What is Hypnotherapy?
Why we feel the way that we do
Unprocessed stress, emotions, or trauma — whether from adverse childhood experiences, grief, life-changing events, toxic relationships or relationship conflict, birth trauma, and even experiences that occurred in-utero — can affect us in a variety of ways.
Culturally, we have been conditioned to dismiss or avoid any sign of struggle that may arise, pushing the emotional repercussions of such events further and further down into our nervous system.
In turn, causing a complete disconnection from the mind and the body.
Over time, this can present as:
anxiety or emotional overwhelm
chronic stress, fatigue, or burnout
sleep disturbances
chronic pain or inflammation
recurring relationship patterns
people-pleasing or over-giving
addictions or behavioural patterns
disconnection from yourself, and so on…
Your body is trying to protect you
If you were to break a bone and leave it to heal without medical intervention, the bone would eventually repair itself, and the surrounding muscles and tissues would adapt and continue to function around the injury.
The same is true for the impact of psychological trauma on the nervous system.
The main function of your body is to keep you safe, meaning any form of stimuli that serve as a reminder of a traumatic event will be flagged as an alarm, and your sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses) will immediately be on guard.
This process happens automatically, without any conscious input.
How does it work?
The principles of hypnotherapy are grounded in the understanding that language is a primary function of how we process information, both input and output — this is simply neuroscience.
To create therapeutic shifts within the nervous system, hypnotherapy works with language to reduce activation of the regions of the brain responsible for analysis, logic, and factual reasoning (the conscious mind),
while opening access to the regions of the brain which govern emotions, imagination, creativity, intuition, and the emotional memory behind every experience that you have ever had (the subconscious mind).
In essence, hypnosis is a natural state in which new learning can take place within the brain.
By reducing the activity of the conscious mind, the brain becomes more receptive to new, felt experiences created through therapeutic suggestion, allowing space for profound change to occur.