The time I thought hypnosis wouldn’t work

Some years after I trained as a hypnotherapist, I did a special course called the Rewind Technique, which is often used for phobias, fears and memories that keep repeating themselves.  I did the course with a group of friends and we had a great time learning and practising the technique. I was really interested in how it could be used to help people change the way they responded to difficult memories and fears.

Then, not long afterwards, I had an experience that gave me a chance to try it for myself.  I lived in a house where I rented out an apartment, and I had to evict someone who was living there. The whole process took about six weeks and it was extremely stressful.  One of the hardest things for me was seeing people coming up the steps from the street, walking along the veranda and then going up the internal staircase to the apartment. I never knew what was going to happen. Were they going to damage the place? What was happening upstairs? I was constantly on alert.

Eventually the person left, but the anxiety didn’t disappear.  Even a couple of weeks later, I noticed that whenever someone came to visit, or I heard someone walking up the steps or moving around in the stairwell, I would feel anxious. I realised that I had developed a phobia of people coming to the house.

I happened to be talking to one of the friends who had done the Rewind Technique course with me, and she said, “Why don’t we use the technique and see if we can let this phobia go?”  I thought that sounded like a great idea.  She asked me to send her the script we’d been taught, which I did. But when she arrived to do the session, she had brought a completely different script.  That really threw me.

She had come all the way to do the session for me, so I was grateful that she was there, but I remember thinking, Oh well, this probably isn’t going to work.  I was too polite to tell her.  So I decided to play along and see what happened.

I sat down, closed my eyes and went through the process. Every now and then, that little voice in my head was saying, This isn’t going to work.  But I stayed with it, immersed in the hypnotic story.  By the end of the session I did feel very relaxed, and when she left I thought, Well, that was nice, but what a shame. She’s come all this way and I’ve probably wasted her time.

Then I forgot about it.

About two weeks later she phoned me and asked, “How’s that phobia?”   And that was when I realised something.  I hadn’t had it.  Not once! People had visited me. People had walked up the steps. I’d heard people in the stairwell. And none of it had produced that feeling of anxiety or fear.

I actually had to laugh.   Here I was, sitting through the hypnosis thinking, This isn’t going to work, while apparently my mind was doing something completely different.

What surprised me most was how completely the response had changed. It wasn’t as though I was having to remind myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. The anxiety simply wasn’t there anymore.  In a way, it felt as though I had remembered to forget that I had ever had the phobia.

That experience stayed with me because it was one of those moments when something I had learned professionally became very real through my own experience.  I had gone into the session with doubt and resistance. I didn’t expect it to work. And yet something changed.

It reminded me that hypnosis doesn’t always work in the way we expect it to. We don’t necessarily have to consciously believe that something is going to work before our minds can respond to the process.   We just have to be open to the process and follow along.

And that was one of the experiences that really showed me that, for some people, hypnosis can make a very significant difference.

Want to find out more about hypnosis?

If this story has made you curious about what hypnosis actually is and how it can help, you can read more about Hypnotherapy in Nelson, including the kinds of things I work with and what you can expect from a session.

If you’d like to talk about whether hypnotherapy might be helpful for you, you can contact me.

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