The PRESENCE OF THE PAST is very often the cause of many neurotic conditions and also relief-seeking safety behaviors, as well as most forms of Trauma, which itself is universal. Hypnotherapy is the ONLY talk therapy that can employ REGRESSION to a client’s younger years to find causal factors and lay the basis for comprehension and re-framing in the present.

“The analytic use of Hypnosis greatly enhances the possibility of an actual cure. It is in this domain that I believe the greatest value of Hypnosis lies. Let’s cease wrestling with symptoms. Let’s identify Causal factors. When they are resolved, the symptoms will cease to exist.”

Prof. Edwin Yager, Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry in UCSD School of Medicine.

The word “TRAUMA” is used rather loosely in Psychology; Serious stress is the context, but a stress event is not actually “traumatic” until the stream of consciousness provided by interception from the body is interrupted by the event (mental and/or physical) or its repetition. Trauma is universal, abandonment, neglect, maltreatment are as harmful as physical and sexual abuse.

TRAUMA AND THE ASSOCIATED MEMORY “Acts like a foreign body that must continue to be viewed as an agent at work long after its entry” this has been know since Freud, It is the body’s reaction to this “agent” that becomes the issue and it promotes : Continual inappropriate activation of the brain region called the Insula. The latter integrates incoming sensory information and persists in attempting to initiate fight or flight signals to the mid-brain amygdala. This leads to the traumatised individual feeling on alert all the time. A heightened state of mind that is maintained at the expense of a feeling of motivation and purpose in their on-going life. Alertness which is reflected in a range of somatic symptoms; fibromyalgia, back pain, migraines and etc, which are the result of constant and insistent muscle-based tension.

THERE CAN BE NO MIND WTHOUT THE BODY!

Your brain and body are part of a SINGLE SYSTEM that creates your MIND and your MENTAL LIFE. You don’t have feelings, thoughts and emotions INSIDE your body, you have them WITH your body.

Our bodies, by a RATIO OF 9:1, have more to say to our brains, via the VAGAL NEURAL NETWORK, than our brains have to say to our body!

Resolution of the symptoms requires REGRESSION to the location(s) of their ORIGIN, comprehension of them, including unblocking of any amnesia, and filling in the missing pieces.

WHAT IS REGRESSION? 

According to Sigmund Freud: REGRESSION; is a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses more adaptively. In Hypno-Psychotherapy Regression as a process is an Hypno-analytic Technique!

The process of REGRESSION conducted in a “trance state” permits a Client to apparently travel back in age to OBSERVE, or IDENTIFY with the self at another time and place.

A means of searching for the ORIGIN of the pattern and can be effected via a subtle emotional, mental, somatic “bridge”. Awareness and comprehension occurs through the perspective of “WITNESSING” and NON-ATTACHMENT.

“LETTING GO” is possible by “CHOICE” when empowered. The objective, in therapeutic work, is normally to have the Client regress to the origin in earlier life, develop SUBJECTIVE insight by WITNESSING, thus enhancing understanding.

TRAUMATIC experiences from the past, tend to assert their associated patterns of behavior in the present, when appropriately triggered.

WE CALL THIS THE “PRESENCE OF THE PAST”.

Resulting “SAFETY BEHAVIOURS” can be extreme, as in the form of SELF-HARM.

The subconscious FEELING MIND is also the storehouse of a person’s total experiences; the memory of everything that ever happened to a person is stored in their subconscious mind.

During hypnosis, long forgotten incidents, and aspects of traumatic incidents that are locked away from consciousness, but which are still affecting a person without them knowing why. These can be brought back into consciousness by REGRESSION, re-interpreted and / or re-framed allowing the presenting symptoms to disappear.

The ability for Hypnotherapists to use regression is what sets us apart from other health care professionals.

I would like to thank Peter & Deborah George for there extensive work on EFFECTIVE HYPNOTHERAPY FOR COMPLEX TRAUMA & Hypno-analytic regression to the cause. Without their ongoing help and support I would not be the therapist I am today.