American Health Magazine reported these findings from a recent study: • Psychoanalysis: 8% recovery after 600 sessions • Behavior Therapy: 72% recovery after 22 sessions • Hypnotherapy: 93% recovery after 6 sessions (From Does Hypnosis Work? A Comparison Study by Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD)

There are different schools of thought regarding hypnosis, and how it should work. Sometimes hypnotists rely on the “magic effect” that makes you experience the state you are looking for immediately, within a session or two. This approach may be effective, however, unless you work on the root cause of your issues or let go of the core beliefs that no longer serve you, results of hypnosis may wear off with time. The school of thought that works for me is based on slower and longer lasting results, as I teach my clients to go in deeper and learn self-awareness through relaxation, self-hypnosis and other tools they can use to achieve desired goals even when I am not around.

Talk therapy is usually organized in such a way, that you talk, and your therapist listens. The goal is to allow you to talk through a problem, with an expectation of you finding a solution, or starting to feel better. However, your talking about problems doesn’t necessarily change anything. Sometimes, it creates more problems, as by repeating a story in the same way over and over again, you cement it into your brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Besides, it takes a while to figure out why certain things happen, or why you feel, act and respond to triggers in a certain way. It often takes three to five years to achieve change with talk therapy according to the American Health Magazine statistics.

Hypnosis usually produces faster results, as it allows to break up the patterns by rewiring your neurons in different ways. It uses the power of the subconscious mind, so you don’t have to re-experience the pain, or pin point the exact origins of trauma. Some issues can be healed bypassing the conscious process.  The subconscious mind operates in pictures and images. For the subconscious mind it doesn’t matter whether a situation happened in real life, or you imagined it. That is why, when you visualize your goals in a very relaxed comfortable state, you create memories that become your new known. So, when you focus your attention in a very relaxed state on a goal and visualize it as something you have already attained, your mind begins to accept it as something you already experienced, something that is familiar and safe.

Hypnosis may also allow a flow of dialogue between the conscious and the subconscious mind, so we can find out what the subconscious mind has been doing to prevent you from achieving your goals so far. Subconscious mind is like a child that is doing its best to protect you. Sometimes it makes a decision unbeknownst to you to prevent you from achieving a goal that seems dangerous or threatening in some way.

Hypnotists often use the power of storytelling, making up stories that may make no sense for the conscious mind, because they are designed to be heard by the subconscious mind, the one that is acting up like a scared little child. Storytelling is a way to get through to the subconscious mind, connecting it to the conscious mind, and getting all parts of the person on board with the task at hand.

Imagine that your mind is a ship, sailing the high seas. You can take it anywhere you want, explore different lands, achieve many different purposes, trading, carrying passengers to vacation places or returning home. Your conscious mind (the one you are aware of) is the captain. Your subconscious mind (the part of you that operates based on the default programming below the level of consciousness) is the crew. Let me ask you this, who makes a decision for the ship to leave the port and sail off?

Yes, it is the captain that makes and verbalizes a decision, however, if the crew is in mutiny, the ship will never sail. And the crew may be holding out on you, on the ship, for a very good reason. That reason always has to do with protecting you from pain, or from a perceived threat. For most people, when this happens, that means that somewhere in the childhood, or later along the way, there was a traumatic event that influenced you in a way that you developed a block preventing you from moving forward.

You may start feeling a major shift in your thinking after the first session. However, I do not promise immediate results. Most of my clients report feeling a profound difference after five sessions, some require ten. Everyone is different. It also depends on how many issues need changing, and how ready you are to work on them. In my practice I structure sessions around building up awareness, as I notice that when I teach people to do this work on their own, starting with breathing, relaxation, self-hypnosis understanding self without judgement, and learning the way of unconditional love and self-acceptance, the results they achieve are long lasting and meaningful.