Tim Maude Hypnotherapy

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  • What is Hypnotherapy?

    What is Hypnotherapy?

    Hypnotherapy is a therapy designed to enable us to change our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Why would we want to do that? Because sometimes we don’t seem to be able to control our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

    Sometimes we think about things that we don’t want to think about – worrying about what might happen, or remembering an embarrassing situation – thoughts that seem to come into our heads without being able to control them. Sometimes we feel bad – feeling down, anxious or angry – feelings that we don’t like, but seem to happen on their own. And sometimes we do things that we don’t think are good, but do not seem to be able to stop ourselves doing – eating too much, spending too long scrolling through our phones, or checking that we have locked the door five times before settling down for the night.

    So why do we think, feel and behave in ways that we don’t like? Why can we not be in full control of ourselves? It’s all down to the primitive part of our brain, the part that is more concerned with our survival than how we feel. The primitive part of our brain is very simple – it just follows patterns. So when it finds a pattern of how to get us to think, feel or behave, it sticks to it – even if we don’t like it, and even if doesn’t actually protect us.

    Hypnotherapy is all about getting into the parts of our brains that we are not consciously aware of. A hypnotherapist will lead it into a better place and help us convince that primitive part of our brain that there is a better way to think, feel or behave that is quite safe.

    Hypnotherapy is not like surgery – the hypnotherapist does not get into your brain and mend things. It is more akin to physiotherapy. Just as a physiotherapist helps us move our bodies so that the muscles and joints work better, so the hypnotherapist helps us use our brain in such a way that helps it works better over time.

    In a typical hypnotherapy session, some of the time will be spent talking, which, in itself, is a way of getting our brain to operate better. Then the hypnotherapist will take us into a relaxing trance – a state that is similar to that time when we are half asleep and half awake. During the trance, our brains have time to restructure themselves.

    If you have trouble controlling your thoughts, feelings or behaviours and would like some help, you might like to give hypnotherapy a go. I work in my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire – focusing mostly on anxiety-related issues. Give me a call or contact me on my website.

    Photo by Mark Williams on Unsplash

  • The Clinic in the Garden

    The Clinic in the Garden

    I sit at my desk, here in my hypnotherapy clinic, having taken all of 10 seconds to walk over from my house. The sun is shining and I can look out at the garden and see the leaves need clearing from the lawn. They can wait until the weekend because, right now, now I am waiting for my next client.

    My client has not been here before, so I go out to the road to greet him. We shake hands and walk back to the clinic in the garden. The clinic is a purpose-built room, where we can talk confidentially. He gets the nice comfortable chair, while I sit in my office chair. He looks at the pictures on the wall, and the garden through the window, but mostly he looks at me, wondering what will happen next.

    I ask him how I can help and he tells me all his problems. I listen to what he has to say, but what I really want to know comes in the next question … “You have told me about your problems … now what do you want instead?” You see, I am not really interested in where the problem came from; what I am interested in is how he wants to be when it’s all sorted out.

    The Hypnotherapy Clinic in the garden

    I get some more background information, and then start to explain what is actually going on in his head. I get out a diagram of a human brain and show him the different parts and how they interact. I explain what stress does to the brain, and how the brain naturally deals with it. I show him the part of the brain that is probably giving rise to the problems he has. Understanding the mechanics of the brain, even in the simplest terms, is the first step to moving on.

    And then I ask him if he would like to try a bit of hypnotherapy – just for relaxation, you understand; just so you get a feel for what it is. I show him how the seat goes back and he can put his feet up. He lies back and just listens as I start talking. I notice his breathing slows as he relaxes and drifts in and out of a light trance, until at last I come to the end. He sits up with a smile on his face.

    And so ends the initial consultation. He understands a bit more about it all and has an experience of what hypnotherapy is all about. He can now decide if this is right for him, and whether to book in for a series of session. And I have enough information about him to prepare for when he comes next week.

    I shake hands again as he leaves. I sit and type up my hand written notes. As I put the paper notes through the shredder, I go through, in my own head, what to do when he comes back next week.

    The real delight for me at the end of the day, as I make my 10 second commute back to the house, is all the people who thank me for what I have done for them. And maybe I shouldn’t take delight in that – because really, they have done it all themselves – I just went along for the journey.

  • The Unconscious Mind

    The Unconscious Mind

    Right now, you are aware of the words that you are reading … you are conscious of them … you are paying (at least some) attention to them. This is the conscious part of your brain in operation – the bit that is aware of what is going on and makes all the main decisions in your life. It is the part of you mind that chose to read this article in the first place.

    We also have a part of the brain that we are not aware of … that part of the brain that just gets on with things. You are probably not aware of the pressure of your back on the back of chair you are sitting on – or, if you are standing, of the pressure of your feet on the floor. That is, you weren’t aware of it until I mentioned it.

    The unconscious part of your brain is busily monitoring the pressure of your back on the back of the chair, and – because there is nothing going wrong – it doesn’t bother to alert the conscious part of the brain, so you don’t think about it.

    The unconscious part of your brain does so much for you without you thinking about. It just gets on and does it. Many years ago, you learned to walk. Now that you are an expert at walking, you don’t need to think, “now move your left leg … next your right.” You just do it. The unconscious part of your mind handles all the details without making you aware of them.

    Now, this is all very well, until we programme some behaviour into the unconscious part of our brain that we don’t actually like. We can accidentally programme our brain into all sorts of unwanted behaviours – like being afraid of spiders, being anxious about social occasions, binge eating, having a craving to smoke, and so on. When the unconscious part of our mind has learned a pattern, it is very difficult to change it. We cannot say to ourselves, “I’m going to stop being anxious now.” And just stop … it doesn’t work like that.

    Hypnotherapy is the art of helping someone get into the right state to allow the unconscious part of their brain to be able to sort itself out on its own. The brain needs the space to sort itself out, and when the right ideas are planted there, and they have space to grow, the brain will, over a period of time, heal itself and get rid of those unwanted thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

    A very important part of hypnotherapy is to reduce the amount of stress you are experiencing. Whenever you are stressed, the unconscious part of your brain is looking out for problems, and so doesn’t have the space to sort itself out – it is too busy getting ready to deal with the problems that may be coming your way.

    So one of the things that a good hypnotherapist will do is to lead you into a nice relaxed state, because when your body and mind are both relaxed, you are able to make the changes you need to make.

    Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

  • The Changing Face of Hypnotherapy

    The Changing Face of Hypnotherapy

    Many years ago, I watched the final episode of the TV series MASH (broadcast 1983), where Hawkeye (played by Alan Alda) suffers a severe trauma and as a consequence is taken to a psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist treats him by forcing him to remember the details of the traumatic event, which he had “suppressed”. Hawkeye recovers from his mental delusions and all is well again.

    Of course, this is all rubbish.

    There used to be a theory, with its origins in Freudian psychology, that traumatic or bad memories are suppressed. This would lead to psychiatric difficulties, which could be “cured” by resurfacing the suppressed memories. This lead to a lot of therapeutic practices that involved getting the sufferer to re-explore those memories.

    In hypnotherapy, “age regression” became the thing to do, whereby a client was asked to go back and relive a time when they were younger, all while under a state of hypnotic trance. Some hypnotherapists even went so far as to do “past life regression”, taking the client back to a memory from a “past life”. Of course, the mind becomes very creative in a hypnotic trance, so it is not surprising when clients create all sorts of experiences that never happened, which they may mistake for memories.

    These ideas are all based on the idea that to solve a psychological problem, you need to analyse the problem and understand it – in the same way that you would need to understand why your car doesn’t work before you can fix it. Of course, the brain is far more sophisticated than your car.

    Modern hypnotherapy is very different. Finding a solution to psychological problems is much more to do with looking for the way forward. The unconscious part of the brain – the part we are unaware of – is quite capable of reorganising itself, once you consciously start searching for solutions instead of analysing problems.

    In a solution-focused hypnotherapy session, you will find yourself talking with the hypnotherapist about what is good in your life, how to get more of it into your life, where you want to go with your life and what positive things you want to achieve. This discussion could be entirely unrelated to the problem you have. The second part of the session will be hypnosis. The hypnotic state gets you nice and relaxed – a relaxed body and a relaxed mind. While this is going on, the unconscious part of the brain – the part we are not aware of – can find time to start reorganising itself along the lines of the positive things that were discussed earlier.

    After a few sessions, clients start to realise that their problem is disappearing, and that they are finding a new way forward in life. This is the miracle that I always love to see.

    Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

  • A brief how and why of phobias

    A brief how and why of phobias

    Do you ever feel a sudden sense of panic about something that other people find innocuous? Your friends tell you that it’s harmless, but you can’t help feeling that sudden tightness in your chest and the compulsion to get away? Maybe you’re a bit embarrassed about it … join the club, there are thousands of others like you.

    We all have anxieties in our lives, some more than others. This is not the same as a phobia. Anxieties are concerns and worries that produce adrenaline and might keep us up at night. This is not the same as the immediate fear as you encounter your phobic fear, accompanied by a sudden surge of adrenaline, tightening of the chest, increase in heart rate, and focused attention on the object of your fear.

    Inside your brain

    Imagine that you can look inside your brain. One of the things you would find there is a small almond shaped part called the amygdala. The amygdala’s job is to look out for you, and to keep you alive. It checks everything you do to see if it’s safe. If it thinks that there’s some sort of danger, it leaps in to protect you before you have had a chance to think about it.

    Many drivers will have experienced seeing someone who looks as if their going to step out in front of the car. Your foot is on the brake before you even know it and you feel a sharp sense of anxiety. You feel the surge of adrenalin rush through your body. That is your amygdala doing its job, protecting your life.

    Unfortunately, the amygdala is pretty dim. It is not creative. It can’t think of new ideas. So when it notices something, it has to check on previous patterns of behaviour to decide what to do next. Once you’ve learned to drive, it knows that if something looks dodgy on the road ahead, it has to tell the foot to hit the brake pedal as quickly as possible. It’s done this loads of times so it remembers the pattern.

    When the amygdala gets it wrong

    So what happens when the amygdala get things wrong? Something happened in your past that taught the amygdala that if you notice “X” then send a massive jolt of adrenaline into your system, and get ready to run. The “X” could be a getting on an airplane, seeing a spider, going out of doors etc. (Insert your own phobia here.) The amygdala has done this loads of times so it remembers exactly what to do.

    Most of the time the amygdala looks after you very well – but, because it is stupid, it sometimes gets things wrong. It is trying to look after you, but in this case it has got the wrong programming. We call this a phobia.

    What you can do

    So what can you do about a phobia? You cannot rationally think it away, because the amygdala is not part of your rational brain. In fact, when it is seriously concerned with a potential “danger”, it will turn the rational part of your brain off while it “deals with the situation”. It’s no good trying to explain to someone with a phobia that “there’s no need to panic”, because the amygdala isn’t clever enough to understand what you’re saying, and it’s the amygdala that’s in charge at that point. The only thing it can do is to react in the same way that it did the last fifty times – panic.

    The only way to deal with a phobia is to reprogram the brain so that the amygdala has a different reaction. The amygdala is outside our conscious control, so it has to be done subconsciously. Fortunately, this is quite easy with hypnotherapy.

    Treating phobias

    If your phobia seriously impacts your life, then it is worth getting treatment for it. Of course, as a hypnotherapist, I favour hypnotherapy, which can treat most phobias in a very relaxed and pleasant state. However, I should also mention that “other treatments are available”, for example:

    Systematic desensitisation – becoming slowly more used to the cause of the phobia
    CBT – cognitive behavioural therapy
    EMDR – eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing

    Hypnotherapy treatment for phobias can be done online or face-to-face in as little as four sessions. Clients are sometimes surprised because of the unusual feeling (for them) of being confident when facing something that they used to be scared of. They cannot quite understand how the old fear has gone so quickly, without them having to undergo any anxiety-inducing desensitisation.

    If you would like any help for your phobia, contact me at https://timmaudehypnotherapy.co.uk/contact/ and we can arrange an online meeting and take it from there.

  • Covid-19 Stress Dreams

    Covid-19 Coronavirus can be scary, I have noticed a number of people reporting stress dreams about the situation. I came across this article that might help, alternatively you can contact me about some relaxing hypnotherapy.

    https://health.clevelandclinic.org/stress-dreams-why-do-we-have-them-and-how-to-stop/