Opportunities

Photo by Rick Hustead

It is cause for celebration whenever one of my clients achieves his or her therapeutic goal. No matter how many (or few!) hypnotherapy sessions it takes to accomplish it, the decision change an unwanted behavior and the subconscious work and dedication it takes to make that change happen are significant commitments. I tell each client at the start of hypnotherapy that my door is usually the last one the person knocked on during their search for the solution to whatever their therapeutic goal happens to be. However, once they achieve that goal and walk out of my office a whole new world of opportunities opens up for them. By that time they have a new set of skills or tools with which to solve and resolve any new challenges that may pop up along the way.

The same is true for me. It is true that when someone has taken off the last pound of weight he or she wanted to drop or given up cigarettes for good, I have essentially “lost” a client. But I don’t look at it that way. The day someone achieves his or her self-improvement goal is a day of abundance for both of us. I know that the hypnosis skills and guided-imagery techniques I employed to help the client succeed are ecologically “sound.” They are natural, drug-free and are effective tools with which to achieve a variety of vocational and avocational self-improvement goals. My clients often refer my hypnotherapy services to a friend. But even if a referral is not forthcoming, I know that the energy and attention I have devoted to that individual will manifest a new client for me, anyway.

When clients leave my office, they are invariably relaxed and comfortable—more than they were before the appointment, anyway. Moreover, they have learned (consciously or otherwise) valuable techniques to call up this sensation whenever they need relief from daily stressors. Hypnosis facilitates a state of natural calm and relaxation as well that enables a person to use rational, logical thought processes in situations which previously might have induced a lot of stress or anxiety. The experience of having already used hypnotherapy to achieve a goal builds self-confidence and increases self-esteem and strengthens the belief in their ability to handle other challenges. Every time they overcome another obstacle or achieve a new goal reinforces these beliefs until they naturally look at any challenge or inconvenience as an opportunity to shine, grow and continue to succeed.

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2016

Are You Afraid to Lose....or Win?

(This blog was originally posted on May 14, 2014)

      Have you refused to participate in an activity because you didn’t want to look bad or ruin your current performance record? Have you ever refused to participate in an activity in which you were likely to succeed? Both of these examples are potential causes of performance an­­xiety, and recognizing what triggers this anxiety is the first step to successfully managing and treating it.

     Fear of success is often more difficult for people to imagine feeling, because who doesn’t want to succeed and to be the best at something, right? But success comes with its own kinds of pressure and stress, including responsibility. Suddenly, it does not matter to that newly minted executive that he or she has years of training and experience to validate this promotion. It does not matter that the person has a proved track record of being able to execute profitable negotiations in the boardroom and is willing to make tough decisions about that will benefit the company. Once you get the big promotion that you have been working so hard to receive, you have to do more work and probably take on more roles than you previously had, to earn the new title and salary that you now earn. You will have to use the skills you have honed during your tenure in your previous role and put them to a real test in a leadership position. Like it or not, when you make a decision the buck will start and stop with you.

     Or, imagine an honors student at high-school student who has received two letters of acceptance from two different universities. He or she may decide to accept a place in the state university because he or she feels intimidated by the anticipated course demands and his or her family’s expectations about what it means to be a student at Harvard. It doesn’t matter that you have earned academic letters or were the captain of your sport or debate team. It doesn’t matter how many awards you have received for community service or other extracurricular activity. Once you leave the security of high school (and childhood) where you were the top-ranked student of your class, you will be starting over in a new environment that is populated by hundreds of young adults just like you. You may well become the head of your class and set a new standard of academic achievement, or not. Whatever you do academically, high-school graduation and attending college are a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.

     The physical manifestations of performance anxiety take many forms, including trembling or shaking, feeling nauseated or “blanking out” (forgetting) the lines or music you are going to perform or the information you are supposed to present. Hypnotherapy and therapeutic guided-imagery techniques can help you to manage these symptoms and overcome this anxiety so you can do the performance or presentation.

• Systematic desensitization to the stimuli that trigger the anxiety/fear response
• Creating hypnotic scripts that reinforce the client’s recent achievements to boost his or her self-confidence about ability to achieve the stated goal.
• Use guided-imagery techniques to help the client re-experience those previous successes and further reinforce his or her self-confidence about being able to achieve a new goal.
• Teach the client how to practice diaphragmatic breathing and to activate an “anchor” to help relieve symptoms of anxiety.
• Educate the client about the relationship between nutrition and anxiety; specifically, the correlation between drops and spikes in blood-sugar level and feeling anxious or afraid. 
•  Instruct the client about using the Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping) to reduce anxiety and replace negative responses with positive/desired responses to achieve a goal. 

Performance anxiety affects most people at some time in their lives. As John Kappas, Ph.D. explains in his book Success Is Not an Accident: The Mental Bank Concept, every person has the ability to achieve success. You do not have to be afraid to fail or to succeed to achieve your goals. Now is the perfect time for you to turn your dreams into reality.

 Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy®, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2014

Doing My Homework

(This blog was originally posted on March 30, 2014)

                In my blog titled Creating Your Hypnotic Script, I described how I create customize hypnotic scripts for each of my clients. This process actually (unofficially) begins during the first introductory conversation I have with a prospective client, when the person contacts me to discuss whether hypnotherapy can help him or her to achieve specific vocational and avocational self-improvement goals. During the course of this conversation, I try to get as much information about my prospective client and the presenting issue as I can. This isn’t being “nosey”; rather, I need to know whether these goals fall within my scope of expertise as a hypnotherapist. If not, I will refer him or her to a medical doctor or licensed mental health practitioner, who would be a better source of support for that issue. (For a complete list of ways in which hypnotherapy may help you, check out the Appendix tab on my website.)

                Once I determine that I can help you, I will need to know even more information and specific details about your behavior/habit: How long have you been doing “X”? Under what situations/circumstances are you most likely to do or want to engage in the behavior? When and why did you start doing this behavior? Have you ever tried to change or stop this behavior in the past? Why do you want to stop doing “X” now? Finally, I will ask whether you ever been hypnotized before. It does not matter whether you have been hypnotized in terms of whether hypnosis can help you achieve your goal; it will. However, this information is useful for me to help gauge how much time you may need to become comfortable being hypnotized (i.e., the hypnotic induction) before we address your specific behavior in hypnosis.

                Once we conclude the conversation and we have set your appointment with me, I consult my notes and text/course material for different hypnosis and guided-imagery techniques that I feel will be most appropriate or applicable to help you achieve your behavioral goal. I may revise or write out a completely new hypnotic script that I can use when we meet that is composed of elements of several different scripts. If we have worked together before, I will review the notes I made during your previous session and research hypnosis scripts or techniques to follow up our recent work together. Of course, I know that this plan may change or be revised again, depending on what we discuss during the session and how you respond to/feel during the hypnosis, etc. I will also review different hypnosis and imagery techniques, and even prepare alternate scripts, to use during the session if necessary or as time permits.

                My goal as your hypnotherapist is to help you address and change the habits that no longer work for you and replace them with behaviors that do. To do this, I constantly review and practice the techniques I know, and train for certifications in new topics that will enable me to help more people in even more ways.

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2015

Hypnosis and PTSD: An Overview

(This blog was originally posted on July 6, 2014)

 

 

Photo courtesy of Microsoft

                Some people become very traumatized by their experiences in a war or while fighting a war, Hypnosis Motivation Institute founder John Kappas, Ph.D. observed. “Any time a person goes into an extremely stressful situation, you start to anticipate the stress or danger,” he said. Even though soldiers receive specific combat skills, their survival depends on their ability to fight and kill as well as to deal with the horrors that they have experienced or witnessed on the battlefield: i.e., the fight/flight/freeze response.

Dr. Kappas warned that whenever a person represses the stress and emotions (e.g., fear, sadness, anger) experienced during combat, he or she is vulnerable to suffering “post-war depression” or, as post-traumaticstress disorder. The Diagnostics and Statistics Manual IV defines PTSD as an extremely complex disorder that includes psychological as well as physical symptoms of distress. These include: insomnia, bad dreams or flashbacks of the war experience, explosive anger, survivor’s guilt and difficulties integrating with or back into society. Job performance at work may and personal relationships with the spouse/lover, friends and family may also be negatively affected. Even if the stress is repressed when the traumatic event occurs, eventually these symptoms surface and must be dealt with, he warned. “Some guys 20 years out of the Service are fine and then suddenly break,” the late hypnotherapist warned. “After you survive in the military/war, if it’s the only thing you know, it can be a shock to face the real world,” Dr. Kappas said. Treatment for PTSD entails desensitizing the client to the stress of war and reintegrating the person back into his or her “old” life, including relationships and work.

On January 1, 2013, I earned a certification to use hypnosis to help people who are experiencing PTSD to reduce stress and symptoms in order to improve their quality of life. I use hypnosis, relaxation/breathing and therapeutic guided-imagery techniques to teach these clients how to manage stress. I also employ cognitive behavioral-therapy techniques and exposure therapy to help the person separate (un-pair) the association between triggers of fear about the previous traumatic event and what is going on in their current environment. Because PTSD is such a complex disorder, I require a referral* from both a licensed medical doctor and a licensed psychotherapist for me to provide hypnotherapy as a complementary therapy to alleviate, manage and control these symptoms.

                I would like to thank each of the men and women who have risked and continue to risk their lives—and those who have sacrificed their lives—to protect and defend our country. I will not forget you.

 

 

*California law allows access by California residents to complementary and alternative health care practitioners who are not providing services that require medical training and credentials. The purpose of a program of hypnotherapy is for vocational and avocational self-improvement (Business and Professions Code 2908) and as an alternative or complementary treatment to healing arts services licensed by the state. A hypnotherapist is not a licensed physician or psychologist, and hypnotherapy services are not licensed by the state of California. Services are non-diagnostic and do not include the practice of medicine, neither should they be considered as a substitute for licensed medical or psychological services or procedures.

 

 Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy®, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2015

 

How Hypnotherapy Is Like Muscle Memory

                                                 (This blog was originally posted on May 18, 2014)

 

 

                People use the term “muscle memory” a lot in the context of sports and athletic participation. But what is it all about, exactly? Wikipedia.com describes this phenomenon as a product of motor or procedural learning in which specific muscles or muscle groups learn and remember how to do a particular movement after repeating that motion many times over a period of time. It is even possible to improve how you execute this motion as it becomes more automatic in your behavioral repertoire of sports or other movements, such as dancing or playing the guitar.

                While I do not discount the existence of muscle memory, I would contend that it is born not just in a specific part of the body that you use for the desired behavior (e.g., body, arms or legs). Rather, I would argue that muscle memory starts where every other memory begins: in the mind—specifically, in the subconscious mind. The SCM triggers every action we make by sending an electrical impulse through the nervous system to activate the muscle(s) we need to carry out the intended or even unintended or undesired behavior. According to Hypnosis Motivation Institute founder John Kappas, Ph.D.’s Theory of Mind, our only natural or innate responses are the reaction to a fear of falling and the reaction to a fear of loud noises. As the subconscious mind takes in more and more new information, we learn new behaviors and develop personal beliefs. Eventually, we don’t even don’t even think about what we need to do to achieve a desired result, we just do it. Most of us have not thought about what our body must do in order to just walk since we took our first steps as a toddler. Who hasn’t heard the expression, “Once you ride a bike, you never forget how”?

                In fact, I use the idea and theory behind muscle memory in almost all of the hypnotic suggestions I craft for my clients. I create suggestions to reinforce the person’s motivations to change the undesired habit or adopt a desired behavior; then, I reinforce this motivation with guided imagery in which the individual is achieving the desired goal. The subconscious mind does not know the difference between you swinging a golf club on the links versus imagining or pretending that you just made the perfect swing an achieved a hole-in-one while you are in hypnosis. Furthermore, the more times you repeat these desired behaviors in hypnosis or in a guided-imagery exercise, the more opportunities you have to lock those actions into your subconscious mind and in your muscle memory. It just takes repetition of the desired behavior—so I guide my clients through these exercises over and over to reinforce the behavior change during the hypnotherapy session and send them home with a track from the session to further reinforce this work. Hypnosis and guided-imagery techniques enable you to replace unwanted behaviors and adopt the ones you want using a process of repetition and memory similar to the way the muscles in your body learned and remember how to walk.

 

 

 Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy®, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2014