Hypnosis Therapy for Mind, Body and Soul
Westhill House Highgate Consulting Rooms, the consulting rooms are located in West Hill House, a quiet building in Swain's Lane, set back from the road. Swain's Lane is one of Highgate's most charming streets. It is within 50 meters of Hampstead Heath and with easy access to bus, train and underground. Local restaurants and cafés add to the friendly, village atmosphere.
Westhill House Highgate Consulting presents this article By Sylviana Hamdani, we hope the following information will be useful for Londoners.
In the words of Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Human beings are complex organisms. Our well-being depends on a lot of factors inside and outside of us. Many of them we don’t truly understand ourselves.
“Human beings are multidimensional,” said Adi W. Gunawan, a certified clinical hypnotherapist as well as president and founder of the Indonesia Board of Clinical Hypnotherapists (AHKI) — a body of around 300 members headquartered in Surabaya, East Java. “We have bodies, minds and spirits, which are all interconnected.”
According to Adi, the mind is the axis of us all.
“When the mind is distraught, everything in our lives, including our health, careers and relationship will usually go awry,” he said.
The mind is divided into two levels; the conscious and subconscious.
“The conscious is like the captain of the ship,” Adi said. “It plans, makes decisions and commands. But the execution depends largely on the subconscious.”
The hypnotherapist, who is registered with the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners, compares the subconscious to a ship’s crew.
“[The subconscious] is nine times stronger than the conscious,” Adi said. “That’s why when they refuse to work, there’s very little the captain can do.”
The subconscious mind contains beliefs, past emotions and memories. Many of these we are not truly aware ourselves.
“They are the master program of your life,” the author of 22 books said.
According to the hypnotherapist, the subconscious starts writing the master program of our lives from the womb.
“It records everything that the baby hears or feels inside the womb.”
These earliest records, made when we are barely conscious (as babies or young children), are the strongest of all and may steer all of our future lives.
“It programs everything in our lives, including our health and wellbeing,” he explained.
The subconscious mind keeps on recording throughout our lives. And bad experiences, if left unresolved, may deeply scar the subconscious.
“We’re all like earthen pots on a stove,” he said. “Bad experiences fire us and make what’s inside us boil and steam, which is okay. But the dangerous thing is that when the lid is on and we cannot let off any steam [from our boiling pots].”
Under such circumstances, according to the hypnotherapist, our defense mechanism will automatically activate to prevent us from exploding.
“The pots will begin to crack,” he said. “These cracks are usually represented with psychosomatic disorders and illnesses.”
Psychogenic
According to research done by the American College of Family Physicians, 90 percent of today’s illnesses are caused by psychogenic (mind-related) factors.
These psychogenic factors include unresolved past experience, trauma, stress, unresolved present issues and self-conflicts.
Psychosomatic illnesses largely vary between allergies, auto-immune diseases, skin disorders, diabetes, stroke and cancers.
Among these psychosomatic disorders is obsessive-compulsive behavior, insomnia, phobias and panic attacks.
To cure psychosomatic disorders, a hypnotherapist would use a regression technique to bring the patient to the moment when the bad experience first occurred.
“We have to take them there [to the past] to cure them,” he said. “Only then can the trauma properly be resolved.”
According to Adi, it may take between four and six sessions for the hypnotherapist to locate the problems and cure the psychosomatic disorders in the patient. Warning! There had been complaints that some hypnotherapists recommends 20 or 30 sessions which is a con.
For psychosomatic illnesses, the hypnotherapist recommends the patients to also seek medical help.
‘Not doctors’
“Hypnotherapists are not doctors,” he said. “But hypnotherapy may assist medical treatments.”
Linda, a 50-year-old housewife in Surabaya, experienced intense bleeding in 2011. Her gynecologist diagnosed her with endometriosis and recommended her to undergo a curettage procedure.
In 2012, Linda experienced more heavy bleeding. She went to a hospital in Singapore, where she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
“I was utterly devastated,” she said.
To help cope with her intense medical treatments, she also visited an experienced hypnotherapist in her hometown. The hypnotherapist located her unresolved anger toward a family member.
Together, they worked on resolving the problem in hypnotherapy sessions.
“The funny thing is, when I had truly forgiven him [the family member], the bleeding stopped,” she said. “And the cancerous tissue totally disappeared from my body.”
“Everyone has cancer cells in their bodies,” Adi said. “When we’re experiencing severe depression and trauma, our immune system drops and the cancer cells may actually grow and consume our healthy parts.”
The role of hypnotherapy in this example is to bring peace and order to the minds of the patients.
“The body can always heal itself,” Adi said.
‘The big snowball’
Some physicians have also incorporated hypnotherapy into their medical practices.
“Hypnotherapy helps a lot of medical cases,” said Adhiarta, an internal medicine specialist from Bandung, West Java.
“Diseases are like snowballs,” Adhiarta said. “We, medical practitioners, deal only with its final condition [the big snowball]. But with hypnotherapy, we can get to the core of the [medical] problems.”
According to Adhiarta, using hypnotherapy methods in his medical practice has helped a lot of his patients. His diabetic patients, for example, find it easier to follow strict diets after agreeing to receive positive mental suggestions through hypnosis.
Recently, he also conducted a laparotomy [abdomen surgery] on a patient in Bandung without anesthesia.
“He didn’t feel any pain at all during and after the surgery,” Adhiarta said.
Dentist Mia Gracia from Kebon Jeruk, West Jakarta, also combines hypnotherapy with dental medicine.
“Hypnotherapy has helped me a lot to understand the underlying issues beneath dental problems,” Mia said. “We, dentists, are not only treating a tooth or two. We’re dealing with the entire human-beings.”
For example, one of her patients always has problems with her right teeth, but never with her left teeth. With hypnotherapy, the dentist found out that the patient never used her left teeth for eating at all because of a childhood trauma.
“The trauma has to be cured because chewing with only one side of the mouth is not healthy for your teeth, jaws, neck and shoulders in the long run,” she said.
The dentist sometimes uses hypnotherapy for root canals and tooth extractions without anesthetics.
“In these cases, hypnotherapy is a great help for those that are allergic to anesthetics,” the dentist said.
However, doctors should always get their patient’s consent before performing hypnotherapy.
“[Doctors] shouldn’t be like ‘Superman’ and perform hypnotherapy on patients without their consents, even if it’s for their own good,” she said. “If so, [the hypnotherapy] will fail and result in trauma on the patients.”
Although hypnotherapy is getting more popular in the country these days, the president of AHKI suggests patients to be careful when choosing their hypnotherapists.
“Hypnotherapists are still non-licensed professions in Indonesia,” Adi said.
“Until now, there are no government standards or regulations for this profession. So, basically every [hypnotherapy] educational institution may issue their own certifications.”
AHKI, referring to the standards of ACHE in the United States, requires that all hypnotherapists joining the organization must complete over 200 hours of classroom sessions in reputable educational institutions.
Adi suggested patients to ask a lot of questions with the therapist through the phone before meeting them in person.
“You have every right to ask about the hypnotherapist’s certification and study methods before agreeing to be treated by him or her,” Adi said.
