How I Discovered the Power of Hypnosis
I moved to southern California at the age of 25. I distinctly remember the gratitude I felt. What wasn’t there to love about my life? I lived a half block from the sand in Newport Beach, drove a cute, and fully paid for Volkswagon Cabriolet convertible, had made many friends, and was earning a good salary working as an environmental engineer.
Despite this idyllic life, I experienced regular bouts of debilitating anxiety and depression that would roll over me like the morning fog coming off the Pacific Ocean. I would try to talk myself out of the feelings by reminding myself of how wonderful my life was. It didn’t work and I felt stuck.
Newport Beach, California
It’s funny how you know something is really wrong inside when your life is so good that you can’t blame your unhappiness on anything or anyone around you.
My best friend suggested counseling. I resisted. Not because I didn’t believe in the effectiveness of therapy but because I had been through so much of it already. I knew that my anxious worries and fears were irrational. Due to my father’s alcoholism, I had participated in all kinds of therapeutic counseling including Ala-Teen, family intervention therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and psychotherapy from age 16 to age 24. Looking back, the therapy helped immensely. It helped me to detach from the dysfunction, stop feeling like a victim, and most of all, gain the powerful understanding that my thoughts create my emotions. So why was I still feeling so stuck?
I asked myself, “What could they tell me that I haven’t already heard? That I don’t already know?” I know my anxiety is irrational. I know how I am supposed to be thinking and feeling to be happy but it’s not happening!
I had heard about hypnotherapy and that it could effect deeper levels of change than what we can reach consciously. Frankly, I always have had the attitude, “I’ll try anything once. ” So, I looked in the yellow pages of my local phone book (back before google and the internet) and found a list of Clinical hypnotherapists in my area. I remember picking a woman named Laurie Miller because she looked friendly and “normal.”
I will never forget my first session. I walked in there desperate for relief from my destructive and debilitating thoughts. I didn’t know what to expect. Immediately, she made me feel safe and comfortable. I told her that I felt irrational anxiety and often felt depressed despite how happy I was with my job and friends and where I lived. hen, she began the process of hypnosis with me.
She guided me to the first source of the anxiety and sadness and I found myself remembering a scene from age ten where I had gotten hurt falling off my bicycle and my pain and emotional needs were ridiculed which left me feeling anxious and sad. That night I felt tired and I slept hard. Then, I will never forget. Two days later, I felt physically and emotionally lighter! Like I had lost 15 pounds! I had no clue on the conscious level that so much emotion was still being held in my subconscious around that story.
The hypnosis session was so powerful and healing for me that I went back several more times to continue the process. “Let’s keep purging!” I exclaimed to the hypnotherapist.
Looking back, that first session was like opening a door to a deeper part of myself that I hadn’t been able to access with prior healing modalities.
Over the course of the next few weeks and several more sessions, I was able to clear my emotional baggage and begin to master my thoughts and emotions. I was able to finally break the patterns of anxiety and depression that had been destroying my peace and happiness.
The process so profoundly transformed me that I quit engineering to help others the way that I was once helped years ago. It is my mission to help those who know they want to behave or feel differently and want to make it happen on the deeper level where it is felt and known mind, body, and soul.
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