What is Trauma?
Trauma is a response to any experience we have in which our choice has been taken away from us, where it leads to physical or emotional pain.
There are many different types of distressing events that we can experience that can cause trauma, ranging from accidents like getting hit in the head by a baseball, to natural disasters, to sexual abuse, to the loss of a loved one.
The type and severity of an event is irrelevant; if it resulted in trauma, it will likely lead to long-term effects such as anxiety, control issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger issues, dissociative disorders, fears and phobias, or depression (among many other responses).
There are, of course, a number of ways to treat these problems, but if you don't get to the root cause of the problem, which is the traumatic event, then the treating of these problems could take years, and often people resort to medication because they just can't get the relief they need through therapy.
What is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is the tool that hypnotherapists use to address your presenting issue.
In hypnosis, you allow the conscious mind to rest through a hypnotic trance so that you can directly access the subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is that mysterious part of your mind that you only get a glimpse of. It's the part of your mind that is active during your sleep, or when you daydream. If you've ever been concentrating on a movie so much that a ringing phone makes you jump, then you've experienced that state of mind when the subconscious is given a sense of control.
What is the Subconscious Mind?
The subconscious mind is the part of the mind that never forgets anything, especially traumatic memories. It takes every memory you have ever had and stores it for you. It also holds every belief you have ever created and every thought you have ever had.
It is so important to engage the subconscious mind to overcome any issues or negative patterns of behaviour because those habits and issues, particularly mental issues, are run by beliefs that your subconscious has stored, which we call programs.
How Does Subconscious Programming Work?
Whenever you come across a scenario, the mind very quickly looks at the triggers — all the events leading up to the scenario — and it then looks at any memory you have of when a similar scenario has happened in the past.
If it finds a similar scenario with similar triggers, it will pull out the appropriate belief and run it as a program. You will then behave the way your program tells you to behave.
If you feel depressed and your subconscious programming tells you that eating sugar lifts your mood, then any time something causes you to feel upset, you will begin craving sweet food.
You will then act on this craving, which will then lift your mood.
This then completes the program, causing it to become even more embedded in your subconscious, and reinforcing this behaviour as the correct behaviour for the next time you get upset.
Logically we know that this isn't true, and if this program is allowed to run free throughout your life, you will likely find yourself becoming obese. But because the program has been created by a belief in your mind and reinforced each time you complete the program, what is right and wrong for your body doesn't affect the program, it will continue to run.
Why Does Your Subconscious Create Programs?
The reason your mind does this is because it has one job.
The one job your mind has is to keep you safe so that you can live as long as possible. To do this, it relies on your programs and several biological responses; many of which date back to the early days of our evolution such as the fight or flight response.
In a situation of extreme stress, our brain would switch our nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system, which would engage the fight or flight response.
In this mode, the body would be flooded with adrenaline to help our muscles move faster and be stronger, causing a slew of physical symptoms. Our breathing would become shallow and rapid so that we could move as much oxygen into our body as possible. We would start to lose feelings in our extremities so that we could conserve energy by bringing our attention closer to the core of our body.
All of these physiological changes, and others, were designed to help us get out of situations that were life or death, for example, to allow us to climb a tree rapidly to get away from a lion we stumbled on in the jungle.
How Does Trauma Create a Subconscious Program?
These are the same responses we have when we experience emotional distress from a traumatic event, because our body perceives danger.
Our body says, "Something is wrong", and our mind says, "Ok, let's activate the sympathetic nervous system to respond to the danger." The problem is, in our current environment, there is often nothing for us to fight or flee from.
There is rarely danger that our bodies need to prepare to quickly escape from, and so we move into this state of heightened sensory perception, looking for the danger, but never finding it.
The other thing that happens in this fight or flight mode is that our unconscious mind is activated. Our body needs to react to instincts, so it activates the part of the mind where all of our beliefs are stored, where we can act without thinking through the scenario.
So, when we experience a traumatic event, the mind very quickly makes a decision and creates a belief, but this belief may not serve our best interest.
Let me give you an example of a client of mine who had a very strange phobia; she was afraid of paper. She could touch paper, but it made her skin crawl to do so. This was made worse by the fact that she worked in an office, and she couldn't even change the paper in the printer!
When we had our hypnotherapy sessions, I regressed her to a childhood memory where she had a papercut in kindergarten. Such a trivial memory doesn't sound like much, and it's something that we've probably all been through, but the key to this issue isn't that her childhood trauma was unique. The key to the issue here is that she never went back to review the event when she had shifted out of her sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic.
Though this is an example of a simple traumatic response, the principles work the same for those who experience complex trauma or repetitive trauma conditioning.
How Can a Hypnotherapist Help?
When we allow a belief to be created by the subconscious mind in a state of fight or flight, and don't allow ourselves to review the belief to see if it makes sense when we are no longer experiencing that traumatic event, the belief is likely to end up harming us in some way in the future.
A hypnotherapist can help you rewire your brain circuit by helping you find those beliefs that you've created that are harming you, and reprogram your mind to replace those beliefs with a belief that allows you to have freedom, growth and success.
A trauma-informed hypnotherapist is a specialist who is trained to facilitate the healing process for personal trauma as a result of distressing memories. They safely review your traumatic experience without reliving it so that you can take back your innate power that the traumatic event took away from you and improve your quality of life.
Not only mental health professionals are trained in trauma-Informed therapy. Reviewing a traumatic event with someone who's not trained to do so can end up causing more damage. If the person is unprepared to hold that space for you and create a safe environment, it can feel like you are reliving your traumatic event, which can lead to your retraumatisation.
If you would like to speak to someone about how a trauma-informed hypnotherapist can help you reprogram your mind, and to empower you to transform your life, please contact me on 02 7906 8427 to book in a free consultation with me.
