Hypnotherapy Melbourne

I was in my late 20s when I finally began taking driving lessons, mostly out of a lack of necessity and desire. When I started learning to drive, I would describe my level of fear of driving as relatively normal for any new driver.

Over time my fear of driving began to snowball. I have often been asked, ‘what happened that made you so scared?’ I have never really been able to answer this question unambiguously. I have never been in nor witnessed a major road accident. Whilst I was learning, I naturally had a few upsetting road experiences but nothing that could remotely explain what progressed into full-blown anxiety.

I started to have physical responses to the mere idea of going for driving lessons. I would overheat, sweat, my heartbeat increased, my belly would knot and the tears would well up. I felt overwhelmed on the road. I felt anxious. I felt tense. I felt rushed. I felt scared. The most minor of incidences would reduce me to tears.

The constant pressure from those around me to get my licence just culminated my pure hatred of driving. I hated that it was a part of everyday life. I felt so pathetic that I couldn’t do something so basic, something that everyone just did.

Earlier this year I took driving lessons again, following another long break. My anxiety was ever-present and with every lesson it became more overwhelming. I pushed through it. I had made a pact with myself to face it head on and I was going to try one final time to get my licence.

I went into the exam thinking – ‘if I fail, I don’t care because I am officially giving up after this attempt’. Not the most positive attitude but my lack of care at least kept the ridiculous level of nerves I had felt in previous tests at bay, and I was left to deal with my customary driving anxiety. I passed. Great. I still hated driving.

After discussing this fear with Rodney, he felt it was very important we deal with it immediately. I went into the session extremely hopeful that it would work and equally as anxious it wouldn’t because if it didn’t there was nothing left except a debilitating anxiety.

Rodney went straight to work with a series of questions in order to identify the various emotions I had experienced, along with my overall attitude towards driving.

During the session, although I was under hypnosis, I was actively participating and remembered the whole experience. We did a few different exercises relating to eradicating those negative emotions, as well as creating new emotions around driving. We also worked on creating a new picture of driving and transforming my overall attitude.

Within 2 hours I was heading home, feeling great and ready to face the real test – driving. I felt very neutral to the whole idea of driving which was already a hugely promising sign. All the horrible feelings and physical symptoms had vanished. I reached the car, jumped into it and just drove. I was fine. What was the big deal? In fact, I actually found it incredibly relaxing and enjoyable. I could not believe it.

The sense of pure relief and happiness was phenomenal. The burden and constant pressure of not wanting to drive, coupled with no one being able to really understand my anxiety, was also gone. I felt liberated and still do. My only wish is I had found hypnotherapy earlier, in 2 hours a 10-year anxiety had just vanished.

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Understanding vs Experential Understanding

Rodney Inns — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 04:40:11 +0000

This is an interesting subject I have been contemplating it the last 5 years of my journey down this most interesting path of Hypnotherapy and NLP! Especially in my business at Synergy Hypnotherapy Melbourne, of which I had no idea I would be travelling. In society so much emphasis is placed on learning facts by rote and being able to repeat the facts back in school’s, university’s and in most other forms of learning. There are a few exceptions like becoming a doctor, Nurse, engineer to name a few.

Having worked in a university in the past, as an educational developer, I was responsible for teaching academics how to design and deliver subjects to students, to get the best result possible for students. A few things became clear quickly; industry wants graduates who can do things, while our universities are concentrating on delivering graduates who have memorised lots of information, with little understanding on how to apply in their chosen profession by doing things.

There seems to be a gap between what employers want and what universities give them. So it is one thing to learn facts and understand those facts conceptually, it is entirely a different thing to apply that information and understandings in the performance of different activities. I have learned that there are many different levels to understanding which are developed when you apply that information in tasks.

First off there is the first level of knowing the information and an idea of how to apply it next we move into is the area of application where so many things come to light that we were not taught, which deepens and textures our understanding of this information and its application. Then on an ongoing basis we come across more and more situations in perfuming this activity where new and different variables present them self, which further deepens and textures your understanding of this information and its application. You may also increase your informational learning in this area which further adds more texture to your understanding. This process can go on, and on for ages, you will continue to learn and develop a deeper appreciation and understanding in this area which influences other areas as well, which in turn then re-influences this area.

So what I am hinting at is we need to place more emphasis on the actual, practical application of this knowledge, this is where greater levels of understanding come to the surface for people. An example from my practice of Hypnotherapy I tell clients that I am going to remove all the negative emotions from their body, due to these emotions being a large component of their problem. Now most of the time, they get my explanation of how it works and understand what I am going to do, but I always get stunned looks and disbelief when we have finished and test the work to see the emotions are gone. In this case, the experience completely transforms their understanding and takes it to a completely different level, most of the time people don’t believe it is possible they want to believe but don’t.

The self help industry is also good at telling people what to do, but they just don’t know how to tell you how to do what you should do, so you end up with being taught a very shallow level of understanding of what you have to do. What would transcend this is if they gave you exercises to do to teach you how to do what they say, this would transform and deepen that level of understanding. This has always been the downfall of the self help industry the authors are telling you what they did, unfortunately they, leave the how out which leaves most people high and dry without any results. The exception to this would be NLP, where you do lots of exercises as part of your learning and development so they teach you the theory of what you need to do, and then they do exercises to help you achieve this and develop a deeper level of understanding.

In our teaching institutions, we need to shift from teaching theory and facts to teaching a combination of theory, facts and practical exercises on using that theory, and we need to stop getting people to memorise lots of facts. Especially when we have access to the internet and other forms of electronic information, we should instead teach them how to find what they need quickly and apply it.

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What are Emotions

Rodney Inns — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 04:58:01 +0000

Emotions are made of a few different components first off they are made up of thoughts and meanings in the form of “talking to self, pictures, movies” in your mind and then the second component is feelings. Feelings are physical sensations in the body and all emotions have a corresponding feeling in the body which we can elicit. For example anxious people will tend to manifest the feelings of anxiety in there stomachs! i.e. “butterflies in stomach”. It also can manifest in other parts of the body as tension like in the legs, chest, heart so the muscles are overly tight.

So do babies have emotions? Well no babies only have feelings or physical sensations because they do not have language, and language is required to have emotions. You also require a certain level of consciousness or ability to think. These feelings or physical sensations take the form of warm, cold, soft hard, different tastes, and all other types of physical sensations, this will then also trigger feelings in the body of the baby. We would normally identify them as emotions, but babies don’t have language to do this so we call them feelings. How do we acquire emotions? Well can you imagine as a baby you may slowly accumulate different types of experiences, and you may sort of group them into sections like all uncomfortable, bad, pain, happy, fun etc, and of course the baby is not using the words its like a grouping of similar feelings together. Now lets say one day mum is feeding the baby ice-ream and saying Yum, Good over and over, then a light goes off in the babies mind and they get the word means that this taste and feeling means yum and good. They may also go through their memory and find all other feelings that are similar and label them with the words as well. So they now have the beginnings of emotions. Then as they get older this continues and they form more complex associations that become emotions as we know them, and they begin to layer them, combine them in many different ways to get very complex emotions and feelings as we associate with adults.

The next thing you need to understand about emotions is that they are self reflexive, for example you may think of a memory from the past and feel sad, then you may feel guilty about feeling sad, then feel angry about feeling guilty, then anxious about being angry, then resentful about being anxious etc, this can go on and on for ever. This is what it means to be self reflexive about our emotions.

We also can feel may different things about events etc, many of the clients here at Synergy Hypnotherapy Melbourne I see will come for anxiety or depression only, and after a little enquiry I find they have a host of feelings like anxiety, hopelessness, depression, anger, fear, guilt etc. I have never come across anyone who has only one emotion about an event or problem. I ask a few different questions to get what is going on for my clients and lets look at one, “How do you feel about the past” I will get the following combination of answers, Sad, angry, guilty, shame, out of control. This is only one example I usually get many different combinations the variations that are huge. I also get positive emotions as well, however due to my job and the reason for people coming to see me it is usually the negative emotions that are the problem.

Meaning and understanding is a key component of emotions and people associate very different meaning to emotion from each other, and the behaviours that may manifest from these emotions and meanings. Lets take depressed people, they may make this mean, Im tied, disease, fear, anger, helpless, life is bad, Im not good enough. I could go on and another person may make depression mean, it happens sometimes, goes quickly, part of life, happens to other people etc. We can make it mean so many different things, and everyone has many different meanings or beliefs around the emotions that they experience.

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How Do We Get Problem Behaviours

Rodney Inns — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 06:22:57 +0000

What an interesting thing to consider how did I get to this point in my life where I am having problems with alcohol, drugs, weight, smoking hypnosis, phobia’s and various other issues. Well there are a few factors we need to look at to explain this properly which are emotions/feelings, beliefs, thoughts and the conscious/unconscious minds.

Well to start with we usually have reasons why we do different behaviours and these reasons take different forms, away from motivations and towards motivations. Away from motivator is like when we get anxious, depressed, angry, lonely, guilty etc and we don’t like the way you feel so you might drink, do drugs etc to escape that feeling. So the way this works is we store all emotions we have experienced in our entire life in our bodies and these emotions form a link or anchor to memories. Now we can also turn that emotion into an anchor or trigger to behaviours this is done by when we feel really bad we drink and then the intense emotion becomes the anchor or link to drinking. It usually takes some time to get good at it though so we will need to experience that emotion several times and then drink each of those times to really cement that behaviour in place when we feel that way.

Emotions are made of a few different components first off they are made up of thoughts and meanings in the form of “thoughts, talking to self, pictures, movies” and then the second component is feelings. Feelings are physical sensations in the body and all emotions have a corresponding feeling in the body which we can elicit. For example anxious people will tend to manifest the feelings of anxiety in there stomachs! Ie “butterflies in stomach”. It also can manifest in other parts of the body like tension in the legs so the muscles are overly tight.

So the next thing is how do we do that? How do we create that emotion and then drink etc? Well we do it in our minds we can think, talk to ourselves in our own voices or others, we create images or movies and we have feelings about them in different sequences. As an example we may think something like Im scared and use an anxious voice, then we may have a feeling about this, then we create a picture or movie of seeing something go wrong like losing your job and not being able to pay rent and winding up in a shelter or on the streets, we then may have another feeling, then we may say no I don’t want that to happen, then another feeling. We could then cycle back through this continuously ramping up our anxiety and what ever else we feel by doing this.

I have had some clients who say something to them self like Im useless, they have a feeling like sadness then they go back to memories similar to this and each one they go back to they get to feel the same way they did when it first happened and with each memory they build up that feeling more and more. This is the strategy they use to make them self feel a certain way which usually involves depression as one component. As a consequence of this my clients would drink do drugs etc to escape the pain of these feelings.

Next we need to consider thoughts/beliefs so as the above is going on people tend to rationalise why they are doing it and come up with reasons why this is happening etc and they repeat them over and over again this is how we create new thoughts and beliefs that limit us in some way or another when we have problems. Examples include I cant stop, I crave it, it just happens, its a habit, I need it. So as we repeat these little phrases over and over they become beliefs that are true for the person. This is interrelated and connected to everything else and it all works together to place a person in a place when they appear to have no choice.

The next thing to consider is that they are doing this in their head and it is a skill and as they practice doing this over time they get better at doing it like anything we do we usually get better at it. So they may not get a drinking problem over night it may take 1-5 years to really become a problem slowly increasing from maybe 1 time every 2 weeks to eventually every night. This is what I have found here at Synergy Hypnotherapy Melbourne

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