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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Experience The World Different 


Manage Your Weight using Hypnotherapy


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Flick through the pages of any local newspaper and you will see a plethora of services and products to help with weight control. Common sense and the laws of science suggest that to dump the excess weight the equation is simple. Eat less, and exercise more. That's easier said than done.
The fact is that there are numerous reasons that people over eat. Most people don't even realise that they are over eating. There are lots of people who are naturally thin and healthy. They tend to have a different strategy for eating. They eat for fuel as a priority to taste. When they consider what they are going to eat, they consider the longer term consequences. They consider how this food will feel in my belly over the next few hours as I digest it. For example, a thin person feels hungry. They consider a block of ice cream, and compare that to a bowl of soup and a sandwich. They imagine how bloated and listless they will feel after eating the ice cream, and how light and energetic they will feel after the soup and sandwich, and choose that.
Hypnotic weight control is not about dieting, it is about lifestyle change. Diets don't work except in the short term. People on diets feel they are depriving themselves, and constantly feel rebellious. Diets fail because they are an "away from" motivation, and they are a source of internal conflict.
Very simplistically, people are motivated to move towards pleasure, and motivated to move away from pain. People tend go on a diet because they want to stop being overweight. Moving away from overweight is an away from motivation, it is away from the pain of being overweight. Meanwhile, the old toward motivations of food as pleasure or comfort or any of a thousand reasons are still there, trying to pull you back to old habits. After a while on the diet, there is some weight loss, and the motivating pain of overweight loses power. The toward motivations of pleasure become more powerful, and the swing back to over eating begins again until the pain of overweight builds up force again and the cycle begins again. Does that seem familiar to you?
Hypnotherapy using gastric band hypnosis combined with other hypnotherapy techniques can have dramatic results, and the change is lifelong, not just temporary. This is because the changes are locked in at the subconscious level. It is your subconscious that is responsible for all learning and change and habits. Changing habits at the unconscious level causes change at the conscious level apparently without effort. A useful metaphor is to imagine a horse carriage. Imagine your brain is the carriage driver, your body is the carriage, and the horses are your emotions. When we overeat, it's usually our emotions that pull us along. If those horses (emotions) decide to have a bar of chocolate, and charge off to do that, pulling on the reins (willpower) might slow them down for a bit, but that takes a lot of energy, and since the horses are consistent (imaging that chocolate), they will drag the carriage and driver along with them. Hypnotherapy gives you direct access to the desires of the horses (emotions) so they will bring you in the direction you want, every second of every day consistently, perhaps just requiring a gentle tug on the reins now and again.
Hypnotherapy for weight control starts off with a two hour session, followed by three one hour sessions, usually weekly. It is very important that you understand that hypnosis is not magic, and while the results are usually dramatic, please look at the following equation.
CAUSE = EFFECT.
You are responsible for your body, for your thoughts and for your feelings. You need to have the attitude that you are on the cause side of the equation, and not on the effect side of the equation. Being on the cause side of the equation means knowing and feeling you are in control of your life, and not being blown along by the winds of randomness. You generate the effects. Being on the effect side of the equation means that you have no control, that nothing you do makes any difference so why do anything. Hypnotherapy is a team effort, where we work together. You need to do your part, because you are the one that is changing. It is important that you have realistic expectations! Your obligations in relation to the hypnotherapy are:
1) To use your imagination to imagine the things I describe as vividly as possible, with as many of your five senses as possible.
2) Listen to the hypnotic recording provided religiously for the first couple of weeks.
3) Follow a few golden rules which I will provide.
It has been reported that the expected average weight loss is half a stone in the first week, and maybe 1-2 lbs a week after that. There is no dieting, you can eat what you like, but will be completely satisfied and content with smaller quantities. This is not guaranteed, but it is the average weight loss following this procedure. 
If you were to lose 1-2lbs a week without dieting, would you be happy with that?
The first session is a two hour session which consists of information gathering, the hypnosis pretalk, the hypnotic induction, the "well formed outcomes" and the hypnotic gastric band "operation". This is basically an imaginary operation under hypnosis where your subconscious mind imagines your stomach is smaller, and so feels full on smaller and healthier amounts of food. You will be given a CD/MP3 to follow up, which it is very important to listen to regularly as it reinforces the session, and increases your subconscious motivation before meals. If during the intake form it is apparent that there are significant emotional events in your past that are the main drivers for the overweight, we may need to change the strategy to clearing emotional baggage from the past before coming back to the weight control.
The second session is of one hours duration, and is aimed at resolving any conflict at the subconscious level in relation to eating and food. The metaphor behind this is that we have parts at the subconscious level which have intentions they want to achieve, and behaviours to support those intentions. Once we get congruence at the subconscious level, change is very easy because we have harmony instead of conflict at the subconscious level. It's like the difference between two people with different objectives fighting and in conflict, and the same two people with the same objective working together in synergy. What would it be like if the part of you that was responsible for overeating now uses it's energy and motivation to move you toward the new healthier, more energetic you?
The third session also of one hour is generally aimed at motivating you towards getting more exercise, because your new eating lifestyle is usually automatic at this stage. Sometimes there are particular foods that have been identified as a particular issue, and we can deal with those during this session.
The fourth session is a "mop up" session, it really depends on how things have being going for you between the previous sessions, and usually we do a "tightening" of the hypnotic gastric band during this session.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Exam Nerves and Study Concentration using Hypnosis


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One of the doctors who attempted to bring hypnosis out of the realm of hocus pocus and to establish it as a rigorous scientific study of immense benefit to humankind was a man called James Braid. He studied hypnosis in depth, and was able to achieve amazing things. He was the man who coined the term "hypnosis". Hypnosis is the Greek word for sleep. James Braid quickly realised that hypnotic trance is anything but sleep. It can actually be a state of intense focused attention to the exclusion of everything else. He attempted to change the name from hypnosis to monoideism, but for some strange reason, the name of hypnosis stuck. 
Monoideism when broken down means mono-idea-ism, or concentrating on one idea at a time. We have to learn things with our conscious minds, but our unconscious minds are responsible for storing all our learning, experiences, memories and emotions. It is much easier to learn when you have access to your unconscious mind. When in a learning trance, you are concentrating all your attention on what it is that you are studying to the exclusion of everything else. This is like opening a trapdoor on the top of your head, and pouring in the information. Glug, glug, glug. Bear in mind that hypnosis is not magic, you still need repetition and practise to get good at anything! However, the aim of hypnotherapy would be to help you to achieve a state of mind where studying is enjoyable. After all, we tend to be motivated to do the things we enjoy. Can you think of something you enjoyed today or over the last couple of days? Let's say it was watching your favourite program, or playing your favourite sport, just something you really enjoy doing. Was it difficult to motivate yourself to do that enjoyable activity, or was it easy? What would it be like if the thought of study was as enjoyable as that, if the act of studying was as enjoyable as that. Wouldn't you be doing it?
Of course, you need to move from procrastination to motivation if you need to get moving on what you study. Assuming you have that, you have prepared, and now there is an exam looming. Some people feel anxious about exams, they go into exams, and read the questions, and something happens to prevent them from performing as well as possible. They have all the information in their heads, and then up comes fear and anxiety, and performance decreases. What usually happens there is that we make scary thought patterns in our head, and those thought patterns manifest as negative body feelings. Here is a metaphorical example. Imagine a foot wide plank that is five metres long on the floor where you are. It would be easy to walk along that plank, wouldn't it. Now imagine that the same plank is over an abyss with streams of lava fifty metres below. It's the same size plank, the same muscles are used to traverse it, however the difference is magnified in the mind. Our imaginations are very powerful, as we imagine things our minds make it real to a certain extent, and generates emotion to go with the imagined thing. Very simplistically, if we imagine good things, we get good feelings, if we imagine bad things, we get bad feelings.
If anxiety is an issue in other areas of your life, we may need to tackle the anxiety as the overarching cause. If it's the case where the anxiety in relation to exams is just one example of things you are anxious about, we may need to clear the anxiety in general.
There are two broad categories of learning. They are procedural knowledge and factual knowledge. Factual knowledge is the gathering of facts, and the linkage and association of those facts to what you already know. Procedural knowledge is the step by step ways things are done. For example, you can learn lots of facts about how to drive a car, but you actually need to drive a car to learn the procedure of driving. Another example is playing snooker. You can learn all the facts about geometry and angles and momentum and action and reaction, but it's unlikely you'd beat an experienced snooker player unless you have the process learning (commonly known as practise) first!

Some people are great on facts, but weaker on procedural knowledge, and with others it’s vice versa.

Procedural knowledge and factual knowledge are both very useful, and getting better at the one you are weaker on will tend to enhance the other one also. For example, having the procedural knowledge of playing a musical instrument can be useful in learning the harmony of mathematics.
Summarising how hypnosis can help with study concentration and exam nerves we have:
1) Motivation to study, by changing study to something you want to do because it's enjoyable to you.
2) Learning how to go into a deep study trance, so you are completely engaged in your study to the exclusion of everything else, while being aware of the context of what you are studying.
3) Clearing out fear and anxiety in relation to exams.
4) Follow up hypnosis CD / mp3 to reinforce the session(s), and to enhance your factual and procedural (practise) learning.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Managing Stress with Hypnosis


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Stress is very common in today's society. Our bodies and minds are still as they were thousands of years ago when we were living in the jungle or on the savanna. We still have the basic motivations of the four "F"'s - feeding, fighting, fleeing and I can't remember the fourth f, but it is do with reproduction. All of these are fundamental to the survival of the body, and to the survival of the species, and are born with us as instinct. 
We all need a certain amount of stress in our lives, we need to exercise our muscles and our brain so they get more powerful. We also need to exercise the stress response in our bodies every now and again. The way Deepak Chopra puts it is that we spend our lives oscillating between pleasure and pain. He says we are on the river of life. Pain is on one bank, and pleasure is on the other bank. It is not possible to experience pleasure without experiencing pain. How do you know what pleasure is unless you have experienced pain to compare it to?
The problem with stress in todays society is that there is so much of it. Our autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that is controlled by our unconscious mind, all the bodily functions we don't have to think about because they are automatic. Examples are heartbeat, blood flow, immune system, muscle movement, balance, digestion, hormone secretion and so on. The autonomic nervous system is divided into our sympathetic nervous system, and our parasympathetic nervous system. 
The parasympathetic nervous system is activated when we are resting, it is a time of healing and rest. It is when we digest our food, fight infection, and maintain and heal our body and mind.
The sympathetic nervous system is active when we are engaged in activity. When in fight/flight mode, our sympathetic nervous system is active, adrenaline and cortisol are dumped into our bloodstream, our heart beat increases, our breathing rate increases, and oxygen and blood is diverted to the legs and arms for action. Digestion is suspended, and our immune function is suppressed, because defeating or getting away from a life threatening situation needs all our energy for survival, or so the primitive response assumes.
There are not too many sabre toothed cats around nowadays, but there are plenty of people who are willing to shout at you over the phone, or hoot their horn at you, or cut you off on the road. Our mind/body tends to respond to these things as if they are life threatening, and so our bodies spend a lot more time in fight/flight than is good for them.
Stress management using hypnotherapy is similar to managing blood pressure using hypnosis, in fact the treatments are one and the same! As with every client, we go through an intake form. If there are a lot of emotional issues, like angerfearhurt and sadnessguilt, it would be very beneficial to clear those negative emotions from the body. Once you have resolved those issues from the past, the old emotions don't keep resurfacing when people press your buttons. You have new choices as to how to respond at the times you would have brought up one of the above emotions. Instead of bringing up old baggage of unresolved negative emotion, you will have more choices as to how to respond. 
We identify the things that you find stressful. We identify your strategy for stressing your body, some of the things that stress you, that bother or disturb you, and we teach you strategies for interrupting those old triggers with new and more appropriate responses that you and your unconscious mind are happy with.
The interesting thing is that in ongoing fight/flight mode, we go into a black and white mode of thinking, we may even get a sort of tunnel vision, everything seems extreme. This can be useful in a simple and real life or death situation, because instant action is needed at that time. 
For most situations in modern society where fight/response is activated, the last thing you want is black and white thinking. You need to be aware of the context, and you need to be able to examine different options, and be flexible in your thinking, and be aware of the shades of grey, so it is much better to be calm and relaxed! Being calm and relaxed allows your body to heal itself, digest your food and fight infections better. It also allows your blood pressure to be more normal. When calm and relaxed, you have much more access to your unconscious resources, and you have more flexibility and more choices.
Your fight/flight response is always there, if an emergency arises, your fight/flight response will kick in so you can protect your body. The fight/flight response is actually an emotionless state of high action. Fear or anger are secondary responses, and are there for learning through emotional imprint, or for letting you know your boundaries have been violated, and are not useful for purposes of action in and of themselves. Fear or anger are too slow. You have probably been in an emergency situation where you just took action and afterwards the reaction kicked in. A lot of people have had the experience where they were crossing the road, saw a car coming too fast, and their legs seemed to move by themselves to get them to safety! In that situation we don't say to ourselves, Oh, I'm afraid, I'd better move - BANG! We just act without thinking about it, and that's the fight/flight response in it's pure form.
There have been a lot of medical studies that show that too much stress is bad for the body, so it is much better to manage it. The benefits are not just in the area of your good health, but in all the areas of your life, in your relationships, in your work, in your leisure, in the way life becomes more enjoyable.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Improving Sports Performance with Hypnosis


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We have all heard stories about sports stars who get injured, and who performed even better after recovery than they did before getting injured. They did this by practising in their minds, using the power of their imagination. As you imagine things, your subconscious mind tends to make it real to a certain extent. For example, if you imagine the tip of your nose is itchy, it is very likely that you will be aware of a tickling sensation there. As you imagine performing well at your sport, rehearsing it in your mind, your subconscious sets up the neural pathways linking the activities imagined to the relevant muscles. The effect of this is magnified when hypnotised, because when you are hypnotised, you have much more access to your subconscious mind, which is where learning is stored. 
When we learn things, we have to get consciously competent at them first. When consciously competent, we can do it, but every step has to be concentrated on. After enough practise, we become unconsciously competent at the activity, and can do it automatically. For example tying your shoelace, driving, dancing, and all sports.
As you think about it, remember a specific time you were in a mental and physical state where you were at your peak performance at your chosen sport. Perhaps it was a sort of euphoric savage joy and everything seemed to go just right for you. Imagine what it would be like to be able to access this mental and physical state on demand. Hypnosis can help with that.
You may have seen the advert where Johnny Sexton is in a forest clearing about to take a place kick between two tall trees. The kick is perfect, and the two trees turn into the rugby goal posts, and the forest turns into a stadium with a very happy crowd. Wouldn't it be useful to have the ability to just focus on the task at hand, filtering out everything else when under a high pressure situation? Hypnosis can help with that.
Two emotions that can seriously detract from sports performance are fear and anger. Boxers and other fighters know that if they can get their opponent angry or afraid, they will start to make mistakes, and then bigger ones. Discipline is very important in sport, and even though being angry or afraid can be energetic states, they seriously detract from the ability to think. Anger especially can really cost you, and it can cost your team.
If anger or fear are issues for you, it would be very beneficial to clear out the baggage of unresolved negative emotion so you can perform at your peak in sport.
Another thing that hypnotherapy can help with is motivation. Please see the page on procrastination to motivation for this, because what is written there applies to sport as well as anything else you want to get moving on.
Another thing that hypnosis can help with is speedier recovery from injury. Hypnosis can be very beneficial for people experiencing pain or discomfort. Using hypnosis with guided imagery you have much more access to your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is the part of you that takes care of healing and recovery. Using hypnotic analgesia and anesthesia, you can reduce muscle guarding, and you can safely trust your subconscious mind to gently contract and relax the muscles in the injured area, allowing better blood flow for better healing and comfort. The increased blood flow also carries away the toxic stuff produced by inflammation.
These are general areas where hypnotherapy can be useful in relation to sport. You are the expert at your chosen sport, and there are probably very specific things you want to work with.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


It usually just takes one hypnosis session to stop smoking!


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Stopping smoking with the help of hypnosis takes all the discomfort out of stopping smoking.

What can you expect if you come into the office to stop smoking? First, I spend some time explaining what hypnosis is. We go through an intake form, because we want to establish that the smoking habit is just a habit, and not a life crutch. If that smoking habit is a life crutch, then more thorough hypnotherapy is needed first. We investigate the strategies you use to keep yourself smoking, the money, work and effort you had put into remaining a smoker up to that point.
I explain about congruence - typically part of a person wants to stop smoking, and another part wants to keep smoking. The part that wants to keep smoking subotages all attempts to stop smoking, and uses all the strategies that keep you saddled with that smoking habit. We can use hypnosis to achieve congruence - get all your parts to agree that you are a non smoker, and once that is achieved, you just stop smoking.

Congruence is where your parts work together in synergy to achieve what you want, instead of having different parts of you in conflict. If you have ever worked with a team, you know how much easier it is to get things done when team members are working together. If the team members are fighting and in conflict, less gets done. The old saying is "Two heads are better than one". When there is congurence or synergy, not only is there more achieved than two single heads working independently, but there may be multiples of what two heads working singly can achieve. Two heads working in conflict achieve less than two heads working singly. Your unconscious mind is similar to that, when you have congruence, the amount of will power required is very small, because your unconscious mind carries you along.
After inducing trance, where I give you simple instructions, and when you follow the simple instructions, you put yourself into trance, remaining aware of everything, actually some experts say that in trance your awareness is exponentially increased.
In trance, we go through a "well formed outcomes", making sure that stopping smoking is a win win situation for you and for everyone in your life, that stopping smoking has no potential negative consequences, and that we keep any benefits you got from smoking, while dumpng the smoking habit itself.
At this stage, if there is stil a part of you that has a doubt about stopping, we use a parts integration to achieve congruence.
Typically, we then use a benefits approach, because we previously identified the biggest advantages and benefits to you of stopping smoking, we then sell the benefits of change to your now congruent subconscious mind.
I then give you a hypnosis CD so you can follow up at home with a stop smoking CD, so you can integrate the changes more deeply into your subconscious mind.
There are several strategies and techniques that can be used, so we go through the intake form together which will give ideas as to the best way to proceed, but the above steps are the typical ones.
If required, there is a free one hour follow up session where we can use strategies like the compulsion blowout technique, EMDR, EFT, smoking strategy disruption. It is possible that there may be a deeper issue, which smoking is just a symptom of, and occasionally this is not apparent during the intake form.

Everybody is different, and everybody deserves an intervention that is tailored for them!!

If you would like an explantory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Clearing Hurt & Sadness with Hypnotherapy


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Just about everyone has been hurt at various times in their lives, and this has caused them to feel sad. Sadness and hurt are very common emotions, because there are so many things that happen to people during life about which they feel sad. 
The thing about sadness is that time does not always heal the sadness, and even sleep does not always resolve sadness. A lot of people go to sleep feeling sad and hurt about something that happened them during the day, and in the morning the hurt and sadness are often still there.
Some people are sad a lot of the time, even at times where life should be good, and it would be appropriate to feel happy, up comes the sadness to rob them of the happiness they are entitled to enjoy at that moment.
Clearing sadness is part of a group of sessions of therapy, where we clear the negative emotions of angerfearhurt and sadness and guilt.
There is a metaphor where negative emotions from the past are stored in the body, these are the negative emotions associated with unresolved incidents from the past. Your subconscious mind wants to rationalise these incidents, so the negative emotions can be cleared from past events. Clearing negative emotions is like getting rid of the baggage from the past, so it stops coming up. What I mean by this is that if a person suddenly experiences a welling up of sadness that is inappropriate, the chances are that the incident has reminded the persons subconscious of an incident from the past where there was sadness or hurt, and the sadness is that past sadness resurfacing.
Please be aware that negative emotions are very necessary, they are unpleasant feelings, but it is important to know when your boundaries have been violated in some way. There is no way that any therapy could remove the capability of experiencing natural emotions, but it is possible to clear the baggage from the past so you have a choice in the future about when and where you need to feel sadness, that is if you do.
Deep sadness can be linked to depression, and even though sadness and depression are different, they both can lead to a depression of the immune system. So if a person is sad a lot of the time, their immune system is not at optimal performance, and so can lead to more colds and flu than would have been experienced without the sadness. 
If you were to stop for a moment, and just imagine what your life would be without the baggage of sadness from the past, if it were gone. Imagine if you could experience happiness a lot more instead. How much more energy would you have? What would it be like for the other people in your life if the baggage of unresolved sadness, grief and hurt was gone from your body? How would life be different for you?

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Comfortable Public Speaking with Hypnosis


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There was a survey that asked people which they were more afraid of, Death, or public speaking. Amazingly, more people were afraid of public speaking than death. Does this mean that those people would prefer to die than to communicate their ideas to other people publicly? Of course it doesn't mean that, what it means is that to those people, thinking of death is not scary, but thinking of getting up in front of a crowd of people is scary. 
If even thinking of public speaking generates anxiety and discomfort, it can have a major impact on people's lives and careers. Some people cannot even enjoy their own wedding day because they are so terrified of having to make a speech, they may even self medicate with alcohol to get through it.
What usually happens is that there is a root cause to the fear of public speaking, it is usually due to a significant emotional event from earlier in life, and it was usually due to public humiliation or embarrassment. This was a highly traumatic event for the person at the time. At times of high emotion, the experience gets imprinted into our neurology at a very deep level. This is the case for any trauma. Once the experience has been imprinted, any event which the subconscious deems to be similar to the sensitising event brings up the same emotions, and no amount of will power can prevent it, because it's at a deeper level than will power. The "feel the fear and do it anyway" method can work if the person is able to gradually become calmer and calmer after numerous repetitions of public speaking, but there are frequent reports of people who perform publicly for a living who go through anxiety before each and every performance.
How can hypnotherapy help? Most people are aware consciously of the first significant emotional event that started off the fear of public speaking. Some traumas are so extreme that the subconscious mind represses it, which means it locks away the experience as if it never existed, and the repressed memory is there with an emotional charge which can manifest in many ways. However, the public speaking significant emotional experience is usually conscious. Having the first event means that we can unlink the memory of the event from the emotional charge in that event. This is possible in hypnosis, because in hypnosis you  have much more access to your subconscious mind which is responsible for storing your memories and emotions from the past. Preserving the experience and learning from the first significant emotional event that caused the public speaking anxiety, and releasing the emotion means that we can discharge the emotion from all the subsequent similar events. 
It is also useful to find out the strategy of how the person generates the anxiety, for example people imagine big scary pictures of millions of hostile faces and sounds of boos and cat calls. Of course that generates an unpleasant feeling. If you have a picture of talking to one or two friends in a relaxed setting, the qualities of that picture and the sounds associated with imagining being with a couple of friends tend to be calming and relaxing. This means transferring the qualities of that thought pattern to the thought pattern of imagining public speaking can have a dramatic impact.
The bad news is that you still have to prepare the material for the public speaking event! The good news is that it will be much more comfortable. Everyone has a little bit of tension just before public speaking, but this is good, because you want your mind and body in a state of high readiness and peak performance.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Moving from Procrastination to Motivation using Hypnosis


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Procrastination is a very common state of "stuckness" that people find themselves in. It is a physical state of non movement. There are numerous reasons why we don't take action.
Procrastination is a very abstract term, it can mean that someone keeps themselves stuck in a rut so life is not as vibrant and fulfilling as it could be. A person could be motivated for a lot of things, but not for other things.
If there is a specific task or tasks you want to get moving on, and are generally motivated to do other things, then we can use your current motivation strategy, and link it to the thing you want to get moving on. We could set up a chain of triggers to move your physiology through different states from procrastination until you get to motivation. For example, procrastination to frustration (like being stuck in traffic!) to curiosity to wanton desire to motivation.
In general, we tend to be motivated by things that are in line with our values, and we put off or avoid the things that are not in line with our values.
Our values are the keys to our motivation, they are abstract concepts, and they are responsible for how we act, as opposed to what we would like to be like. We have values in all areas in our life.
To find out your values in an area of you life, simply keep asking yourself the question "What is important to me about ....". Ask yourself this question in relation to the areas of Work/Career, Family, Relationships, Personal Development, Health and Fitness, Spirituality, Leisure. Values are one word answers, or a very short phrase at most, and are "big picture" as opposed to "zooming into the details", the whole forest as opposed to branch or leaf, the entire symphony as opposed to the individual notes. 
Examples of values in relation to work and career could be money, fulfillment, free time, social activities, helping people, winning, being the boss, challenge, enjoyment, fun, making things, creativity etc. Honesty is important in filling our your values, sometimes there are values we aspire to but don't have. If we are not taking action to "get" that value, if it is not a source of motivation, then it is not an actual value. For example, health and fitness. Someone could write down "being fit" as a value, and sit down all day in front of a computer without getting any exercise. This is an aspiration and not a value. It could be also be a low priority value compared to the leisure value of "computer games".
Part of the motivation strategy would be eliciting your values in the area of your life where you want motivation. We then have to find out how important the various values are to you. High ranking values have high motivation, and the lower the value is in importance, the lower it's motivation. In the above example, supposing you wanted to actually become fit instead of just wishing for it. We would find out your internal representation of the "computer games" value, and use that to increase the priority of the "being fit" value so it is something you would act on and want to do as much as computer games.
If during the intake form consultation, it is apparent that procrastination is due to a combination of fears and negative beliefs combined with a lot of negative self talk, we might need to do some emotional clearing, where we clear the negative emotions of angerfearhurt and sadness, and guilt.
There is a metaphor where negative emotions from the past are stored in the body. They are the negative emotions associated with unresolved incidents from the past. Your subconscious mind wants to rationalise these incidents, so the negative emotions can be cleared from past events. Clearing negative emotions is like getting rid of the baggage from the past, so it stops coming up. To achieve the changes you want in your future, it is sometimes necessary to clear out the baggage of unresolved negative emotion from the past, so you have room for new experiences and motivation in your life.
Please be aware that negative emotions are very necessary, they are unpleasant feelings, but it is important to know when your boundaries have been violated in some way. There is no way that any therapy could remove the capability of experiencing natural emotions, but it is possible to clear the baggage of negative emotion from the past.
Once we do this, we can tweak your values and set up chains of motivation triggers so you can have the motivation you want.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Working with Panic and Clearing Phobias with Hypnotherapy


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Panic and phobias are extreme manifestations of fear and anxiety. If you are under the care of a medical doctor, and are using medication to control anxiety or moods, we would need to consult with your doctor as to whether hypnotherapy is appropriate.
Phobias are usually associated with a particular thing, and when that thing is experienced an immediate and dramatic physical reaction ensues. Sometimes a phobia is so intense, that a person just has to think about the thing they are phobic about, and up comes the physical reaction.
Panic is similar, but is not necessarily attached to a specific thing happening. Phobic behaviours are deep in the neurology, and are consistent, which means that we never "forget" to do the phobic behaviour. We may forget to brush our teeth occasionally, but we'll never forget to do a phobia, so it's easy to test whether it has been resolved.
If you are aware of the root cause of the phobia, it can usually be cleared in a couple of sessions. We would have to determine that during the information gathering session. In trance, you have much more access to your unconscious mind, even your deep neurology. A phobia is usually a synesthesia of visual and kinesthetic. This means that the visual image of the thing about which you are phobic and the physical reaction are almost simultaneous. However, as fast as the physical reaction is, it still takes more time than the internal visual flash, and it is possible to unlink the visual image and the physical response at the subconscious level. 
If you are not aware of the root cause of the phobia, or if there are several phobias, or if there is agoraphobia, if there are panic attacks and flashbacks, we would need to do the emotional clearing of angerfearhurt and sadness and guilt. We may also have to use the emotional freedom technique (EFT), or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) which are also proven treatments where there is panic and flashbacks.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Easing Pain and Discomfort using Hypnosis


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If you are experiencing pain or discomfort, your first port of call is always your medical doctor. There are lots of effective treatments and medications for pain relief, and it is very important to get a medical diagnosis and medical testing. Hypnotherapy is a complementary treatment, not an alternative treatment, so your medical doctor needs to be aware of the hypnotherapy.
Doctors will tell you that long term pain can be one of the most intractable and frustrating things to deal with. Treatment will work for a while, and that discomfort sometimes finds a way to come back. How on earth can hypnotherapy help then?
Pain has a lot of emotion and memory of past discomfort associated with it, and anticipation of future discomfort. Through the use of hypnosis you can use post hypnotic suggestions with appropriate cues to generate hypnotic anesthesias (no feeling at all) and hypnotic analgesias (sensation with much higher pain threshold). Hypnotherapy can be used to tackle emotional issues around pain and discomfort.
The theory behind hypnotic anesthesia and analgesia is based on  the work of Ronald Meizack (a Canadian who studied phantom limbs and pain) and Patrick Wall (an Englishman who studied pain and brain plasticity). They wrote the most important article in the history of pain. Wall and Meizack’s theory asserted that the pain system is spread throughout the brain and spinal cord, and far from being a passive recipient of pain, the brain always controls the pain signals we feel.
Their “gate control theory of pain” proposed a series of controls, or “gates:’ between the site of injury and the brain. When pain messages are sent from damaged tissue through the nervous system, they pass through several “gates,” starting in the spinal cord, before they get to the brain. But these messages travel only if the brain gives them “permission,” after determining they are important enough to be let through. If permission is granted, a gate will open and increase the feeling of pain by allowing certain neurons to turn on and transmit their signals. The brain can also close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the narcotics made by the body to quell pain.
With long term pain and discomfort, there tends to be a lot of muscle guarding, inflammation, vascular stasis. If a person holds their arm up for a period of time, it quickly becomes uncomfortable, and that discomfort is quickly eased by moving the arm, and appropriate relaxing and contracting of muscles. When a part of the body is injured, the brain uses muscle guarding. Muscle guarding is where your subconscious mind wants to keep the injured part still, so there won't be further injury. The mechanism used to keep the affected part still is to generate pain when there is a motor signal from that part of the body. A pain signal is quickly generated before the motor signal becomes actual movement. The pain is there to inhibit the movement, and over a long period of time the muscle guarding pain response can get locked in, even if that part of the body is now healed.

Hypnosis can give you access to the deeper part of your mind that controls automatic muscle movements and blood flow, and using different guided imagery techniques your mind can convert your imagined healing techniques to actual beneficial changes. A proof of this is the easily repeatable scratch test, where a hypnotically anesthetised arm is scratched at the same time as the other arm with normal sensation. The scratch on the hypnotically anesthetised  arm consistently heals much faster. 
Hypnotherapy can work with emotional issues around pain, and deep subconscious motivations. Bear in mind that these are not conscious motivations, they are motivations you will not be aware of. Let me give you some examples:

    • Inadvertent Hypnotic suggestions—can sink deep into our minds at times of high emotion like fear combined with high levels of discomfort, e.g. “You’ll just have to live with this pain”, can be interpreted by the subconscious as meaning death follows if the discomfort goes away, so of course your subconscious will want to hold onto the pain because it means life to your subconscious.
    • Financial reasons: Your subconscious can hold onto the discomfort because it fears losing disability benefit for instance.
    • Self Punishment: If there is a part of you that carries guilt about something, another part may decide to use a physical symptom as punishment.
    • A part of you may be using the symptom as a method of communication, telling you of some change needed, e.g. forcing you to slow down or some other change.
    • More attention from others: We all have basic needs for security and intimacy, and our subconscious may hold onto discomfort as a way of getting this.
    • Identification with someone else: E.g. “This runs in the family, so you are doomed to it also” can be literally manifested by your subconscious.
    • The intensity of emotion that goes with discomfort, having to deal with the emotions associated with past pain, current pain, and the fear of more of the same. It has been said that removing the emotional trauma from past pain and removing the fearful anticipation of future pain sorts out two thirds of the emotional burden.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Learning self hypnosis is a fantastic lifetime skill that you can use to manage stress and discomfort and access the resources of your deeper mind.

Hypnosis Makes it Easier to Manage Discomfort
• Hypnosis helps take away the anxiety of anticipation of future pain.
• Hypnosis helps to separate you from the emotions associated with past pain.
• You can access analgesia and anesthesia in hypnosis, and then use post hypnotic suggestions to access them when you want them during full conscious awareness. Like everything, this needs practice.
• If there is one or more sub conscious motivation(s) contributing to the discomfort, hypnotherapy can be used to deal with that.
• Various Guided Imagery Techniques can be used to alter how the mind perceives the discomfort to heighten pain thresholds, and even to increase the speed of healing.
• Hypnosis helps you to relax muscle guarding which can lower inflammation and allow better blood flow to carry nutrients and medicine to the affected area, and carry away waste.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344
Experience The World Different 


Stop Nail Biting using Hypnosis


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Hypnotherapy is a very effective treatment for nail biting. Nail biting is usually just a habit, but it is an automatic habit, and because it is a subconscious behaviour, people are usually in a "nail biting trance" when biting their nails. 
A lot of people don't actually bite their nails, but pick at them, and pick at the sides of their nails, and at the cuticles.
Sometimes people bite their nails just to keep them short, sometimes there is a more deep rooted psychological cause, and it's usually an automatic behaviour.
Treatment involves finding out the nail biting strategy, and interrupting it, so behaviour changes  at the times an old nail biting trigger occurs.
Typical deep rooted unconscious motivations could be "self punishment", "identification with someone significant", "an internal conflict", "a significant past traumatic event or events", "an imprint by someone significant", "metaphorical communication from the unconscious", "secondary gain". 
More serious types of nail biting where people don't just bite of their nails, but also bite off bits of flesh around the nail could be a type of self punishment at the unconscious level.
The therapy would be aimed at uncovering the root cause event, the first significant event that caused the subconscious mind to start the nail biting habit. This root cause event is not necessarily the first time there was nail biting, but the first significant event in relation to it. 
Once the first event, and subsequent significant emotional events related to nail biting have been found, we then want a resolution at the subconscious level of this event and subsequent related events. This means that the event(s) can be rationalised consciously and unconsciously, and releasing the emotional charge from the event(s). If there was a positive intention or positive intentions at the unconscious level, the nail biting could be a misguided attempt to achieve the positive intention(s). Obviously, it may be a good idea to persuade the unconscious mind to use a more useful strategy to achieve the positive intention(s)!
After the root cause(s) have been found and rationalised, and the nail biting strategy has been interrupted and replaced by a new strategy, it is important to use the CD / MP3 for follow up at home so the change can be embedded more deeply at an unconscious level.

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please contact
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344

Working With Migraines with Hypnosis

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Obviously if migraines are an issue, the first thing to do is to consult a medical doctor. There are a lot of medications for migraine, and it is very important to rule out serious organic causes.
How can hypnotherapy help with migraines? There can sometimes be a deep rooted psychological cause for migraines. Please note that the psychological causes are usually at the unconscious level. There could be an unconscious motivation to generate the migraines, and there would be no way of being consciously aware of this. The migraine appears to start spontaneously.
Typical deep rooted unconscious motivations could be "self punishment", "identification with someone significant", "an internal conflict", "a significant past traumatic event or events", "an imprint by someone significant", "metaphorical communication from the unconscious", "secondary gain". 
The therapy would be aimed at uncovering the root cause event, the first significant event that caused the subconscious mind to start generating migraines. This root cause event is not necessarily the first time there was a migraine, but the first significant event in relation to it. 
Once the first event, and subsequent significant emotional events related to migraines have been found, we then want a resolution at the subconscious level of this event and subsequent related events. This means that the event(s) can be rationalised consciously and unconsciously, and releasing the emotional charge from the event(s). If there was a positive intention or positive intentions at the unconscious level, the migraine could be a misguided attempt to achieve the positive intention(s). Obviously, it may be a good idea to persuade the unconscious mind to use a more comfortable strategy to achieve the positive intention(s)!
Once you have learned self hypnosis, you can then put yourself into trance, and give yourself powerful suggestions for comfort at the times of old migraine triggers.

If you would like an explantory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344

Experience The World Different

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Hypnotherapy


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Irritable Bowel Syndrome is notoriously unresponsive to medication. Obviously, the first port of call for someone who is experiencing IBS is to go to their medical doctor, because there are a selection of potent medical treatments available, and the discomfort needs to be diagnosed medically as IBS.
However, if you are one of the unlucky people who has been diagnosed with IBS, and it  is not responding to typical treatment (e.g. medication, diets, food intolerances)  some psychological treatment is frequently of benefit.
Hypnotherapy treatment for IBS involves investigating root causes, for example physical or mental trauma, helping a person to calmly deal with possible sources of stress, checking for messages from your body, because the symptom may be a metaphorical message from your subconscious manifesting as a physical symptom.
There is a very rich network of nervous tissue around everyone's gut, and a person's digestive system is capable of working automatically even if it gets unlinked from the brain, which is why  a paralysed person can still digest food for example. The term "gut instinct" is not necessarily metaphorical, as people frequently experience emotions as manifesting as a bodily feeling in their gut area. (Does the term "butterflies in my stomach" seem familiar?)
Assuming any root cause traumas have been found and resolved mentally, the next phase is to get the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract back into sequence. If we use the metaphor of a car, a driver could hit a pothole with a car, and then the tracking is out. Hitting the pothole corresponds to the root cause trauma. If the tracking is not fixed as soon as possible, the car is now out of balance, and other secondary causes start happening, tyres wearing unevenly, steering linkages getting stressed etc. If the car has been left for a year without being serviced, all these other secondary consequences have to be resolved also.
New born babies don't arrive in the world with all bodily systems intact and working correctly. Breaths are skipped once in a while. It takes some time for newborn to regulate body temperature, regulate blood pressure. Things like muscle movement, and digestion come later. The unconscious mind trained autonomic nervous system functions, those bodily functions that function at a level below conscious awareness.
Since your subconscious mind has stored all the memories of your life, it also has memories of when the gastrointestinal tract was functioning correctly. It has memories of training your gastrointestinal tract the first time around
Gut specific suggestions are aimed at requiring your subconscious mind to retrain your digestive tract to get back into it's normal rhythm of functioning, so the cells that co-ordinate those muscles can get back in their proper sequence.

If you would like an explantory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344

Experience The World Different

Clearing Guilt and Shame using Hypnotherapy

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Guilt is one of the most pervasive negative emotions in our society, and it can be very destructive at an unconscious level. Guilt is an unpleasant feeling of responsibility for some action we did that was not in line with our values, and so we regret it and feel guilty. It is not just a thought pattern, but it is also a negative feeling in our body that goes with the thought pattern.
Shame is more complex, and is tied into our identity as a person, our self worth, and what we believe about ourselves. Shame tends to have a lot of negative self talk, and deep rooted beliefs where a person makes generalisations about themselves, and put labels on themselves which are abstract. For example, someone may say to themselves "I am worthless". A lot of therapy is aimed at turning a label like this back into a process, or series of actions, and then changing the strategy. 
For example, a person puts a label on themselves "I am no good". This is a series of actions that the person takes to be an expert at "no goodness", whatever that is. So the strategy could be that the person sees a certain look on another person's face. The look could be anything, it could be the person mentally saying hello. However, they then misinterpret the look, and could say to themselves with a harsh and critical internal voice, "Look at the way that person looks at me, they must know how "no good" I am". Then the negative and painful body feeling of shame is felt in the body. To get rid of the pain, the person may use some destructive action to combat it, for example overeating. Then after the binge, they use that to load even more guilt and shame on themselves. They feel guilt for overeating. They will use any number of infinite ways of beating themselves up, and practising their "no goodness" strategy. After all, the more we practice something, the better we get at it, and this applies to negative emotions as well.
Our values are the keys to our motivation, they are abstract concepts, and they are responsible for how we act, as opposed to what we would like to be like. We have values in all areas in our  life, and if we perform an action that is in conflict with our values, then we feel guilt. There are anti-social personality disorders where people don't feel guilt, but fortunately most people have the capability to feel guilt.
Coming back to our values, to find out your values in an area of you life, simply keep asking yourself the question "What is important to me about ....". Ask yourself this question in relation to the areas of Work/Career, Family, Relationships, Personal Development, Health and Fitness, Spirituality, Leisure. Values are one word answers, or a very short phrase at most, and are "big picture" as opposed to "zooming into the details", the whole forest as opposed to branch or leaf, the entire symphony as opposed to the individual notes. 
Examples of values in relation to work and career could be money, fulfillment, free time, social activities, helping people, winning, being the boss, challenge, enjoyment, fun, making things, creativity etc. Honesty is important in filling our your values, sometimes there are values we aspire to but don't have. If we are not taking action to "get" that value, if it is not a source of motivation, then it is not an actual value. For example, health and fitness. Someone could write down "being fit" as a value, and sit down all day in front of a computer without getting any exercise. This is an aspiration and not a value. It could be also be a low priority value compared to the leisure value of "computer games". If "being fit" is an actual value, then guilt would be generated because the persons actions are in conflict with this value.
Another example would be the value "Standing up for myself". This is a very commendable value, but if the method used to achieve this is to get angry at other people all the time, this would be in direct conflict with the value "nurturing deep loving connection" in the area of relationships. The person expressed anger at the person they love because they wanted to stand up for themselves. However, in doing so they damaged the deep loving connection, and so that can generate a lot of guilt.
Clearing guilt is part of a group of sessions of therapy, where we clear the negative emotions of angerfearhurt and sadness, and guilt.
There is a metaphor where negative emotions from the past are stored in the body, these are the negative emotions associated with unresolved incidents from the past. Your subconscious mind wants to rationalise these incidents, so the negative emotions can be cleared from past events. Clearing negative emotions is like getting rid of the baggage from the past, so it stops coming up. What I mean by this is that if a person suddenly remembers something they did that they felt guilty about, the feeling of guilt from that past memory arises, not just as a memory, but as a physical feeling in the body.
Please be aware that negative emotions are very necessary, they are unpleasant feelings, but it is important to know when your boundaries have been violated in some way. There is no way that any therapy could remove the capability of experiencing natural emotions, but it is possible to clear the baggage of guilt from the past.
An important part of the strategy in relation to guilt is eliciting your values so we can check for values conflicts. If there is a values conflict, situations will arise where no matter what you do it will conflict with one of your values, causing guilt. In cases like this, it is important to resolve the conflict at an unconscious level.
This is to pre-empt future guilt, so it won't be an issue in the future.
Some people say, well if you clear guilt, there won't be anything to stop me from doing bad things. The important thing to note here is that the guilt doesn't tend to stop people from doing things, people frequently feel guilty about things before they do them, but do them anyway. It's your values that determine your behaviour, not the guilt. Once your values are aligned and are ethical, then your behaviour is also ethical, and there is no guilt, because there is no reason for it, and your behaviour tends to lead to a happy and fulfilling life.
If guilt is ingrained at an unconscious level, there may be a part of our unconscious mind which has decided that we need punishment, and this can lead to all sorts of self destructive behaviour. If this is the case, it's very important to clear it, resolve the internal conflict(s), and align the values.
So just stop, and just imagine for a few moments what it would be like if you could be free from your guilt, if it was gone from your body. What would it feel like? What would you do instead at the times you used to feel guilty, what self destructive behaviours would be gone? What difference would it make to you and other people in your life?

If you would like an explanatory brochure, or a free consultation, please phone
Daniel Madden ADHP MICHP BE
Phone: 085 - 1318344