PSYCHOLOGY BUSKING a la wordswords: RUE THE PAST TO REJUVENATE YOUR FUTURE: GET HAPPY -- GET HYPNOTHERAPY (OR GO HIKING)

AMANDA AND SELF AT THE REGINA FARMERS MARKET

All of us know fat people who get skinny and get fat again. All of us know drunkards who get on the wagon and fall off the wagon. All of us know druggies who get clean and then get dirty again. It does seem that no matter how guilty we feel when it comes to eating too much, drinking too much, drugging too much, most of us do not feel guilty enough to actually quit that too much (of whatever) until it becomes an addiction. An addiction is the condition of being addicted to a particular thing or activity, especially when that thing or activity has decidedly become detrimental to one’s personal or social life.

Yes addictions are disheartening, and the psychological and physiological descriptions are certainly abstruse; however, any addiction can be cured with client desire and deliberation.

Time to drop the anchor. If you are an addict and desire change you must:

RECOGNIZE THE PATTERNS IN YOUR SELF-DESTRUCTION. Acknowledging a problem is the beginning of the battle. Don’t blame your problem on circumstance or bad luck. Reflection and introspection are necessarily huge when it comes to curing oneself.

RECOGNIZE YOU STILL HAVE ASSETS AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. You must always have the power to keep your dignity and self-worth. You must always be capable of change. To get better (forever) you will have to suffer somewhat.

DON’T GO IT ALONE. Get thee to a therapist. You’ll feel much more accountable with a therapist than with a friend. You get what you pay for. By the time you’ve reached the addiction stage of your problem/s, it could be that your friends have already ditched you. You may need to pay to get happy.

Of course I’m inclined to suggest HYPNOTHERAPY as your first therapeutic option. I quite like REALITY THERAPY (CHOICE THERAPY), SOLUTION-FOCUSED THERAPY, and COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY but … I’ve decided that HYPNOTHERAPY is the way to go to get thee better. I love HYPNOTHERAPY mainly because of the IMAGING, IMAGERY, and GUIDED IMAGERY aspects.

IMAGING is the representation or reproduction of a form. Switch the word form for action and voila … we are into HYPNOTHERAPY.

IMAGERY is a visual description. Thick description, a qualitative term which includes visual description, is synonymous with HYPNOTHERAPY.

GUIDED IMAGERY is that gentle but powerful technique that focuses and directs the imagination. HYPNOTHERAPY mobilizes a client’s unconscious process to assist with the client’s conscious goals. HYPNOTHERAPY seduces the mind through appealing sensory images while narrating a naturally trance state of mind for the client.

I shall further explain:

In my HYPNOTHERAPY private practice, people only pay to see me when they have decided they have had it with their problem/s (mostly “problems” plural). People pay me to help them improve their present condition, which they currently consider to be personally and socially problematic.

Most of my bread-and-butter clients seeking HYPNOTHERAPY want to lose weight, quit smoking, or gain a good night sleep. I do have other clients who have other self-declared dysfunctions, lacking in a sufficient love life, or committing untoward sexual tendencies being just a couple of examples, but such clients are certainly not the majority. Saying thus, whatever their decided problems, all of my clients want to change their behaviors.

To predict a person’s future you need only to know a person’s past. Past behavior patterns are always adumbrate to dire predictions toward addiction. There is a bright-line regarding addiction: If you sense that your habit is becoming a social problem and concern, you have an addiction. My clients have enacted the exact same patterns over and over again until that behavior has become a severe problem in their lives, an addiction so to speak. To break an addiction one needs to change behavior. This would be called Addictions 101 in the pop-psychology academy of addictions training. In order to beat an addiction, one needs to get unstuck from past patterns.

To reiterate my opening paragraph: All of us know fat people who get skinny and get fat again. All of us know drunkards who get on the wagon and fall off the wagon. All of us know druggies who get clean and get dirty again. People tend to repeat their behaviors; tend to step forward then backward, forward then backward, forward then backward until their backward steps exceed their forward steps and become an addiction. Only when they step into addiction do people seek therapy. In reputable therapy, counselors help people to change their behaviors.

HYPNOTHERAPISTS tend to employ imaging. HYPNOTHERAPISTS stimulate imaginative thinking, and they do this by way of narrative story-telling. Story-telling is fundamental to our understanding of the world. We, being human, have created myths to comprehend our universe. We, being human, have created fables to encourage ethical tendencies. We, being human, have personal anecdotes to express our powers of independence as distinguished from the rest of the general population.

Every client has a story to tell (see William Glasser and REALITY THERAPY). And together with a HYPNOTHERAPIST, that story can be altered to promote a personally positive future behavior. Working collaboratively, the client and therapist can create a new plot (script) for a positive life twist (outcome). In a trance-like state, the therapist as story-teller and the client as story-listener, the client through the therapist’s guided imagery, will re-create a behavior to see things, to hear things, to do things in a totally different way. Whether it’s losing weight or quitting smoking or gaining sleep, the HYPNOTHERAPIST will help the client to stop sabotaging success by no longer doing the same ol’ same ol’.

For example, a fat client of mine had determined his condition was the result of eating too many sweets, and those sweets were eaten only a coffee times, but coffee times were five or six times a day! Together we re-created his past behavior and collaborated on a new script adding a new twist for the ending. Instead of eating sweet cakes and other desserts as had been the pattern, the client listened, while in a trance-like state induced by me, to partake of his coffee accompanied with no food, except once per day (perchance) at noontime.

For example, a coughing client of mine had determined her condition as the result of smoking too many cigarettes, and those cigarettes were smoked always in her backyard patio or while she drove her new half-ton truck. Together, we collaborated on her new script, re-creating her past behavior by imagining the sipping from a bottle of water (or some other drink), rather than the puffing of a cigarette.

For example, another client had determined his daytime lethargy as a result of not enough sleep, and according to the client, was just tossing and turning most the night worrying and thinking about his this-and-that work-time activities. We collaborated, composed a new script for his nighttime behavior. We determined the client study the odds and furniture of his bedroom in great detail before his last look at the alarm clock, before settling off into deep sleep.

The examples I’ve presented are from real life clients and their self-assigned problems.

We (my clients and self) re-wrote their patterned scripts in accordance with their preferred behaviors. And in typical HYPNOTHERAPY fashion, I assigned each of these clients to a ninety minute session. The first ten minutes I always offer an explanation of what HYPNOTHERAPY really is. The second half hour the clients tell their stories and disclose their habits. Following, it takes only ten or so minutes to write a script that re-writes the client’s actual behavior. The expertise of the HYPNOTHERAPIST is especially evident during the client’s induction and, too, in the delivery of the all-senses descriptive narrative, that will hopefully change the clients' past behaviors concerning their particular activities when partaking of their problems.

None of us can be happy when a particular habit is ruining our life.

GET HAPPY – GET HYPNOTHERAPY.

OR ... GO HIKING!

(Though hiking will cost considerable more monies, I highly recommend that you consider hiking as a positive addiction to overcome any negative addictions that are haunting you and wrecking your life. And I'm not suggesting good health can be measured in monetary fashion!)

I wrote my thesis on POSITIVE ADDICTION. POSITIVE ADDICTION can be defined as replacing a socially perceived negative habit (eating too much, drinking too much, drugging too much) with a socially perceived positive habit (for example: playing the violin, bird watching, HIKING). As a graduate student I quite liked REALITY THERAPY and William Glasser, and was especially hooked on his book, POSITIVE ADDICTION (pun intended).

Ah HIKING! I spend many an estival day hiking through a weald on some rocky mountain.

Some pictures from last week: