Some people feel afraid of what their future might hold, the medication they might need and the loss of the self-image they had.

There are dietary changes that can help as well, such as avoiding dairy, fat, some proteins and foods like corn or tomatoes.  By minimizing arthritis inflammation, pain can be reduced significantly.  It is possible to live a pain free life whilst living with rheumatoid arthritis.

Hypnosis can help you to minimise pain and to regain your self-image, through visualisation and positive affirmations.  As arthritis is an ongoing condition, it is often recommended to have two or three sessions with a hypnotherapist to start you off and then ask your hypnotherapist to teach you self hypnosis techniques so you can continue the hard work for yourself.

Self hypnosis can be used to focus your thoughts on your body and to redirect your immune system.  On one level, it helps to control your stress and emotions, both of which have a direct impact on your symptoms.  On another level, it can directly reduce the level of pain you feel.

Hypnotherapy can help someone to gain confidence – that’s quite well known – but it can also help increase sexuality, open communication channels and other critical emotions needed for a relationship. We’ve all been there when either our own low self esteem or the low self esteem of a partner has damaged our friendship or relationship, sometimes irreparably.

A good hypnotherapist can help you to achieve inner peace, helping to ease critical thoughts and remove negative tendencies, replacing them with more positive thought.

In most cases, each partner can believe they are right. Sometimes they believe they know the issue, even when they accept that it is themselves that is causing the issue, that recognition doesn’t in itself solve the problem.

Naturally, nobody is perfect and hypnosis cannot make you perfect! However, throughout our lives we all strain for improvement and to feel better. Everyone would like to avoid those awful feelings of shyness, anger or depression. These feelings in one particular area can spill out into other areas, causing a negative effect.

As always, hypnosis cannot make you do anything that you don’t want to, so each person must be willing to move on and resolve their problems. Couple therapy won’t work if both parties are not willing.

Hypnotherapy can help couples with four key areas: resentment, irritation, repression and lack of communication, amongst other smaller, although important, area.

Victims have self esteem issues and often feel incapable of intimacy, even though consciously they may want and feel ready to.

Counselling can help them to feel better about themselves but sometimes the problem is rooted so deeply inside their unconscious minds that it is difficult for them to overcome.

Using hypnosis, Frederick starts by helping to rebuild their self esteem but also to help them to let go of any residual fear and anger from the assault itself.

These sort of issues are rarely resolved in less than four or five sessions at least and it can take two or three just to help with this.

The hypnosis can also help to then reinforce the idea that they have a wonderful body and using visualisation, they can let go of the past and accept that idea that they have a new, wonderful body.

Sometimes, Frederick will help the person to imagine themselves back in time where they can confront their attacker and get some closure.  This gives them the opportunity to vent what they need to and give them a new, stronger sense of control, having gone back to rescue their earlier self and to tell them that it will be ok, they’ll survive and they’ll be able to build a new life, new relationships and to move on.

Frederick also asks his clients to do a ‘cleaning ritual’ when they get home.  This symbolically helps them to clear any last remaining painful memories.

Hypnosis and counselling are often combined, particularly with relationships involving both partners as not everyone is comfortable with the idea of hypnosis.  However, one partner may really want the hypnosis and it can help them improve dramatically in a shorter space of time.  If hypnosis only helps one of the couple then it will help the overall relationship between the two.

This particular client, a married lady, came to see her for hypnosis because she could not get over the strong feelings she felt for her ex-boyfriend.  Despite knowing that her husband was the right person for her and by far the better match, she still had an affair with her ex when he moved back into the neighbourhood.

Consciously, the client knew she should stay well clear of her ex but she just couldn’t seem to find it in her to do it.  Her unconscious mind had such embedded, strong feelings for him.

Mengle used hypnotherapy to help her to break free of the grip of these emotions using a method called ‘disassociation’.

One particular client, a married lady, had developed strong feelings of resentment towards her husband.  Although he wasn’t a slob, she was obsessing that she felt she always had to pick up after him.  Consciously, she knew her husband was not that bad, so why did she feel so resentful?

Using hypnosis, the client discovered that her feelings towards her husband had somehow become associated with her feelings of resentment towards her father.  She had always felt that her mother was left to do all the running around and picking up after him, and perhaps it was her fear of that happening to her that was causing the obsession.

Shertzer used disassociation to help the client’s unconscious mind to realise that this was not the case with the husband and that it could feel the love in the relationship more than the irritation.

Our unconscious mind is making connections all the time between different memories – it’s like when you hear particular song and cannot help but remember a past memory, your unconscious mind has made the connection a permanent one for you.  Often, this isn’t a problem but when it is, we can use hypnosis to help remove or replace these connections with a more useful one.

Apparently, just a few hypnosis sessions can revive those feelings of passion and love that you first felt when you were hit by Cupid’s arrow by bringing back an awareness of those feelings and that state we feel when we first start dating.  Not sure if I’d want those butterfly feelings back, but there are some nice feelings I wouldn’t mind reacquainting myself with!

And if you haven’t yet found yourself that perfect partner, don’t forget the article we did on how to attract a partner using hypnotherapy!

We’ve all been there, been hurt, had our hearts broken, but is it stopping you from moving on?

Sometimes even when you think you’ve got over someone, those negative feelings can be hidden in your subconscious mind. Unconsciously, you may find yourself holding back, or something and nothing can cause a little niggle of mistrust. These emotional barriers can hold you back from intimacy, whether that’s physically or mentally.

When you’ve been hurt in the past, it’s normal to remember those feelings – we don’t want to be naïve, lovesick teenagers again – but when they get in the way of building a new, strong relationship with someone new then those feelings have reached an abnormal level.

Under hypnosis, a hypnotherapist can communicate with your unconscious mind and help to return those feelings to a more normal level much quicker than many other methods of emotional counselling, allowing you to concentrate on your new love.

Improve their health with a stress and relaxation session, improve their worklife with increased confidence and motivation, improve their health by helping them finally quit that smoking habit.  The possibilities are endless!  (Plus you’ll get extra points for being original!)

Although positive affirmations can work to some degree, I would say that the questions approach works better because positive affirmations include some sort of presupposition about your present state.

For example, when you repeat to yourself ‘I am a confident person’, you are saying it is already done so your unconscious mind has no work to do.  However, when you change that to ‘How can I become a more confident person?’ then the unconscious mind has to find answers to that question.

Everything you say to yourself is heard, so as we’ve repeated several times, make sure your questions are positive and clear.  Then, when you get what you want, remember to say thank you.