Jenny Christie: Clinical Hypnotherapy, NLP

Stress, anxiety

Everyone experiences occasional stress, anxiety and fear. These are normal healthy responses to threatening situations, which spur us to take action to keep ourselves safe. The instinctive "flight, fight or freeze" options for responding to stress are great when faced with an immediate physical danger. However, these responses are not helpful when dealing with other situations that feel threatening but do not involve any physical danger - for example, sitting an exam or financial difficultes.

Ongoing or excessive stress is uncomfortable and exhausting. It can be very difficult to live with, impacting on our physical, emotional and mental health.

Panic attacks: Sometimes a traumatic experience can result in a person's stress response becoming hyper-sensitive so they will later have panic attacks in harmless situations that unconsciously remind then of the past trauma. Panic attacks may occur without warning and can be very debilitating.

I can help you take control of your emotional responses. While you are in a state of deep, calming relaxation, your subconscious mind can examine the issues and their underlying causes in a safe way. I will guide you to identify any links between your current problems and traumatic experiences in the past. I can then help you to recognise and release any powerful emotional connections that are currently making you respond to particular situations in an unhelpful way. This means that in future, when you face similar situations, you will be able to deal with them much more easily without bringing in old patterns that are no longer helpful. I can also help you develop and embed coping strategies so that you do not feel overwhelmed, and can stay relaxed and calm when facing challenging situations in the future.

Addiction

Addiction involves a craving for the substance or behaviour, then pleasure and short-term relief when it is accessed, negative consequences that impact on the person’s life, and trouble giving it up.

According to Gabor Maté, addictive behaviour is always an attempt to reduce suffering/pain. When reaching for the drink or other substance, or doing the addictive behaviour, the person is choosing that as their best option in the moment, usually with full awareness of the negative consequences. The question is what is it about the option of not using/doing that makes it seem worse?

I can help you uncover what is causing so much suffering, and support you to address it in more constructive ways, enabling you to reduce or stop the addictive behaviour.

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
- Edgar Allan Poe

Being your authentic self

Our perception of ourselves and our place in the world affects how we experience situations and how we react to them. It is closely linked to our personality, our confidence and self-esteem, and also to our abilty to pursue our goals and ambitions. It is something we have learned over time, but sometimes it is not serving us as well as it should.

Particularly as we are growing up, we are constantly getting messages about other people's expectations of us, how we ought to think, feel, and behave, what our goals should be - and about how well we are measuring up against those expectations. Unconsciously we often adopt many of those expectations as the framework upon which we build our own identity, but sometimes the framework is too rigid or does not provide the support we need for our own personality to develop comfortably and confidently.

Like any learned thought pattern, our perception of who we are and of our place in the world can be modified.

Hypnotherapy and NLP can help you identify your strengths and values, reduce anxiety about particular situations you find difficult, and change the subconscious thought patterns that stop you engaging with the world in a relaxed and confident way. Instead of those limiting patterns, you can learn to recognise the real you, the confident you, with the potential to be all you can be.

"The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours"
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Depression, despair, hopelessness

Is life grey, lacking in joy and optimism?

We all occasionally encounter difficult times, when just keeping going seems unbearably hard. If such times are temporary, they develop our coping skills, and we come out of them a little stronger, a little wiser and ready for the next challenge. But sometimes, we may find ourselves stuck in the darkness for so long we wonder if we can ever be happy again.

Hypnotherapy and NLP can help you identify the issues, bring some light into the darkness and develop a positive way forward into a life that includes joy and optimism.

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths" - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Loss, Grief

The sorrow of loss and grief can cause deep pain, and sometimes the pain feels so overwhelming that it seems impossible that you could get past it. Inevitably, loss is part of life, part of the ongoing process of change that also supports growth and makes room for renewal. When you lose someone you love, or deal with any other major transition involving a significant loss, there is a necessary grieving process before you can move on, and for a while the pain may feel beyond words, too huge to understand or express, too huge to deal with.

Hypnotherapy can help you find your way through the grief, looking at it in different ways, gently dealing with different aspects of it, and gradually letting yourself reopen to live a full life.

"I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process." - C.S. Lewis