Services Offered
Trauma and PTSD
Trauma, as defined by a "peak", negative emotional event, is a part of every persons' life experience. While the degree of frequency and intensity will vary greatly from person to person, no one is exempt from negative emotional events. What many people fail to realize is that the context in which we receive trauma (what we saw, heard, smelled, felt), becomes encoded with the negative emotion. The contextual sensory experience then acts as warning signal, even years after the initial traumatic event, and serves as an anchor to the negative emotion. Whenever we encounter a similar context, our warning signals go off, and we can experience a wide range of negative effects. Fear, anger, anxiety, guilt, shame, panic, terror, flashbacks, physical effects, just to name a few. And when flooded with a cascade of negative emotion, many of us develop destructive ways of preventing ourselves from being overwhelmed by the emotion (addiction, withdrawal, self-mutilation, rage, etc.) Often, the conscious memory of the initial trauma is not even necessary to set off a cascade of troubling effects when confronted with a "trigger" or "anchor". There are numerous effective modalities for helping an individual cope with memories of traumatic events, the contextual anchors to those events, and the unwanted effects (for a thorough summary, see The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk). Hypnosis is one of many modalities that have been proven effective for resolving trauma and it's unwanted effects. Hypnosis helps an individual harness the incredible power of their attention and imagination in order to change their emotional relationship with a troubling past, creating positive changes in the present. In fact, many of the most cutting-edge healing modalities in modern counseling and psychotherapy, when closely inspected, contain hints of traditional hypnotic techniques, only with an updated vernacular. "Of course, we can never undo what happened, but we can create emotional scenarios intense and real enough to defuse and counter some of those old ones." (Kolk, p. 310)
Weight Management
According to Dr. Mercola (https://naturalsociety.com/sugar-the-toxicity-question-and-what-to-do-about-it/), the average person in 1700 consumed 4 lbs. of sugar per year. In 1900, it was 90 lbs. By 2009, 50% of Americans were consuming 180 lbs. of sugar per year. Sugar is just one of the many examples of food items that the industrialization of food has made incredibly easy to over-consume. Ask most any internal medicine practitioner what issues they see the most, and they will likely say some form of chronic disease or illness.
Food is vital for life. Food can be quite pleasurable. But, like anything else that has the power to bring pleasure, it also has the potential to be over-used. Relying on our will-power alone is often not enough.
Hypnosis has been shown in clinical studies to be powerfully effective in weigh management. See: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-006X.64.3.517
Hypnosis for Weight Management at Southern Changeworks will be done in four sessions. Sessions will focus on:
- 1) Beliefs about weight and weight management.
- 2) Food cravings.
- 3) Metabolism
- 4) Self-esteem and anxiety around weight and weight management.
Call or email now to schedule an appointment for a free 15 minute consultation.
Childbirth Hypnosis
Childbirth is one of the most fascinating, memorable, and beautiful aspects of human experience. However, for most people in American culture, physical pain is usually associated with the process of labor and delivery. The anticipation of pain can generate fear, the fear can generate physical tension, and tension, in turn, can exacerbate physical pain. On the other hand, both physical relaxation and anesthesia/analgesia are usually natural byproducts of the hypnotic process. Because of this, hypnosis has proven to be highly effective in helping an expecting mother bring life into the world with a greater sense of physical comfort and freedom from fear.
Hypnosis for childbirth is typically a four session package, giving the expectant mother ample opportunities to explore any underlying fears/concerns surrounding the upcoming birth, as well as practice relaxation, positive auto-suggestion, and analgesic techniques.
Pain Management
It has long been understood that hypnosis can be effective in reducing or managing physical pain. James Esdaile, a surgeon with the East India Company, famously performed over 300 major surgeries without anesthesia and without pain between 1845 and 1851. Clinical Hypnotists, Dentists, Doctors, Nurses, and other medical professionals frequently use hypnosis as an alternative to pharmacological anesthesia with great success.
However, physical pain serves a purpose, as a warning signal pointing to an issue that needs attention. The issue may be physical, or a person may have a psychological or emotional problem presenting as a physical symptom (psycho-somatic). Hypnosis can be effective in either case, but is used with extreme caution, especially in cases of pain with physical causes.
At Southern Changeworks, sessions for pain management will be assessed on a client-by-client basis, and only executed with written permission from the client's primary physician.
Ego State Therapy
Ego State Therapy is based on the principle of multiplicity of mind. It understands human personality "as a multiplicity rather than a unity" (John Watkins, Ego States: Theory and Therapy). At first glance, this may sound pathological. One might be tempted to think of Dissociative Identity or Multiple Personality Disorder. According to ego state theory, the normal state of the human personality is multiplicity. If you think for just a moment, have you ever used "parts" language? We might say something like, "part of me wants to go to the birthday party, but another part just wants to stay home and relax". Or, it may sound more like "part of me knows that If I use drugs again, something really bad can happen, but part of me just doesn't care". According to Ego State Theory, those conflicting attitudes, emotions, and beliefs actually do come from distinct parts of our personality that often have their own agendas, methods, and burdens. Again, this is the normal state of the human psyche. However, parts in conflict can often make us feel torn, fragmented, and disjointed. Ego State Therapy can be incredibly useful in helping an individual become acquainted with their various parts, as well as negotiate between the needs, burdens, and agendas of the various parts, in order to achieve a greater sense of harmony, unity, and coherence within the internal landscape. And, I can't emphasize this enough. We are all made up of parts. To have parts within our personality is perfectly normal, but sometimes they don't agree, or behave in extreme ways and create chaos within the total system. Ego state therapy can help our various parts to feel heard, understood, healed, and even find new jobs to do within the system that contribute to the well being of the whole person.