August 17, 2020
Now, more than ever, it’s not unusual to experience a wide range of emotions, especially anxiety. And dealing with anxiety can feel like an uphill battle that never ends. That constant gnawing feeling of stress, of worry, can attach itself to you and dominate your life and your well-being.
There are a number of excellent treatments for anxiety but one that deserves a fresh, new look is hypnotherapy. While the presence of the word “hypnosis” may trigger skepticism in the minds of some potential patients, hypnotherapy is a safe, guided experience that involves intense concentration, and focused attention to gain insight regarding how past experiences, emotions and traumas play a large role in creating behavioral patterns. Often, these factors also create limitations to successful relationships, careers and overall life satisfaction.
We spoke with holistic psychotherapist Maura Lipinski, LISW-S, to better understand the process of hypnotherapy, how it alleviates anxiety and to learn about the misconceptions that might prevent patients from exploring this safe, effective form of therapy.
How hypnotherapy works
For Lipinski, the hypnotherapy approach begins by looking at the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind.
“The conscious mind, according to Freud, includes thoughts, sensations, and feelings that we are aware of and can easily access and analyze,” she says. “The conscious mind is sometimes considered to be the part of our mind where we reason.”
Continuing debate exists related to the terms “subconscious mind” and “unconscious mind,” she adds. Both terms have been used in the field to include the idea that many feelings and painful memories are repressed or suppressed, typically in childhood. And these same feelings and memories create challenges in our psychological state. These challenges can develop at the time of trauma or much later in life after the adverse event.
In Freud’s model the subconscious and unconscious levels are similar, but the unconscious level is seen as the deepest level, and includes deep-seated emotions and trauma, whereas the subconscious holds thoughts, behavior patterns and emotional information that is more readily accessible. The subconscious is seen as more of a gateway between the conscious and unconscious levels.
“For our purposes,” Lipinski says, “we focus on the subconscious or unconscious information that is driving current responses in the background like a computer drive.”
With hypnotherapy, she points out, the process begins by looking at the present emotion which would usually be among the core emotions: fear, anger, sadness, guilt or shame. And anxiety, Lipinski says, exists on that fear spectrum.
Even if it’s a free-floating anxiety, a term currently being used to explain the feeling of anxiety that a client has without a connection to a particular stressor, Lipinski says the next step is to explore if that anxiety is also linked to an incident in the past. “Does it go back to something from earlier in life? What did the patient conclude or decide after experiencing it? How is that conclusion being acted upon today in their current circumstances subconsciously or unconsciously?”
“It’s not that the anxieties that are happening today aren’t real. They are,” she says. “But the response to it might go back to third grade, where we made a decision or a conclusion about ourselves with the thinking of a third-grader, with a more concrete mind and in many cases, the third grader did not have emotional support from an adult or did not know how to access that support. And sometimes that third grade conclusion is what gets subconsciously pulled forward, causing us to operate from that historical place.”
Lipinski says, hypnotherapy starts with guided imagery to help the patient enter a more relaxed state. But, she adds, this is an interactive process and the client maintains awareness during the session and memory of the session following it.
