Improve Your Emotional Regulation And Wellbeing With Hypnotherapy

Do you often find yourself stressed in your daily life? Do you sometimes feel extreme emotions that doesn’t feel like yours? Do you overreact or feel out of control when exposed to certain situations or people?

These feelings are very common; in fact, everyone experiences them throughout their daily lives. But we often don’t know the real reason behind our emotions or how to regulate them.

It can be a bit challenging to regulate or control our emotions without first understanding  where they are coming from, or why they have been triggered for us to behave in a specific way.

Hypnotherapy can improve your emotional regulation, and your reactions to external stimuli and situations. Some of the after-effects of hypnotherapy are relaxation, improved quality of sleep, and feelings of calm (Smitha Bhandari, MD, 2021)

What is Hypnotherapy?

To first understand what hypnotherapy is, we should first understand hypnosis. Hypnotherapy uses ‘hypnosis’ as a state to help people apply therapy tools. When a client goes to a hypnotherapist, the therapist induces this natural state of hypnosis by feeding the client a lot of message units which have a tendency to relax the client. These message units create distractions for the conscious part of the mind by bombarding it in a specific, trained way that uses misdirection, ego sensations, and emotional feelings.

The client then reverts to their subconscious mind and becomes very suggestible for creating change, accessing hidden parts of themself, and receiving therapy. Hypnosis is a state which is pleasurable within in a controlled environment, when overactivity of the senses takes place, causing extreme receptiveness (John G. Kappas, Ph.D, 2009)

What causes unexpected extreme emotional reactions?

In hypnotherapy, we operate from the premise that it is not the first time we have ever felt any emotion that we are feeling in the moment; we must have felt this way before somewhere or sometime else. This extreme emotional reaction, or unwanted feeling that we experience, is often triggered by an external situation, person, or time.

Those external stimuli are called triggers. A trigger is a major throwback a trauma or a painful event that we have experienced, perhaps in our early adolescence or childhood. Our limbic system and part of the brain reacts to triggers without any sense of time, or the growth that we have went through; the brain still reacts the same way as if the external situation that created the trigger is happening right now (David Ricco, Triggers, 2019).

In that sense, any unwanted or exaggerated emotion that we are feeling in that moment is not the real us reacting to that stimuli; its a part of us that is not healed or acknowledged being triggered and unearthing these feelings from our subconscious mind.

How can hypnotherapy really help?

Using hypnotherapy like any other therapeutic modality, can help you explore, process, and acknowledge these emotions, un-peeling those layers of symptoms or outwardly behaviors to discover the core issues, or the original traumas that keep coming through our subconscious and influence our behavior and feelings. As a result, hypnotherapy helps us to diminish these symptoms, regulate our emotions, and feel more calm and stable when exposed to the same triggers.

Hypnotherapy uses a lot of therapeutic tools under a trance state (hypnosis) to access the subconscious part of the mind, creating change, healing, and integrating those parts that were affected or frozen in time. Using different tools, such as inner child therapy and ego state therapy, which deal with early childhood traumas, attachments, and external influences that latch and form the ego, even though sometimes these parts don’t belong to the ego state, like attachment to a childhood friend or a deceased family member.

Also, hypnotherapy uses regression therapies in a safe, controlled way to process traumas, or feelings that were experienced early on, in a way that will finally acknowledge, heal, and feel those emotions fully. During a Hypnotherapy session, it’s very common for catharsis to happen, and it’s very important and positive to release emotions in that therapeutic space, because if you can’t feel, you can’t really heal.

Is Hypnotherapy safe?

A lot of misconceptions about hypnotherapy have become popular because of media or TV portrayals of hypnosis and stage hypnosis, but hypnosis is not the same as you see in media.

Hypnosis is a natural state that we go into lightly at least twice every day: once before we fall asleep, and once when we wake up in the morning. Hypnosis is very similar to a delta state, which is a very relaxed, half-asleep, meditative state. Usually, people who meditate are very familiar with this state, and can go into it easily and quickly.

Hypnotherapy is a safe practice when conducted by a trained and certified therapist. I usually recommend the session of trance to be under 50 minutes to avoid fatigue, false memories, or drifting off to sleep. Hypnotherapy should be an interactive process of therapy, so clients and therapists need to protect their energies and create those safeguards.

What kinds of issues is Hypnotherapy good for?

Hypnotherapy can be effective in managing a lot of different ailments and concerns. I have seen clients for various presenting issues, such as anger issues, unwanted habits, indecisiveness, bad breakups and attachments, money blocks, physical pains, and anxieties, who had remarkable results from a few sessions.

In a nutshell, hypnotherapy can be used for really anything, because of its integrative nature of combining different tools and modalities to tackle the client’s challenges. As a result, it helps in emotion regulation and stability.

References:

- Mental Health and Hypnosis (Medically Reviewed by Smitha Bhandari, MD on September 14, 2021) https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-hypnotherapy.

- Professional Hypnotism Manual, John G. Kappas, Ph.D, 2009.

- Triggers, David Ricco, P.hD, MFT, 2019.