Hypnotherapy
Make yourself comfortable and imagine living life differently – with more energy, vitality and optimism – feeling good about yourself and your world.
Hypnosis is a safe, effective tool for rediscovering inner strengths and abilities that have helped you succeed personally and professionally. For example, most of us have succeeded at kicking a habit (smoking, overeating, nail biting…) as well as failed miserably. With hypnosis, you can renew motivation and, with post-hypnotic suggestion, make healthy choices more easily, if not effortlessly.
To be clear, hypnosis and hypnotherapy are related but different. Hypnosis is a tool for change that requires little or no training. Hypnotherapy refers to any psychotherapy that uses hypnosis for a client’s benefit. Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing passive or one-sided about hypnotherapy. The creative collaboration that is hypnotherapy actually takes two active participants: a skillful hypnotherapist and an open-minded client.
Hypnotherapy alleviates physical, emotional and psychological distress, but it’s proven especially effective for pain and insomnia, anxiety and habit disorders, labor and delivery, hot flashes and side effects from cancer treatment.
Are you hypnotizable? Most people are. In fact, it’s only natural to go into an informal trance under certain circumstances, like driving somewhere on auto-pilot, getting lost in a good book, or playing a sport or instrument with unbidden grace and ease. In a formal trance, hypnotic subjects often dive deeper into relaxation, yet remain conscious, alert and attentive.
A good hypnotherapist is hard to find, a good on-line one even harder. As a Harvard hypnosis instructor emeritus, I consider myself one of the good ones. When I provide hypnotherapy, it’s usually in the context of a comprehensive psychotherapy, and in person. In select cases, I provide on-line hypnotherapy.
By and large, hypnotherapists don’t cure, they teach, motivate, illuminate, make winning suggestions. Like a tennis coach, a hypnotherapist can teach you to serve, but your success depends on your responsiveness to suggestion as much as your willingness to practice.
