WHO CAN CBT-HYPNOTHERAPY HELPin EDINBURGH?
Hypnotherapy Edinburgh
The short answer is everyone who wants to be helped, although I doubt whether psychosis will be. I tend to avoid using hypnosis with a person who has epilepsy, however if their GP approves then I will use it.
Let us at this stage put psychological ailments into perspective.
We as humans are mistake making, so therefore any approach that offers a philosophical ability to identify and correct our mistakes is going to help anyone sensible enough who believes in it. Since most people are truthful and honest, all we are doing here is reactivating congruence and translating it into the inaccurate assumptions we have made on ourselves at a given time. By re-interpreting the past we can emerge from our deep thinking with a clearer, more concise way of viewing how we can interact in the world around us now.
In clinical experience, my CBT/Hypnotherapy approach has helped anxiety, depression, public speaking, blushing, stress, pain control, weight loss, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, sporting performance, panic attacks, sexual dysfunction, relationship difficulties, smoking, anger, jealousy, confidence issues and self-worth issues. I am normally expecting results quickly as this is a common sense easy to follow approach. However, I would expect three sessions for a problem to be well under control, but to quote Dr Ellis “It takes as long as it takes-no demands”.
Because most people have thought about their problem inside out, outside in for months, if not years and have not had adequate help, they usually breathe a sigh of relief when the therapist starts to talk their language and shows them a way out of the problem. It is interesting to note that Dr Weekes, probably the most qualified therapist of us all, used the most simple words and analogies, examples being; “The nervously ill person feels like he has been cast adrift on a storm at sea in a rudderless ship”. She would then give detailed, accurate, factual knowledge to this bewildered, frightened person, answering his questions before the patient had asked them and then say “so go on little ship, you can survive the storm by sailing straight into it, there is always peace on the other side of panic, so go on through, peace lies on the other side, not on this side… it’s good to take the old skeleton out of the closet, he scares us less and less when we do so…trying to batten down a vivid imagination rarely works, when you slay one dragon, 13 more appear”.
From a cognitive perspective, the major weapons we have in our armoury are knowledge and understanding; problems do not like to be analysed properly. That is the essence of this approach. It is defining to an individual the truth of human and world conditions that are measurable through thought and perception, as Dr Ellis discovered in his teens outside the Bronx Botanical Garden “Nothing bad actually happened, nobody cut my balls off, I wasn’t arrested.” So many therapeutic approaches try to change or put a sticking plaster over the symptoms that they think arise from the situation, but that is short term ignorance kept alive with marketing approaches and phoney promises to directly appeal towards instant success and indirectly dumb down the population into thinking they are all magicians, but scientifically as far as we know magic does not exist.
It has never ceased to amaze me that when a frightened, bewildered person present themselves for help they are met with an even more disturbed unscientific ethos from the therapist who is determined to believe that they hold magical powers so that they do not have the “human condition”. That is why REBT at its inception was reviled and still is. “I give myself unconditional self-acceptance (USA) no matter what my personal and professional failings are-and they are considerable! I also accept myself unconditionally, no matter who disapproves of me and my therapy. Since REBT, for many years was an anathema to most therapists, and since I was reviled for creating and practicing it, I was able to keep it going and turn it into one of the most successful psychotherapies by not giving too much of a damn for the scathing criticism that it kept engendering. Let the benighted faultfinders criticise! I didn’t give that much of a shit” Dr Albert Ellis.
People with an ability to think for themselves and who truly want to get better and not become immersed in a sub-culture of embracing illness and making a hobby out of psychotherapy will gain vastly from this terrific approach. When I met Al Ellis in New York City three months before his death, I asked him what the difference between Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy? He replied “REBT is more philosophical”. We have the ability to think about our thinking so therefore we can change it.
For some of you reading this, you may at this stage fail to see the connection between thought and feeling and maybe think that you cannot possibly alter your thinking at this moment. It may seem that you have become so entrenched within your illness that it seems impossible. Read on, I will show that change is possible. To begin to understand our thinking we again come back to memory, which is no more than brain cells that have been written upon with our experiences, sight, sound, smell, taste and feeling then wired into the circuitry of the brain with neuro-transmitters and held in place with protein. These memories are most susceptible to change at the very time that they are re-called and a result, are in effect waiting to be re-written with more accurate information. Because the original information was written on with awfulness, this has made a big impression upon us and is now affecting our attitude.
Awfulness is the state into which we propel ourselves with our inaccurate thinking; we feel disabled, vulnerable, insecure, fearful, depressed, angry, frightened, and helpless. We have done this to ourselves by initially being in the situation and then demanding that a) we be loved and approved of, b) others respect us and c) the world around us must adhere to what we want and if not it’s awful. What these three core-beliefs mean is we must get what we demand, note; we do not wish, desire or hope, we demand a) against self , b) against others or c) against the world. We escalate our thinking into demands, so naturally with such great stakes, we create the extreme emotions of anxiety, anger, depression. Since the world is full of biologically mistake making and fallible animals, nothing then is awful. We create ‘awful’ with demands.
A young lady presented herself at Dr Ellis’ Friday Night Workshop in Manhattan and said that she had witnessed her sister being shot dead 12 years previously, had been very depressed for those 12 years and she did not know how to go on with her life. Note that bereavement usually lasts 18 months and she was presenting depression. Dr Ellis replied by saying “The answer is you go on with your life by going on with it; you are saying that she should not have died! (Using and reversing her should) He said “I say she should have…because that’s what happened.” He freed her from her destructive anger over a reality that could not be changed. She had kept herself ill by taking over-responsibility and trying to control other people’s actions then depressing herself when she couldn’t. Depression is commanding you get what you want then getting depressed when you do not get it. That is arrogant. It takes a person who is finally sick and tired of the debilitating symptoms to finally listen.
For many people coming out of a situation which we find problematic, they breathe a sigh of relief. The situation may change but more accurately, in relation to the relief, our perception changes; we think differently. So now you see the connection between thought and emotion. Also, since most situations have human beings in them, we therefore have to look again at our perception of ourselves. On many occasions we put others on a pedestal, therefore creating heroes or heroines, so we then have to impress or seek approval from these mythical icons. Of course we never will, so when we don’t, we experience emotions that we dislike. Given that humans are fallible and mistake-making, we ignore and disown this fact and project our failings onto others, thereby turning insecurity into excitement. We then feverishly try to control this excitement by controlling the other person; we then create anxiety when we surely cannot. It is akin to a blindfolded ass going around and around in circles.
Our initial thought may be one of wishing to impress, but because we have had difficulty in similar situations before, memory metaphorically slaps us across the face with a feeling and then rather than let the first shock pass (grandma’s scones) we then escalate our thinking into awfulness with a demand that we must not look foolish, whilst overlooking the fact that the demand that we are using against ourselves is the same demand that created the memory. The emotional intensity of the memory i.e. fear has been created by the belief that we must not/should not/ought not look foolish, is like a gun being placed at our head then given the possibility that the unconscious mind is allegedly like an literal creative child, the ‘child’ dutifully responds with fear from the demand of the punitive parent.