It has been working extremely well with children.

Sometimes using “formal” trance doesn’t work. Especially with children and adults with busy brains that they cannot quiet.

It is working well because I think, I’m throwing it in at the end of a session, just as one might do with a session of hypnosis to round off the other great work you may have done using NLP techniques.

I say something like “Ok, we have covered everything we can here today with the time that we had available but we still have a few minutes left. A few minutes to fill with something…..is there anything else you wanted to mention? An little issues you wanted to clear out having sorted all the other stuff we did earlier?”

There are a couple of sneaky presuppositions thrown in here

1) The issues they will share will be little, whether they used to perceive them that way or not.

2) The issues will be cleared out. Their minds will be clear as soon as the issue is out of their mouth

3) We have assumed that the stuff we worked on earlier is sorted now.

Once they have told me the issue, I then respond to it with a story, anecdote or reframe which allows them to access thinking and feeling about overcoming the issue. I ask them very little but say a lot, sometimes acting things out or making it funny.

It’s not about having a conversation. It is an awakened trance which is achievable because they are relaxed having overcome some challenges/learned some techniques to help them overcome challenges already. It in some ways works better than diving into a trance at the beginning of the session because they have had plenty of time for rapport building and relaxing. They are in a much more comfortable place by the end of the session compared to at the start.

Sometimes I use the awakened trance at the end of my consultations too. Once they have offloaded their problems and received some hope of a solution they become very relieved and very suggestible. Quite often people have come to see me at the start of their treatment, claiming that they are getting better already just from the consultation, although no formal work was done.

A great example of an awakened trance recently was a boy I worked with who was self harming. He had cuts to his hands, knees and arms.

We had worked together for 3 sessions and on the 3rd session we had 10 minutes to use up at the end of the session. He said he felt everything was going to be ok now so I asked the question above to find out if there were any little things that we could mop up before I let him go for good.

He said that sometimes his scabs were itchy where the self harming was stopping and beginning to heal. I told him it’s where the skin is pulling back together to rejoin and heal. “The itchiness means the skin is pulling and fusing. All of those little red marks that are left by the scabs after they fall off completely on their own, will be red for a while because they are brand new skin for a brand new body. But in just a few months from now they will no longer be red and then you will forget that they ever were or that you ever used to harm yourself.”

It was just 10 minutes of saying things like this, putting his problems in a forgotten past and accepting that everything will be fresh and new in the future. I think it made a difference.

Of course there are different levels and types of trust. There are trusts that we need for different context of our lives. If you go to a doctor, you have to trust that that doctor will give you the right medicines. When in a relationship it might be important to you to trust your partner will be faithful. If you jump out of a plane with a parachute you have to trust that it will open!

There is a great deal of external trust that human beings have. This is both useful and important to understand.

It is useful because the external trust allows us to continue with our day to day lives without worry about the sun falling out of the sky or our alarm clock failing to wake us up the next morning.

Having this external trust is important because it means that we can worry less and not concern ourselves about what might go wrong all the time.

Sometimes people’s external trust doesn’t work properly. They might start to have problems such as anxiety or OCD. When these problems show up, the person has doubt about things that in the past they had trusted. Instead of mentally ticking the box that says “That’s taken care of” they run images in their minds of the in-completion, of the act in some way becoming undone. They think of the worse case scenario and feel bad as in their mind they experience that worse case scenario.

External trust is important but it only fails when the internal trust is not working effectively too.

Internal trust, trusting in ones self could mean trusting your instincts and gut feeling. It could be related to having self-belief and self-confidence. If self-belief and self-confidence do not exist then it becomes a challenge to trust ones own thoughts, ideas, abilities and instincts. The evidence that an internal trust issue is occurring, may be that a lack of trust in the external world begins to occur. It is much easier for us to place the faults outside of ourselves than to look within.

If you have ever experienced lack of trust in a relationship, this was an internal trust problem too. Your point of reference (the partner or your internal voice in your head) said everything was ok and you were being daft but your gut feeling told you another thing. There was an inconsistency and this caused the feeling of lack of trust. But most people instead of focusing on and fixing the inconsistency, will place the blame upon their partner for their behaviour (external). The internal inconsistency needs to be rectified too or the mind may continue to seek evidence of the differences between the point of reference and the internal feelings again and again in the future. Your mind likes what is the same, but notices what is different. Unless you fix the internal trust issue you will continue to look for external evidence that the issue is still happening.

Quite often trust feelings comes from the gut feelings we have and not from our logic. There is usually something that has caused a lack of trust feeling to occur in the first place and even if the external cause is removed or happened long ago, a small similar trigger can cause the lack of trust feelings to resurface, despite a weighty logical argument.

Gut feelings will almost always override logic as we are more driven by emotion. Doing things that we know are logical but that go against our emotions can be done but will probably feel uncomfortable to do.

Knowing that the external world can (and will at times) let you down and fail you is part of challenging and strengthening your trust in it. However if your internal trust is functioning in a way that it only alerts you to relevant, current problems and is strong and produces self-belief and self-confidence, then the failing of the external world will be much easier to manage.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org

About 4 years ago, I fractured my ankle. It was something that was just meant to happen. The odds were highly stacked against me. I was in a nightclub on a  Spanish island and I was wearing high, high shoes (now affectionately known as “the ankle breakers”). The club had a tiled floor and they had just had a foam party so it was really slippery. Oh and there was also a tiny, tiny step which wasn’t marked out. And potentially I might have had a little bit of wine too.

So anyway, I slipped and my ankle bent in a way that isn’t normally humanly possible and there was a nasty noise. I tried to get up but couldn’t put any weight on it and knew it was bad, bad news.

I got to the hospital, had it x-rayed and they confirmed it was fractured.

The doctor wanted to operate and stick some pins in but I was due to fly home the next day and my Spanish can just about get me a beer but probably wouldn’t cover me for a hospital stay. So I told the doc to wrap it up in plaster cast and send me on my way.

He said they would have to plaster it with the bone back in the right place and that they’d need to push it back whilst plastering me up. This, he said was going to hurt quite a lot and said I’d need some pain killer. The only problem is that I’m allergic to morphine and he didn’t have anything else to offer me. He was pretty worried about this but I was fine about it and just said “I’m a hypnotist, I’ll put myself into trance.”

We got into the special plastering room and I started to get myself into state. Out of the corner of my mind I saw a nurse coming over with a needle. The doctor quickly told her something along the lines of “No need she’s doing hypnosis on herself” (but he said it to her in Spanish obviously.)

I used Hakalau to manage my state- breathing in for the count of 8 and out for the count of 4 whilst also using peripheral vision. I’d previously used this technique when I was on my NLP Master practitioner training and on the last day we did a glass walk. It was a big stretch of broken bottles and in order to walk over them without slicing your feet up you had to utilize the breathing technique and the vision at the same time. Some people who didn’t quite get it right did end up with cuts on their feet.

It took about half an hour and I was aware at times that some pain kicked in, but I quickly got rid of it by focusing my attention elsewhere.

The Doctors and nurses were suitably impressed and sent me on my way with some paracetamol.

Which I never took.

By Gemma Bailey
www.gemmabailey.co.uk

Post hypnotic inductions are one of the most commonly used hypnotic phenomena. This is when a suggestion is given whilst in hypnosis to react in a particular way later, when out of hypnosis. Usually this reaction is triggered by a particular stimuli for a more reliable post hypnotic suggestion. I recently worked with a  feuding couple and part of the problem that was happening in their relationship, was that if the wife became upset in some way (but not necessarily because of the husbands behaviour) she would make a certain facial expression. The husband was preconditioned to become defensive and argumentative when he saw her making this expression and would begin to become aggressive in his tone of voice. This would all result in an argument. Since I was working with the husband, I gave him a post hypnotic suggestion to experience a wave of calm overtime he saw the troubled expression on his wife’s face. If he didn’t become aggressive, she wouldn’t respond in the same way and the rowing would never start.

Ideomotor behaviour
When someone is in hypnosis they can practice things in their mind and the physical body may move or respond as they think about it. This is particularly useful if there is something that a person need to rehearse. The physical movements occur as the brain fires off the neural networks related to that part of the body and activates the muscles and nerves. I remember once during a deepening process using the visualisation of a flight of stairs to deepen the trance. The client’s legs were quite twitchy and when I gave the suggestion of a banister begin there for support, she made a very clear grasping motion with her hand. Afterward I mention this to her and she told me that she grabbed the banister as soon as I said it as she had once had an accident on the stairs at home when she was a child.

Time distortion
During hypnosis is it quite natural for a client to experience a speeding up or slowing down of time during the session. This means it can be quite a surprise to them when they later wake and check the real time!
This is a useful phenomena to utilise, as it can be a beneficial skill to develop. A racing driver who whizzes around a track at over 100 miles an hour needs to have a high degree of concentration so that he can make accurate judgments and reactions during the race. Therefore learning the skill of slowing down time in his mind is very beneficial. It means that if for some reason he lost control of his vehicle he would be able to make decisions and reactions in millionths of seconds that could prevent an accident from happening.
It can at times too be a useful skill to speed up time. If someone has experienced a traumatic event and needs to recall details of the event- for example if someone has been involved in an accident and is helping the police with details about how the event occurred, it could be really useful to recall the event at a faster speed so that less opportunity to fully associate to the negative emotions is experienced. Then at the point that some detail needs to be focused upon, time can be slowed down again.

By Gemma Bailey
www.gemmabailey.co.uk

Rapid inductions really are the stuff of magic. It is true that only a small percentage of people are suggestible enough to be influenced by them. This is why a stage hypnotist will usually ask the whole audience to participate in the initial suggestibility test and then only invite to the stage the audience members who appear to have been affected. An example of the type of suggestibility test used at the opening of a stage hypnosis show is the hand clasp where the hypnotist asks audience members to clasp their hands together whilst he gives suggestions of the hands being stuck. Those whose hands remain stuck after the suggestion to “Try to pull them apart” are considered to be the most suggestible and may be invited to the stage to experience a rapid induction such as the hypnotist standing behind them, covering the eyes and giving a firm command to “Sleep!”

Rapid inductions can find their place in the therapy room due to the speed at which they work compared to a traditional induction which may take up to 20 minutes to take effect. In addition a client may be more predisposed to the effects of a rapid induction if the they experienced hypnosis before and if a post hypnotic suggestion of begin able to relax rapidly is installed for later use. This means that a great deal more of the therapeutic session can be spent of addressing the problem, rather than on the hypnotic induction. The benefit for the hypnotherapist is that they can develop a reputation of being able to help clients resolve their problems in fewer sessions than others.

Milton Erickson showed how a subject can be hypnotized unconventionally and quickly without using any tools and without even informing him that he was going to be induced. It can be accomplished by building rapport, using the most appropriate words, and that too deftly while conversing with the subject to turn away his mind and the adept but subtle use of similes and symbols. Whatever be the means of inducing, the goal would be to focus on the subconscious mind and to make it relax quickly.

By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk

Though there are a number of medications available to treat Candida, some patients do not respond to the conventional medicines that are recommended. One reason is that Candida is aggravated and sometimes even caused by increased mental stress, and therefore, medication only cannot cure the symptoms whilst the root cause remains untreated. Diet also has a huge impact on this illness and certain foods- such as yeast based products- can aggravate the condition further. However there have been a number of cases, where a patient was completely cured of the symptoms of Candida through a few sessions of hypnosis, when medical treatment could not provide any relief.

Some case studies have revealed that, if a person constantly faces moderate to severe mental pressure, the patient’s body, especially the stomach become weakened and may not be able to function properly. If untreated, the situation may worsen, leading to the abnormal growth of the Candida microbes within the stomach and the person starts to show the symptoms of the disease. In such circumstances, it becomes necessary to create the correct balance between diet, mental well-being along with providing any appropriate medications. The symptoms may start with food allergy or intolerance, making a special Candida diet necessary. Even basic relaxation from a hypnotic induction can bring useful results.

Music and progressive muscle relaxation can be used to induce the patient into a deeply relaxed state of hypnosis. During the hypnosis session, post hypnotic suggestions are also given that will enable the patient to cope better with stress in the future. A series of hypnotic sessions not only deals with the problem of Candida from the curative point of view, but it also alleviates some of the emotional and psychological distresses that had caused the disease. Medication can be used alongside the use of hypnosis but it becomes less easy to discover which treatment is having the curative effects. What is important to note is that if the person does not follow the advice, does not have the belief to be cured from within or is again subjected to the similar mentally stressful situation as before, the chances of recurrence is high. Using self hypnosis and attention to diet it is definitely possible to be completely cured from Candida.

By Gemma Bailey
www.gemmabailey.co.uk

Hypnosis is a healing method which directly interacts with your subconscious mind, gives it beneficial instructions and the recharged and alerted subconscious mind then reacts with a more positive outlook.  Though hypnotic effect is best done by a hypnotist, you also can practice it in your home using self hypnosis. Healing by hypnosis finds its root in the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Persian civilization way back in 2500 B.C. In 19th century England, it was used to deliver babies painlessly. A Scottish surgeon, Dr James Esdaile (1808 -1859) operated on more than 300 patients by using hypnosis as the sole anaesthesia.

Hypnosis can treat you in a number of ways. It will,

• Help to get rid of pain.
• Correct food habit to lead a better life.
• Provide relieve from asthma or any other physical hyperactivity.
• Give relief from tension and the problems this can cause, such as headaches.
• Increase your self confidence.
• Help with weight loss.
• Boost your energy and competence level in any performance oriented activity, such as sports and also in your job.
• Make you optimistic and positive minded.

In a nutshell, it will teach you to have increased control of your body and mind and thus help you to resolve your problems from within you, using the enormous power hidden inside you.

How does it work?

Through the conversation of an efficient hypnotist with your subconscious mind, you can relax and go into a trance, your body and mind are relaxed, your metabolic rate along with your breathing and heart beat slows down, your brain wave activity changes (usually from Beta to the Alpha state) but your subconscious mind remains alert and responsive to the hypnotherapists suggestions. In this state, the hypnotist can offer suggestions for positive and beneficial change in areas that have previously been involuntary and unreceptive.

Some of the vast areas that hypnotherapy has been proved to be valuable include:

• Within sports- athletes are taking the help of hypnosis to boost up their performance and consistency in the sports arena.
• The law and criminal investigation agencies are using hypnosis to help witnesses of crime recollect the vivid memories of a crime scene or incident, even very minute details as the license plate numbers

• Health professionals are using it as a complementary to the conventional anaesthesia prior to the operations. It is also being used after the surgery to help the patient overcome the discomfort of the surgery.

By Gemma Bailey
www.gemmabailey.com

Are you certain you want to quit smoking? What about that precious relaxation you enjoy with a cigarette- when you draw the thousands of chemicals and poisons into your lungs, increasing your heart rate, releasing adrenaline, raising your blood pressure and soaking the poisons into the tissues within your body. If you quit smoking using hypnotherapy you will learn to relax in a way you have never experienced with a cigarette. It will usually involve taking in clean fresh air and becoming more confident, happy and energised than you have been in a very long time.

Perhaps you’re just a social smoker, happy to share the arsenic, cyanide and carbon monoxide sticks of death with the people you love and care about. If you use hypnotherapy to quit smoking, you may feel compelled to get fit, to spend you time socialising in the gym instead. If you consider that within just 20 minutes of quitting smoking your blood pressure, pulse rate and temperature return to normal, safe levels. After 8 hours, you can look forward to having a normal amount of oxygen in your body.

Incidentally, did you know that starving the body of oxygen can cause tissue damage that can lead to gangrene which might mean that limbs have to be amputated from your body. Starving the brain of oxygen can cause brain damage. Are you absolutely certain you want to use hypnotherapy to quit smoking? Your unconscious mind has a very important function of maintaining your body. Therefore any damaged you may have caused stands a good change of repairing itself. The longer you will remain a non smoker, the more the body repairs and the better your prospects become.

Perhaps you believe that you are a considerate smoker. You’re children and family don’t know, or you only smoke outside so that you avoid polluting your home and anyone else who happens to be in it. Good for you. Those who love and care about you will be most grateful for your act of kindness once you are gone, I’m sure!

When you use hypnotherapy to quit smoking, you no longer have to worry about the guilt of the secret cigarettes you’ve smoked, the damage you’re causing to your body, the bad example you set to your children or the polluted air you have created and forced others to inhale. Instead, when you use hypnotherapy to quit smoking, you can look forward to a healthier future, a better smelling home and a new lease of life. The sooner you use hypnotherapy to quit smoking, the better!

By Gemma Bailey
www.gemmabailey.co.uk

Firstly let me point out, that I offer a free consultation. The purpose of this from the clients point of view is that it allows them to build rapport with me and ask any questions they may have, before paying for any therapy. From my perspective, it allows me to ensure that the client is genuinely motivated to stop smoking. If they are not motivated to give up smoking, then I will not do the therapy with them. There are a few reasons why, one is that often, if a person isn’t motivated to stop, it’s because they like smoking and someone else wants them to quit. If I worked with this person, it is unlikely that they would be successful which is bad publicity for my therapy practice in Watford, and would also decrease their faith in hypnotherapy, making them less likely to use this method for giving up smoking in the future.

Secondly, the therapy is done in one session. After that session, if at anytime in the future you should happen to start smoking again, you can comeback for free (providing you have paid for lifetime support.)

So the way I measure my success, is by noting that in all of the quit smoking sessions I have done, only 2 have returned for a further session. This means that the others were either successful, or were not successful but decided that they wanted to remain as smokers, and waste their money, which is up to them, silly billies!

If you live in the Watford area and are looking for a Hypnotherapist to help you quit smoking, then please take a look at the testimonials on my website.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Below, I explore some of the reasons why I believe hypnotherapy and other such practices should be given much more credibility by the medical establishments.

1. Relaxation
Lets face it, the only time most people relax these days in when they go to bed- and then they can’t even do that properly, the get busy brains right at the point where what they actually need most, is to go to sleep. Relaxation is so important and should be integral of your every day routine. Without it, there is often no way of releasing the build ups of stress that accumulate in the every day working lives that we have. This can lead to aggravated states within the body, such as headaches, IBS, muscular aches and pains and lack of energy.

2. Motivation
Quite simply we don’t get very far without it. Motivation keeps us going and keeps us growing, and everybody has to grow in order to feel fulfilled in life. We have 2 kinds of motivation in life, things we are motivated to achieve and things we are motivated to get away from. Strangely the latter contains the most power due to the fact that it is most like a survival instinct. In short, motivation is essential in life and you really won’t get very far without it.

3. Life Changes
This is probably the broadest of the 3. People want their lives changed in many different ways. For some, changing their life might be about changing their lifestyle- taking up more exercise or giving up smoking for example. For others, changing their life might mean leaving behind years of emotional baggage from abusive relationships. Either way, one small change always tends to snowball and have positive knock on effects in many other areas of life also.

Hypnotherapy has been used as a therapeutic tool for many years and has been recognised by the British Medical Association since 1955. Yet still it is brushed off as invalid and jiggery pokery. If as a nation we invested as much money into alternative practices as we have into pharmaceuticals, we would have invested wisely. People would be in a better position to take responsibility for the impact their lifestyles have on their bodies, getting better would be more empowering, potentially less money from the health services would be spent on treating symptoms and would be more geared towards finding and solving the causes. Let’s hope for the future that our potential as human beings can be taken more seriously than our belief in manufactured drugs.