Psychology is a study of human behaviors and psychotherapy is an umbrella term for the many different ways for helping people with their thoughts and emotions. Hypnotherapy falls into this category, it is an effective and popular branch of psychotherapy; it has been approved for use by the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association for over 60 years. Hypnosis is now widely recognized internationally as the key to rapid behavioral change and is now used in many fields including dentistry, medical, professional sports and education.
Hypnotherapy has two significant advantages over other psychological approaches:
• Hypnotherapy deals with the subconscious mind.
• Hypnotherapy is usually far quicker in producing beneficial changes and results.
These two factors are obviously linked. Hypnotherapy tends to be quicker because it deals with subconscious thought processes, which are often the cause of many people’s problems. It is the process of communicating unconsciously with oneself and gives speedy access to underlying causes and insights stimulating alternative behaviors using unconscious resources of the client. However, on the other hand, psychotherapy is a conscious process and is a useful tool for self- discovery, raising self- awareness around unresolved issues or underlying causes of negative behaviors and emotions. Realization of such causes can sometimes be enough to generate behavioral change and exploring cognitive avenues of alternative behaviors and perceptions accelerates such change. Hypnotherapy and psychotherapy is a powerful combination in the field of personal change, bringing together one’s conscious, cognitive realization with an unconscious, creative resources.
A Hypnotherapist is in a unique position of actually being able to communicate with the subconscious mind directly in a way that nobody else can. It is not always necessary to induce the hypnotic state for a client to achieve the desired change in their life. Equally, it is not always necessary to explore underlying issues using cognitive psychotherapeutic skills with clients but rather the hypnotic state to achieve quick and lasting change.
Hypnotherapy does not merely involve suggestion style therapy; it is heavily influenced by a variety of psychotherapeutic techniques.
A skilled hypnotherapist will often incorporate many different methodologies into any given treatment. One psychotherapeutic method that is particularly useful for hypnotherapists is to directly challenge the limiting belief structures – which is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). For instance, when someone says, “I can’t do that”, we can ask them to change “can’t” to “won’t” and then explore the reasons. Incorporating such methodologies into hypnotherapy gives additional tools for permanent, lasting change, makes it much more effective and much quicker. However, everyone has their own unique model of the world, their own inner world, and their own differences. We can never know how long it will take a particular person to respond to psychotherapy or hypnotherapy.
Instead, there are some exceptions, I personally believe that almost anything that psychotherapy can achieve, hypnotherapy can accomplish much quicker. I just see it as a more direct route to resolution. I mean, you can talk about something at length and never really resolve any of the underlying subconscious thoughts and feelings that fuel you’re waking reactions. The advantage of hypnotherapy is that we can go straight to the source – the subconscious mind!
