ANXIETY

Anxiety can present itself in many different ways including panic attacks, obsessive complusive disorder, post traumatic stress and phobias.

All of the above can have a massive impact on an individuals life and the long term stress of managing one of these anxiety disorders may lead to long term health problems.

Hypnotherapy has been used succesfully to aid in the treatment of such disorders. Donna works on an individual basis with the patient to help identify the most appropriate method for overcoming their experiences. Donna is experienced in using a number of Cognitive Hypnobehavioural techniques, along with analytical techniques and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. Not all methods suit all so it is important that a detailed case history is taken to ensure that the patients needs are fully understood and met.

PHOBIAS

DC Hypnotherapy use a variation of techniques to directly communicate with the unconscious mind, which is where the irrational thoughts provoking a phobia come from. A phobia is a special form of fear which is :

• Out of proportion to demands of the situation,
• Cannot be explained or reasoned away,
• Is beyond voluntary control and
• Leads to avoidance of the feared situation

It is believed that a phobia is usually a result of the following factors:

• Severe stress
• A series of stressful or negative experiences
• Transmission from someone else (e.g. a parent or sibling)
• Past trauma

The aim of therapy is never to completely eradicate the fear since a certain amount of fear is neccesary to allow the client to take sensible precautions to avoid danger. Rather the aim is to help the client to manage their fear or have a different response to the fear provoking situation. This is where hypnotherapy comes in. The treatment of a phobia will usually take between 3 and 5 sessions.

EMDR THERAPY

EMDR is a psychotherapeutic technique that can be used to aid in the recovery of troubling symptoms, such as anxiety, guilt, anger, depression, panic, sleep disturbance, and flashbacks that are the result of traumatic experiences. EMDR can also be used to overcome phobias, and has proven to be effective even at times when other therapies have failed. EMDR – Stands for eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing.

In 1987, Dr Francine Shapiro, while walking in a park made a chance observation. She noticed that the intensity of her disturbing thoughts and feelings reduced after her eyes had been moving rapidly back and forth. Being a student of psychology and a naturally curious person she decided to research this for her doctoral thesis. She found a way to use rapid eye movements in a special psychotherapy protocol, and discovered it was very successful in relieving chronic distress in victims of trauma.

Since 1989 Dr Francine Shapiro has developed this protocol into a completely new kind of therapy. EMDR now does not only use eye movements to help overcome the symptoms of trauma but takes in the patient’s individual modality (i.e. how a patient predominantly experiences life, through sounds, feelings etc.). The particularly disturbing part of a memory for an individual may not be what the patient saw, it could be a sound or a feeling. EMDR can be used to desensitise these reactions and also alter beliefs about an incident which have in the past been damaging, for example a negative self belief such as “it was all my fault”.