Canberra Hypnosis – Dr. Julie Kidd
Tired of being a victim of your own mind?
Shift to “I want to. I can. I will.” with hypnotherapy.
Canberra Hypnosis – Dr. Julie Kidd
Tired of being a victim of your own mind?
Shift to “I want to. I can. I will.” with hypnotherapy.
What can hypnotherapy do for you?
Weight Loss
Sleep
Addictions
Stress
Depression
Cancer Support
Pain
The Mind of Healing
Hello,
In 2009, I found out that I had a malignant brain tumour.
Through the course of this experience I found a much deeper perspective on what true healing is, from the inside out. Now I very much want to share what I’ve learned with other people who have cancer, or any life-threatening illness, to give them their best chance of surviving and thriving.
I have written a book, The Mind of Healing.
All achievements are from habits. All failures are from habits.
Weight Loss
Hypnotherapy is extremely effective for changing habits including emotional eating, binge eating, night eating, eating out of boredom, addiction to junk food, chocolate, or other sweets, or just overeating at mealtimes. it can also disrupt the habits of taking disproportionate servings or getting seconds, excessive snacking, or just an “I deserve a treat” mindset.
Hypnotherapy is also great for regaining your basic confidence, motivation, self-esteem and in reaching the realisation that it really is possible to succeed.
The wonderful thing about hypnosis is that it takes away the desire to overeat. It doesn’t stop normal hunger, just the part that wants to grab more. Without that desire, the inner fight is over. That endless loop of try/give up, diet/binge, good person/bad person can come to an end .
When you’re no longer obsessing about food and weight, you free up space to enjoy life and live more fully. You have more energy, feel happier and lighter, sleep better and feel more optimistic. Once this shift occurs, it’s easy to stay on track.
In dealing with weight loss, I usually see people five times over five weeks and ask that people practice with a recording of the session in between meetings, for best effect. After that I suggest an occasional tune up until the goal is reached, then a check in at one year.
Sleep
If you’re looking for a hypnotist to help you with sleep, you’ve probably already tried basic “sleep hygiene.” There’s a lot of information available but sometimes information alone is not enough. We know we shouldn’t keep adding more coffee during the day, consuming alcohol in the evening, or engaging with electronic devices and thrilling TV at bedtime, but we often do it anyway.
We can be addicted to the agitation, the feeling of being “on.” Maybe it’s too “boring” to eat early, skip the alcohol, and wind down during the evening instead of up, or you can’t/don’t make time to unplug from “doing” mode.
The good news is we don’t have insomnia like a disease, insomnia is something we do. We keep ourselves awake with our habits, agitation, random thoughts, endless reruns, anger, frustration, planning, worry, or dwelling on sad things, or even exciting things, in the future. So if we’re doing it, we can undo it.
The agitated mind tends to try to take control and force itself to go to sleep, then gets irritated if it’s unsuccessful. But we can’t make ourselves go to sleep; we fall asleep. It’s a letting go, a basic trust.
Hypnosis can help greatly with addressing these habits. It can also guide you back down under the superficial chatty mind and that tired, wired feeling into deep rest and deep stillness. People often say after hypnosis that they’ve had their best sleep in years.
I usually see people 5 times over 5 weeks for resolution of sleep problems and ask that people practice with the recording of the session in between, for best effect.
Addictions
Smoking
Personal motivation is recognised as the most important factor in succeeding at quitting cigarettes. Hypnosis can increase that motivation.
Often, it’s not enough to know that tobacco ruins your health; you have to imagine and truly feel that there’s a good future for you where you’re happy and healthy, that there’s something to look forward to.
Some people will just decide to quit and that’s that, no matter how strong the addiction. They have a sense of being the authority in their own lives. But for most of us, we actually need to find our own confidence and power in order to decide to stop, rather than “try.” Hypnosis is great for giving you this confidence in order to make a stand. Furthermore, it takes away the root desire for the cigarette, so you don’t have to fight with yourself. Without that desire, you’re free.
I usually see smokers 5 times: twice in the first and second weeks and once in the third. The first day is quit day.
Alcohol
Hypnotherapy works extremely well for alcohol dependence. Most of the people I see have increased their intake over time to the point of drinking a half to two bottles of wine daily. A nice lifestyle has become an unhealthy addiction.
I usually suggest that people intend to be a non-drinker for life, or if that is out of the question, then to do it for a year. That is usually long enough to find a better way to live life without the “bottled Valium.” Hypnosis takes away the desire to drink and helps you come out of the fog feeling happy, healthy, confident, optimistic, clear-minded, better slept and looking forward to the future.
I usually see people 5 times over 5 weeks for alcohol or pot addiction and ask that they practice with the recording of the session in between, for best effect.
Stress
What is it? Stress is our reaction to perceived threats. It’s not a vague thing; we all know when we feel stressed. Cartoonists know how to draw it and we recognise it in ourselves and others. We’re constantly trying to adapt to an accelerating world. Faster and faster we are confronted by not getting what we want or expect or not getting it on time, and instead getting what we don’t want. Our fight or flight reaction is triggered as we perceive possible threats in our everyday. We try to make things happen with force and control but our attempts can be frustrated by others, time, the world, technology, reality. As a result, we become restless, driven, feel powerless to change things. We might self-medicate with food, alcohol, coffee, cigarettes. Then we hit survival mode living on adrenaline –irritable, inefficient, complaining, foggy, sleepless, tired, and wired.
If you had a choice, would you keep doing this?
The good news is that you can rewire yourself to feel grounded, relaxed, empowered. You can strengthen your resilience, feel confident in your own resources, and live from a feeling of being bigger than your problems.
I usually see people five times over five weeks for stress or anxiety and ask that people practice with the recording of the session in between, for best effect.
Depression
Most agree that medication is needed to combat major depression, but in mild to moderate depression, psychological treatments alone, or in tandem with medication are often very effective. Of course, there are lots of ways people deal with it themselves, such as exercise, meditation, acupuncture, and talking it through with close friends and confidantes. There also are now several excellent and effective interactive apps to guide people through reframing how they think week by week.
When depressed, we tend to focus on the bad things and spiral down. Some people experience “learned helplessness” and if they also have a pessimistic thinking style they can quickly collapse under pressure. Add in toxic negative beliefs – “everything I do is wrong,” “no one likes me,” etc – and we can get stuck.
The good news is that thoughts and beliefs are not set in concrete; they can be changed and so can the feeling.
What is required for this change to take place? A decision, a willingness to change, knowledge of your intentions, and a pathway to where you want to go.
Hypnotherapy can be very effective at stopping the replays of past negative things and future nightmares, and can change one’s thoughts, beliefs and mood. It also settles the anxiety that most people with depression have. Hypnotherapy improves self-esteem, confidence, sleep, energy, relaxation and optimism. Once these attributes begin to balance, happiness returns.
I usually see people 5 times over 5 weeks and ask that they practice with the recording of the session in between, for best effect.
Cancer Support
Fear and sadness are natural responses to the sudden possibility of death. Even though we superficially accept that one day we’ll die, a cancer diagnosis is very confronting. The very idea of it can be scary and then the process may include sickness, pain, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, upheavals in career, family, finances. Furthermore, the shift of identity from being an autonomous person to being a patient is unwelcome to say the least. People often feel powerless to the disease; the conveyor belt, the tests, treatments, the prognosis. As someone who had three monthly brain scans to see if “it” had come back, I know the feeling. It can seem overwhelming but I want you to know that it’s all workable; it may or may not be fixable, but it is workable: the fear, the sadness, the negative beliefs, the hopelessness. You don’t have to die before you die.
Using hypnotherapy and other mind tools can get you back a sense of personal agency (being able to choose your mind’s response to the situation), strengthen your inner confidence, and find a sense that you have all the inner resources you need to deal with whatever comes. Perhaps most importantly, hypnotherapy can give you a strong sense of a possible positive future to sustain you throughout the process. You don’t have to strain to “be positive” over the top of the awful. It’s actually possible to have some genuine happiness of heart.
I usually see people 5 times over 5 weeks to begin with for relaxation, empowerment and happiness.
Pain
Chronic pain is not what you think it is. This is good news! Researchers have found that chronic pain (lasting for more than 3 months) isn’t necessarily a sign of ongoing tissue damage or inflammation.
But neither is it ‘all in your head’.
Pain is definitely real but where is the signal actually coming from if it’s not tissue damage? We can keep getting messages that we’re in pain long after the injury has healed. But that’s just the brain overdoing its threat warning to protect us. The brain’s job is to hold the data from our past bad experiences so that we can avoid future similar threats. If a red car runs over our foot, we’ll quite likely flinch whenever we see a red car in future. If a movement hurts, we’ll avoid doing that.
If we keep getting these pain messages, then we keep believing that the damage is still there, and we keep avoiding any movement that might increase the pain. And ongoing pain often sensitises the nervous system so that even a light touch on the affected area or slight movement can be felt as pain.
Say you have a major car accident and injure your neck. There’s the shock of the accident held in the mind and body. Then a long period of pain with any movement and the natural bracing to avoid that. This can become the way you hold your body habitually. Caution and anxiety can easily develop “I can’t do that” “that will hurt”. All of this can be even more intense if this happens at a particularly stressful time in your life and your confidence has already taken a knock. And if you can’t work because of the pain then financial fear can add to the intensity of the experience of powerlessness. Maybe you see the Xray report, the damage is there in black and white, and your doctor frowns. Your brain logs all that. Your mind then might spin “it’s damaged, it’s permanent” “what if I can’t work” etc and you might spiral into fear and hopelessness.
We know, from functional MRI brain studies of people with chronic pain, that the brain lights up, not just in the areas that represent physical sensation, but also in the hippocampus (memory), amygdala (fear-fight/flight), vision and hearing areas. The brain has logged all this evidence that you’re under threat. The confluence of trauma, pain, emotions, negative beliefs, fear about moving can really put people in a bind, a holding pattern, a contraction of mind and body.
Fortunately, there are well-researched ways to get back out of the pattern as long as pathology has been ruled out.
With graduated exercise the brain can accumulate experience that moving is safe again.
And there is good evidence that, with pain reprocessing, beliefs about the pain and damage can be changed, thus reducing the intensity of the pain. Changing that belief can help change the pain.
There are many ways to change negative thoughts and unhelpful beliefs, to process or release held emotions, defuse the hypervigilance, and alter the holding pattern in the circuits of the brain.
All of this can be expedited with hypnosis. Going into trance is the best way to open the door to changing the brain’s circuits and train it to be less reactive, to send fewer pain messages. It’s the easiest way to change the perception of pain, the meaning of pain, the beliefs about it, and the expectations of the future. And best of all, it implants the possibility of a good future to look forward to where you’re happy, healthy, confident, and living your pain-free life.
One of my patients, a man in his fifties, had been in constant neck pain for 5 years after a series of car accidents. He’d had several major surgeries for it as well as having had injections into the pain area and a nerve stimulator, which worked temporarily. After the first session he had no pain for 5 days and when it did come, he felt it as just uncomfortable. He was much happier, more active and hadn’t needed his twice daily opiate tablets. In fact, he’d only needed to take one in the whole week. (Please note that while most people have good results, I cannot guarantee individual outcomes)
If you would like to gauge your own overlay of fear and unhelpful beliefs, you could fill out the Tampa pain scale (Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia). It is 17 quick questions to see where you are on the scale, a score of 17 being the least fear and 68 being the most. Scores above 37 indicate some degree of kinesiophobia (fear of moving causing pain or damage).
https://www.mdapp.co/tampa-scale-for-kinesiophobia-tsk-calculator-465/
The good thing is that no matter what the score is, the mind and the perception of pain can be changed so that it’s possible that the pain can be vanished or perceived as just uncomfortable and harmless.