Hypnosis for Anxiety

How Hypnosis Can Cure Social Anxiety

On this page we shall explore the ways that hypnosis for anxiety and depression actually helps.

Why do you think we have emotions? Wouldn’t life be simpler without them? Do we have emotions to give middle class people something to talk about or to provide soap opera writers with script material?

Of course not. As with everything else in human makeup, emotions exist to keep us safe and alive and able to thrive.

Emotions Motivate Movement

Embedded in the word “emotion” is another word: “motion”. Emotions are there to make us move. Either towards something or away from it.

We all have deep basic needs – for warmth, security, love and connection and, of course, food and shelter. We have needs for status, significance, attention and to feel safe in our lives. We need stimulation, to exercise our creativity to learn and produce in the world. Some emotions drive us toward experiences that would help meet these needs and ensure our survival. And other emotions serve to drive us away from experiences or situations which, we feel, would prevent us meeting our essential needs.

But what happens when our feelings move us the wrong way?

Your needs move you towards social contact, and social anxiety away from it.

I highly recommend this excellent course from Hypnosis Downloads – 10 steps to overcome social anxiety which has an audio for each step of the way to help you develop social skills before going into real social situations. In this way, the horrible away from feelings of fear can gently be replaced with the happier toward feelings of pleasure and positive expectation in socializing and meeting new people.

The “motion” in “emotion” has us moving either towards what we feel we need or away from what we feel we don’t want. Think lust, love, anger, greed, hunger – all feelings that motivate us towards an experience. And think about feelings that drive us away from something – fear, terror, disgust.

Phobias

Hopefully, our emotions drive us toward what is good for us and away from what is bad for us. But sometimes they don’t.

The social phobic both wants and doesn’t want social contact. They move in different directions because of their feelings. If social contact was bad for us, fear of social events would be life saving. But a socially anxious person instinctively knows they need social contact at the same time as fearing it;. They are pulled and pushed at the same time by their emotions… tricky! And it gets worse.

We Avoid What We Fear – But Also Fear What We Avoid

One problem is that the more you avoid something, the more the fear around it increases. It’s as if your “emotional brain” draws conclusions from your behaviour: “She’s avoiding this situation all the time, so it must be genuinely dangerous. So I’ll ramp up her fear of this situation even more to make sure she won’t go near it.”

On the other hand, people can switch off their fear around stuff they should fear simply because they have made themselves go towards it. I’m thinking of the old-time circus lion-tamer calmly putting his head in a lion’s mouth, and of those perennial favourites, the human cannonballs, getting themselves fired from a cannon. Not hobbies I’d recommend. The point is that even dangerous acts like these can start to feel “normal” to your emotional brain if you voluntarily and repeatedly do them. The “emotional brain” concludes “This must be safe, else why are we doing it?”.

So yes, we avoid what we fear, but we can also come to fear something just because we avoid it so much.

A number of approaches over the centuries to overcome this have failed. None are as successful as hypnotic therapy. Consider, for instance, what happens with “exposure therapy” and “cognitive therapy” in the context of dealing with fears like shyness and social anxiety. This is where hypnosis for anxiety or depression can really help.

Exposure Therapy: A Step Too Far?

The understanding that emotions are physical drivers away from or towards something is extensive in exposure therapy. (1) This approach typically encourages you to gradually face what scares you. So the spider phobic might on week one see a drawing of a spider. On week two see a photo of a spider. On week three see a toy spider, and on week four touch the toy spider. Next, week five has them seeing a movie of a spider and week six an actual live spider. This can be very effective if the person can remain calm through the gradual exposure (sometimes known as “systematic desensitisation”). It would be easier and faster to use hypnosis and the rewind technique.) This is why hypnosis for anxiety and depression is really effective.

The idea is that spiders need to start to feel “normal”. This is done through forcing oneself to go towards it rather than away from it. This is classic behavioural therapy, and probably what the lion-tamer did to get the nerve he needed…

Another kind of exposure therapy takes a less gradual approach known as “flooding”. Yikes! This might see the spider phobic put straight in a room full of spiders. The idea of this is that fully experiencing your worst fear – and surviving it – will put an end to that fear.

So does it work?

Therapy For the Therapy

Yes, it can work – provided the person undergoing the therapy learns to relax deeply. But, I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had to treat to help them recover from the effects of this kind of therapy when it didn’t help. These are the ones who didn’t improve, the ones who couldn’t get past the photo of the spider on week two. They are the ones who were deeply traumatised by being thrown in at the deep end of having to speak in front of a hundred people when they were still chronically shy.

There has to be, and fortunately there is, another way.

Using hypnosis for anxiety or for depression is highly effective.

The Beauty of Hypnosis for Anxiety or Treating Fears

Hypnosis, is the perfect way to expose someone in a safe and relaxed way to a situation they had been avoiding. If you have relaxed deeply and felt spontaneous at a party a few times while in hypnosis, this is a sufficiently strong indication that this situation is not dangerous. This kind of social event can now be “retagged” as something you can potentially go safely towards – before you’ve even been to an actual party. Someone who hasn’t left the house for years can “leave their house” in hypnosis and “experience it” before they go out the door in real life. The exposure therapy is fully within their own control, in sync with a relaxed mind and body.

When they then “do it for real”, it seems more familiar and therefore not as threatening. The previously dreaded social event may even, dare I say it, turn out to be relaxing and fun.

It’s important to understand here that we are talking about more than just what a person believes.

Feelings and Thoughts Can Be At Odds

You can fully believe something is good for you and still flee from it. You can fully believe something (or someone) is bad for you but still want it (or them). Cognitive approaches to dealing with fears often fail over this, as fears aren’t because of “faulty thinking”, more primitive emotional conditioning for survival. It is much easier to access, and modify, these primitive drivers through the use of hypnosis than through reasoning.

When we help someone with social phobia it’s generally obvious the phobia has gone when they open their eyes. This is because calm hypnotic exposure to previous fear while feeling completely relaxed has transformed their response. They know it wasn’t “real” – but a new positive blueprint for responding calmly in social situations is established in their subconscious. Being socially relaxed is the new “normal”.

10 Steps to Overcome Social Anxiety

The new 10 steps to overcome social anxiety course, like all the ten steps courses, has a hypnotic download for each step of the way. This is because social skills can be developed during hypnotic rehearsal but also because we want people to experience hypnotic “safe” social experiences before they go into these situations for real. In this way the horrible away from feelings of fear can gently be replaced with the happier toward feelings of pleasure and positive expectation when actually socializing and meeting new people.

Notes

1. See: Wikipedia entry: Exposure therapy
2. See: Wikipedia entry: Flooding