Conventional medical help for depression
With issues such as depression you should always see your doctor
to eliminate any treatable cause. We are not offering 'treatment for depression' or 'therapy for depression'. We use NLP and hypnosis to provide training for your thinking, so think of what we do as a combination of training, education, coaching and advice. This is not a substitute for appropriate medical care, it is 'complementary', not 'alternative'.
Symptoms of depression
Typically people who are given the 'depression', or 'depressed' label have some of the following symptoms - sadness, despair, tiredness, lethargy, grief, frustration, guilt, anger, inability to sleep, overeating, no appetite etc etc, and these symptoms, or patterns of thinking/feeling, tend to go round and round in loops in a person's mind.
Then, often there is self-blame, a feeling that the person is inadequate or stupid because they are not able to break out of the depression patterns themselves and stop being depressed.
Sometimes the person knows, or believes they know, how the cycle of thinking/feeling began (the cause of the depression), sometimes they don't and go on a search to find out why they have depression
Our approach aims to help ease depression, to help you stop you being depressed, by using hypnotherapy and NLP...
- We spend time looking and listen to the person to determine how it is the patterns of thinking/feeling that we call 'depression' manifest themselves.
- We then work consciously to begin to train the client to build flexibility in the way the person thinks about things, they way they remember the past and imagine the future, the way they talk to themselves, and literally the way they experience the world.
- We work unconsciously (hypnosis) to assist the person to gain flexibility in their behaviour, to build with suggestion, metaphor and conditioning new resources, and to connect the person with the resources they almost invariably have but have been unable to access during the 'depression'.
We don't talk about the past, we simply train your mind for the present, and the future
We find that by working literally with how a person is thinking, rather than trying to interpret, explain or theorise about why they are that way, and we aim to achieve results more quickly. Similarly, while some therapists spend time in a search for a 'cause' or a 'deep hidden meaning' to try and get someone to stop being depressed, by going through a person's past, we find that approach is often long-winded and painful for people (if you were beaten with a baseball bat when you were seven, what is the use of re-living it!?). Reviewing the past can sometimes be useful for some people, however, and if you feel that this would help you then you would be better seeking a counselling referral from your doctor.
Hypnosis and Depression
As far as we know there is not yet any substantive research on the subject of hypnosis, or hypnotherapy, and depression. We are not saying that hypnosis alone can cure depression. When we use hypnosis it is to help the person feel less and anxious and more comfortable. Yes, we also give suggestions for the person to recover from depression, but we are not saying that hypnosis can in any way, by itself, provide any kind of cure..
NLP and Depression
NLP is about how to think, and how you think has direct consequences for your feelings, and therefore your behaviour. The approach is about as far from therapy as you can get. The way we utilise these models (and others may use them differently) is to work to build some choice and flexibility into patterns of thinking, into thinking 'habits'. Please remember this is not therapy, it is training.
Be more resourceful right now
Therefore our aim is as quickly as possible to help to make the person more resourceful in the here and now. The aim is to help them to view the past with a different perspective, and begin think of the future in a more positive light, a future that sounds good when you think about it, and a future full of possibilities for feeling good, having fun, and learning. Please do not hesitate to contact one of us for further information.
