Looking for Counselling or Psychotherapy Services? Check out my Person Centred Counselling site here: RT Counselling

Now offering Parts Therapy

- We are all made up of multiple and differing parts.

- Parts therapy is essentially about resolving internal conflicts within all of us. By resolving inner conflicts, clients may no longer feel ‘stuck’.

- The objective is the two parts (the motivating part and the sabotaging part) in conflict reach a positive outcome through discussion and ultimately resolution with one another.

Find out more by Contacting me on - info@nextchaptertherapies.co.uk / 07793144403 for a consultation.

Stress & Anxiety

Overcoming Stress & Anxiety

In order to truly understand and assess hypnotherapeutic treatments for stress, anxiety and phobias it is important to explore the origins of these conditions and how they manifest in people. Let us first look at stress as it is most commonly experienced in our everyday lives. Stress can be attributed to our bodies’ natural reaction to fear or a reluctance to change. Our subconscious will create an inherent fight or flight response to any situation where we may feel, or at least think, that we are being threatened. The subconscious will create these feelings by using neurotransmitters that arouse or inhibit our brain to make us excited or to calm us. But the subconscious sees things in a binary way. It is resistant to change, and battles with the idea of being challenged. This is a conflict which will likely result in feeling stressed. In essence, stress can derive from any situation that makes us feel angry, frustrated or anxious – anything that challenges our subconscious beliefs. Stress could also present itself in someone suffering from prolonged and inescapable pain or discomfort.

Apprehension or fear is the cause of anxiety and the source of that cannot always be determined or recognised. As discussed, the subconscious does not deal well with uncertainties and throughout life we go through a process of change. These changes can create a sense of anxiety.

Stress is a feeling that people will usually be able to identify. By contrast one might have a continual sense of anxiety that is difficult to identify. Someone who has been subjected to long-term stress can cause anxiety. It might also occur when we feel threatened by a person or situation. Stress is an incidental experience that we can overcome more easily than anxiety, whereas anxiety can affect our emotions, behaviour or physical health. A negative cycle can be created, meaning the more anxious we feel the more heightened the anxiety becomes and the more negative we feel, which in turn makes us avoid the situations that make us feel anxious. In this sense, we might be able to identify the situations that make us anxious, but unlike stress, we cannot explain why it is making us feel that way.

What are the possible treatments? In the case of somebody suffering stress, once the cause of stress is accurately pinpointed, a course of hypnotherapy, focusing on relaxation techniques and reversing the element of stress with the power of suggestion will work. Hypnotherapy treatment alone would usually be used to treat acute stress, where a client feels tension and physical disturbances such as insomnia or sexual dysfunction. This can usually be overcome with treatment of around six weekly sessions.

In the case of treating anxiety, you will need to realise that the symptoms can be alleviated and that you will be able to deal with them. It is also important to distinguish that their are not multiple reasons behind the anxiety, otherwise one may be resolved but the other then replaces it. Hypnotherapy can be used to build your confidence and alter your subconscious mind to believe that you can reverse the anxiety.