I am as much to blame as anyone in this field I guess… Any chance we get to promote this fabulous field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, eh? Whether it is Lily Allen reducing her weight with hypnotherapy, Matt Damon stopping smoking with hypnotherapy, Jo Wood overcoming dancing nerves with hypnotherapy, I could go on and on with celebrity endorsements for hypnotherapy that have been plastered all over this blog in recent years.
To be honest, they often make a refreshing change to all those internet marketing advertisments for hypnosis – “Hypnotherapy for procrastination” – just makes me pedantically look at the language and think “Why would anyone want to use hypnotherapy to help them procrastinate?”… Or of course, there is the headline upon headline by poor quality journalists who insist on being unimaginative and writing “you are feeling sleeping” or “look into my eyes” and so on…
So it came as a rose-scented waft of summer air through my google alerts this week when an article written in the Finanical Times by Stephen Poliakoff came up and he wrote about his recent experience of hypnotherapy for overcoming his fear of flying, which was a joy to read.
In this hypnosis article, Poliakoff writes about his fear of flying by air around the world, he states:
To stand a chance of getting on a plane at all, I had been persuaded to try hypnosis. I am a natural sceptic and felt it was extremely unlikely that it would make any difference but I was willing to try anything. As it is for many people, my image of hypnosis is derived from stage acts where people crawl around on all fours squealing, having been persuaded they are now piglets, so I approach the hypnotherapist’s house with some trepidation. He is a man in late middle-age, immaculately dressed like a solicitor from my 1960s childhood.
A friend of mine had told me that when he tried hypnosis to stop smoking, he had the extraordinary sensation of swimming through liquid concrete while he was in a trance. When he left the session he couldn’t stop himself from jabbering to complete strangers in the street for many hours afterwards. He never touched a cigarette again. I am, therefore, anticipating a dramatic hallucinatory experience. Instead I find myself in a gentle hazy world, like the state between waking and sleeping. I am not convinced I have allowed myself to go very deep into a trance but I still find myself visiting a series of intense landscapes. It is like experiencing an 8mm film of one’s childhood, various memories lapping gently, and yet there are no startling revelations that could throw light on my phobia.
We’ll just have to wait and see how successful the results were/are and hope that he sees the hypnotherapist for more than just a solitary, single flash in the pan session and uses hypnotherapy to fully let go of the fear once and for all.
Enjoyed reading that, despite the rather lethargic sounding effects. it was free of clichés though, hoorah! 🙂
