Reflective Journal Entries: Accidental Hypnosis!

from Lucy Waterhouse, with thanks

I have to mention my client N, who came to me unexpectedly, her husband was doing some carpentry work in the centre and she had come with him just for something to do. 

I am constantly amazed at how fate brings us to the places we need to be without us even realising it! We were chatting in general, she was interested in finding out more about what hypnotherapy was and admitted that she was having a very difficult time in her marriage at the moment. 

Her husband had tried to commit suicide a couple of times but appeared to be doing better but she had been in several violent relationships prior to meeting him and had one time used violence against her husband who had then hit her back. 

That was the only time that they had ever been violent towards each other and other than that had a fairly stable relationship. She said that she wanted him to have some hypnotherapy to help him but it soon became very apparent that she had a lot of work to do as well. She openly talked about her kids about how proud she was of them and that the first one had been planned but that she had had undiagnosed post-natal depression and had found the first couple of years difficult, and then a lot sooner than they had expected she fell pregnant again with her second child a son, who wasn’t planned but who they were overjoyed about having. 

She had been worried about her mood following her first pregnancy and sure enough she had had severe, this time, post-natal depression with psychosis and at one point had planned to commit suicide and take her kids with her. As a result of this she hadn’t bonded with the second child at all for the first six months, which apparently in arguments he would throw in her face (he is in his early 20s now and still living at home) the fact that she hadn’t wanted him, he hadn’t been planned and she hadn’t bonded with him. She carried enormous guilt which as we talked became ever more apparent, with her saying the most awful things about herself, how she deserved to feel bad, that she was evil for not bonding, that she deserved the guilt, it was her fault, that she had ruined the child’s life and was to blame for her husband’s depression. 

I had stopped talking completely at this point and she was just pouring out information whilst sobbing openly. I offered her some hypnotherapy to help her to feel more relaxed and to help her sleep at night- she said that her sleep was awful- and maybe to let go of a little bit of this guilt she was talking about.

I put her in a trance and she relaxed noticeably, and did some work on sleep, and a detailed control panel to increase her confidence, reduce her anxiety, increase her ability to cope, and a few other things, then did a guided visualisation about letting go of that grief in a balloon- I have found this visualisation really effective for loads of problems- the returning to a waterfall of abundant resources that she could draw on any time she needed to. It was a long session and when I woke her up the transformation was incredible! She literally looked ten years younger, she was relaxed, happy, and enthusiastic about how good she felt, and immediately went to tell her husband about how much it could help him. I don’t know if I will see her again, but Julie told me that she had been in touch with her and told her that her sleep has really improved.

I seem to get an awful lot of past life clients. It seems to be a very popular subject at the moment with people turning to spiritual leanings at a time when the safety of our society and our freedom is very much at stake with political and religious movements threatening our welfare. I love doing past life work, but want to find ways of using it therapeutically and not ‘just’ for recreation. I have a book about healing through past lives which I will definitely be reading! Yes, this is an arena with huge potential for healing and it is no surprise to me that it is becoming more popular, no matter what one’s belief system is and always leaves a client remarkably changed for the better.