the natural show offs), people who will readily accept suggestions to do wild and wacky things. So unless you want to run around a stage clucking like a chicken, to amuse yourself and an audience, no one can make you!

As a professional Hypnotherapist I do not partake in or endorse stage Hypnosis. I do however use Hypnosis to allow my clients to accept beneficial suggestions for their well being. Most people are not suggestible enough to take part in a stage Hypnosis show. However, almost everyone is suggestible enough to accept the beneficial or relaxing suggestions needed for Hypnotherapy to be successful.

Before I start to discuss the benefits of Hypnotherapy, I hope that you can now see that Hypnosis is not mind control! You will in fact only ever accept suggestions into your subconscious if you want to. Since as a professional therapist I only ever offer suggestions for your benefit there is no reason why your mind should reject them Therefore any suggestions that I do make in the course of the therapy will be integrated into your subconscious mind and have a lasting and beneficial effect.

Hypnosis is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Let's now look at what Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy really are, how Hypnosis occurs, what are its applications and how it can help almost everyone in one way or another.

Have you ever been driving down a familiar road or walking along a familiar route that you’ve traveled many times in the past, when all of a sudden you realize that you don’t remember the last couple of miles if you are in a car, or the last 200 yards if you were walking, and you’ve wondered how you didn't have an accident, because you know you weren’t paying attention? Well what you’ve just experienced is the relaxing of the conscious mind and you have been guided by your subconscious, this is a form of Hypnosis. Have you ever been ready to wake up in a morning, aware of things going on around you and yet you haven't yet come to completely. Perhaps you don' t want to wake up fully so you just doze, half asleep, half awake, conscious of everything but very relaxed, this is Hypnosis. Quite simply Hypnosis is a natural mind state that you have generated yourself on many occasions in the past, no more , no less and most certainly not magic. There is something a little special about this in between state though, and that is that your subconscious mind is much more receptive to suggestion and much more ready to get rid of bottled up emotions, allowing the therapist to undo any destructive habits or help you to get rid of bottled up emotions.

We all have two parts to our mind, the conscious mind and the sub-conscious mind Two separate parts that don’t really have too much in common. Your Conscious mind is the part that you are using now to read and understand this. This is the thinking, reasoning, doing part, the conscious you, the part of your mind that you are aware of. Whenever you learn something new, question something, or doubt yourself, you are doing it with your conscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is the area a Hypnotherapist is interested in – this is like a big vault, a big library of every experience, every memory and emotion we have ever had, everything is in there, when you hear a song you’ve not heard for years and it takes you back to when you first heard it, that experience is from your subconscious – any day to day action or activity you do without thinking about it, anything that you do automatically, like the physical actions needed to drive your car, these are all done from your subconscious memory. Habitual tasks pass from your conscious mind where they are learned to your subconscious so that once you have learned them, you never need to think about them again, you can just do them automatically. Most people can remember when they were learning to do something new, whether it was learning to drive, learning to use a computer or whatever. At first you have to think about every action until eventually you just do it without thinking because your subconscious mind has learned the task and takes over. If this didn't happen then our conscious minds would very quickly become overloaded. The subconscious mind can learn good habits and ideas, and unfortunately bad and destructive ones.