The word hypnosis tends to conjure up thoughts of stage shows, people doing silly things whilst apparently under the control of the hypnotist, or perhaps Svengalli like mind control.
Hypnosis used in a therapeutic or medical context bears little relation to the use of hypnosis for mere entertainment. Hypnosis was approved as a therapeutic practice by the British Medical Association in 1955 and by the American Medical Association in 1958.
The state of hypnosis, sometimes called trance, is a quite natural state of mind that everyone experiences. Daydreaming is a light trance state, we tend to loose awareness of our physical body and get caught up with mental reverie. Whether or not we are aware of it, we all do a little daydreaming approximately every 90 minutes. It's a sort of safety valve and is part of what is known as ultradian rhythm. We all pass into a hypnogogic state, albeit briefly, just before going to sleep and just before waking.
A trained therapist uses techniques referred to as induction to assist patients to enter a deeply relaxed state which allows the focus of attention to move away from awareness of the body and the conscious part of the mind and on to the subconscious part of the mind.
There is no definitive scientific explanation why hypnotherapy works. The most plausible explanation is that when someone is deeply relaxed the frequency of brain wave patterns slows down. This has the effect of sidelining the conscious part of the mind and opens channels of communication to the subconscious. As explained elsewhere, the part of the brain we use to reference stored information to make sense of the world, the REM state, is running mostly below the level of conscious awareness. Therefore when in a deeply relaxed state it is possible to directly influence the functioning of the REM state by rearranging the priority of the information we reference. Hypnosis can quickly break the cycle of pattern matching negative and mostly erroneous thoughts that maintain anxiety disorders, depression and compulsions.
There is a saying, "neurons that fire together, wire together". That is, the more often we reference a neural circuit, the stronger that circuit becomes. This is true for beneficial circuits and harmful circuits.
These can be useful to help with relaxation but are a poor substitute to working with a properly trained therapist. I sometimes record CD's for specific clients and when I am doing Re Emergence Therapy listening to specific CD's is part of the therapy.
A preoccupation with past lives can be a distraction and in most cases has little relevance to the life we are living here and now. I am reluctant to do a past life regression before investigating current issues. During a therapy session the subconscious will naturally travel where it needs to recover information, that may well be a past life or lives.
When the current situation is identified and dealt with then it may be appropriate to look into past lives and other spiritual dimensions such as "Life Between Lives" as part of personal soul development.
EFT is a method which employs lightly tapping with the fingers on certain acupuncture points whilst making statements about conditions one may have. Although EFT is probably the best known, there are a number of variants of this type of therapy, Thought Field Therapy, Meridian Therapy, Provocative Energy Therapy to name just a few. There is an enormous amount of information on the web including many Utube clips.
I teach almost all my clients how to tap because it's easy, it's effective and you can do it virtually anywhere. It is a self help technique that can be used for and in virtually any situation.
This is a really exciting method utilizing a metaphorical journey to rapidly catalyze change in your life. The therapy was developed over the last 8 years by a psychologist/hypnotherapist in New Zealand called Pauline Kam Po Lin.
It is a fast paced form of time line therapy using symbol and metaphor to "clear out the rubbish" so to speak. Unprocessed events from the past will be reprocessed, the essence of those events absorbed and any irrelevant "stuff" got rid of. Because of the nature and speed of this process the client is not reliving past events, There may be flashes of events but a lot of stuff is processed without conscious awareness. After the past is dealt with we turn our attention to the future, setting up the parameters by which the client can move forward with more clarity of purpose and control of outcomes.
As mentioned, this is a fast paced process, much of which will be missed by your conscious awareness and I think this is partly why this is such a powerful and effective therapy. You don't have to laboriously identify each and every negative experience you've had throughout your life and analyze those events from all sorts of perspectives. Your subconscious and super-conscious mind just clears it all away. The intellect is incapable of understanding exactly what is going on but your innate intelligence knows exactly what's happening.
You will be given a CD to listen to (preferably daily) between the first and second session. This helps to smooth the integration process, making it easier to reconfigure neural networks and thought processes more compatible with the new you.
This is a very effective method of down regulating the emotional arousal associated with traumatic events experienced recently or from long ago. We can continue to harbour the emotional arousal either constantly in our awareness or lurking in the background ready to be activated by environmental triggers or when we are temporarily in a vulnerable situation. Because the client is in a deeply relaxed and detached state the technique is not confronting. It is unnecessary to deconstruct and/or analyse the event as happens in many conventional therapies. It is now accepted that focusing attention on unpleasant events, even in therapy is not conducive to healing.
This method helps clients to modify dysfunctional thinking and behaviour by employing understanding and mindfulness. It can be effective but as a stand alone therapy can still take a long time to achieve significant change and if the client is in a state of emotionally aroused they will be seriously handicapped in employing rational thinking. Elements of CBT can be useful as an adjunct to some of the other techniques.