After stabilising the patient first, the hypnotherapist regressed her to the time when the problem first started, asking questions to learn more about her feelings, thoughts and behaviours at the time. Calling the adult self to come to the scene is very efficient as from that wiser and more knowledgeable perspective, she can give her younger self valuable advice and that advice comes from her own lips in her own words, hence the subconscious will more easily accept it. When the adult self cannot help or her remarks are not helpful due to lack of appropriate role models, the therapist steps in and gives implicit suggestions using the Socratic questioning method so that she can arrive at the answers that are going to help her re-parent her inner child / younger self. Regarding the messages to the baby self, the adult self was able to deliver some very positive affirmations, and again the hypnotherapist added some others that related to her specific problems like ‘you can cry when you want to’. When the patient started to cry, she deliberately paused the session acknowledging, valuing and respecting her need to cry, which is what she lacked when she was a child.
These hypnosis sessions have helped the patient in ways that she wasn’t expected and she might even not have been aware that there was any problem in those areas, like gaining insight on how she was raising her own children; that she needed to pay more attention to them and communicate with them differently. She might have unwittingly been repeating patterns ingrained in her deep subconscious memory.
This is something that happens very often during hypnotherapy: the clients not only get the results they expect and want but also other areas of their lives improve as they get an understanding, clarity and strength they didn’t have previously. This was summarized perfectly by this patient when the hypnotherapist asked how she felt near the end of the second regression: ‘Complete’
