By Thomas Gigliotti, LISW
Ease@Work Network Counselor
Guest Blogger
For many clients the deep experience of emotion has been blocked or repressed. Hypnotherapy has proven to be a valuable experiential technique to get those repressed emotions flowing. In other words, to help people to get back into their bodies so the negative physical energy can get moving out. Activating the energy in the body helps release any “shock” so the emotional energy can flow out. This may also release the body memories or cellular memories, that the individual may be holding onto.
Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, believed in a “collective unconscious”, referring to the information stored in an individual’s subconscious. Jung believed that the collective unconscious contained all the experiences of long term memory including the person’s emotions, behaviors and cognition, as well as the unconscious material of the parents, grandparents and the human species itself. These are referred to as archetypes. Once an individual is in a deeply relaxed state as is often produced in hypnosis, they can access the “unconscious material” that may keep them stuck in fears, phobias, self-defeating patterns and numbing of feelings.
Researchers, such as Rossi, Janov and Candace Pert have concluded that a person who learns a task or creates a memory while under a particular emotional state will repeat the task or recall the memory while under the influence of the same emotional state. In other words, if when I was seven years old, I was comforted by being given something to eat when I was sad or tired, I may have concluded in that child state that the best way to comfort myself is to eat when sad and tired. Obviously, this can have many negative consequences on my overall health and well-being. Using hypnotherapy, we can help a person to go back to the memory where that behavior was created and change the belief in the ego state in which it was created. By doing this a person can use the wise adult part of themselves to create new and healthier behaviors of comfort that are unrelated to food or other unwanted behaviors in the present. You can see by this example, the many practical possibilities for improving our coping skills and living more effectively through the use of hypnotherapy. For more information, contact Tom Gigliotti, LISW, certified hypnotherapist.
Family Behavioral Health is a counseling practice near Cleveland that Ease@Work has utilized for many years. This entry was reproduced from an entry by Tom Gigliotti on February 2, 2011 at blog.fbhsllc.com
