What is Hypnotherapy?

The best way to start to describe hypnosis is to say that even if you think you've never been hypnotised, you still enter a hypnotic state a number of times each day. A hypnotic trance, or the hypnoidal state as it is more properly known, is merely a state of altered consciousness, and we enter them nearly all the time. One of the simplest examples to offer is daydreaming, which we've all done, where we suddenly blink or shake our head as we realise we were "miles away" but have now come back to reality.

While we were daydreaming we were concentrating our mind on a particular issue that meant we excluded things in our immediate environment from our conscious thoughts. Car drivers often report a similar phenomenon when, after completing a familiar journey, they cannot remember passing a particular landmark even though they will have had to have done so. Their mind was "elsewhere" during the journey and they talk of being on "auto-pilot".

Clearly then there are different areas of consciousness. There's the busy active part taking in what's happening around us and responding to it but there's also the subconscious part, working away in the background, keeping everything else on track while the conscious part is busy.

It's the subconscious that holds all the information about who we are, what we are, what we've experienced as individuals and the motivations that make us do what we do during our life. If any of them is not as we would wish then it's the subconscious we need to talk to, not the conscious area. What we need to do is to communicate directly with the subconscious where all our beliefs and motivations reside if we want to bring about change - changes such as those listed to the left.

[ What is HypnoTherapy? - Part 2 ]