I just love doing Inner Child Work, both with clients and on myself. It’s fascinating and amazingly effective. In my last article, we looked briefly at the concept of the inner child, and today I want to give you an idea of the work we hypnotists can do to resolve some of the issues and problems that can stem from the “wounded child” that we all carry around inside of us. As always, a little article like this just can’t do justice to the subject, but I hope I can give you enough of an insight into it to make you want to find out more!

The whole idea of inner child work is to heal the wounded inner child that feels they weren’t loved enough. At the same time, we want to encourage and release the positive aspects of the child – spontaneity, and a sense of fun and wonder that helps us to love life and grab opportunities that come our way. Other forms of therapy successfully carry out inner child work, but it can take a lot of time and discussion, and digging around in the past, working through issues from early childhood. Hypnosis on the other hand, is a fantastic tool that can shortcut the whole process, bringing about dramatic change in just one or two sessions.

So what do we do?

We make use of a combination of visualization and memory. Having induced an hypnotic state, the idea is to go back in trance to when we were about 5 years old. This is roughly the time when most of us come to the realization that the world doesn’t revolve around us. The unconscious mind will know what point to lock onto, so there’s no need to pinpoint exactly what age the client should be homing in on.

In most cases I like to take the client back to the home they lived in at that time. They’re asked to imagine they’re standing in the street outside, looking at their old home. As always, engaging all the senses in the visualization helps to make it very real and effective. So taking a little time to establish what they can see, hear, feel will reap rewards and often helps to deepen the level of trance.

The next part of the session will look something like this:

In a moment I’ll ask you to make your way to the front door of the house, noticing all sorts of details as you approach it. You’ll find that the door is unlocked, and you’ll go into the house and make your way through the rooms. Somewhere, you’ll come across your inner child, the “you” from that time.

You might find your child right away, or it might take some time to discover where they are. They might be right there waiting for you when you enter, or they might be hiding themselves away. While you’re looking for them you may notice significant details about the house that have meaning for you. Note these details so you can remember and think about them later.

When you find your child, just raise the finger on your right hand as we discussed, to signal that you’re with them.

So now, walk up to that door and enter the house…

People usually find it fascinating when they do this exercise, because they often recall small details about their early home that they had completely forgotten about. Even if they’re still living in the same house, things change over the years, and they’ll frequently remember little ways in which the house was different back then, whether it’s the detail of a particular wall paper, or the lay out of furniture, or a picture that no longer hangs on the wall.

The idea now, having found that wounded child (they’re often sad and quiet in this first visualized “meeting”, or sullen and angry) is to reassure them that this adult version of themselves has come back to take care of them, to love them and comfort them, to cherish them and give them whatever is missing in their life. You’re basically offering that wounded child exactly what they’re been looking for all these years – the pure, indulgent, unquestioning and unconditional love that couldn’t be theirs in the real world. But we can give this to the inner child because in our inner world we can visualize whatever we need.

If they were desperate for a puppy or a new bike, we can give it to them. If they wanted a room of their own to get away from the mad crush and noise of siblings, or a visit to a theme park we can create that for them. In fact, it’s usual to give the child a gift of some kind. Sometimes people have a clear idea before hand of what they’re going to give the child, but often it’s a spur of the moment decision, or something just “appears” in the visualization which may surprise the client but will be entirely appropriate when they think about it later.

A little time is given to let the client ask whatever questions they want to ask of the child, or vice versa, and for them to discuss whatever they need to discuss, before the client holds the child close and reminds them that they are always a part of them, carried inside them forever, and that they’ll always be loved and cared for. Then it’s time to leave.

We can teach the client how to easily “revisit” the child regularly in just a few minutes a week, or on an ad hoc basis.

What we really do in inner child work is “re-parent” the wounded child. That child sub-personality has been stuck, locked in an unhappy struggle to change the way things were, to re-play history until he or she gets what they wanted or needed. By giving them what they want and need in fantasy (and remember, the unconscious mind can’t distinguish between reality and something we vividly imagine), we can release the old, destructive patterns and insecurities, and move forward in a way that’s positive and appropriate to the adults we have now become.

One caveat I need to add before finishing today. This is a very quick, rough and ready look at the basics of inner child work. What I’ve written above probably sounds warm and fuzzy and kinda sweet… the reality is that if there’s been abuse and trauma in early childhood, this first “visit” to the world of the inner child can be disturbing and distressing. The child may want to have nothing to do with the adult, or the adult may find their inner child repulsive, disgusting or pathetic.

In cases like this, I’ll often set up the “meeting” with the inner child to take place on neutral ground – perhaps a beautiful garden, rather than in the home where the trauma or abuse was experienced. We can get there if it seems necessary in later sessions. In these cases, you may have to work over a longer period and with more “visits”, but the rewards will be even more profound and satisfying.

In short, everyone can benefit from paying some attention to that inner child. I urge you to look into this area in more depth. Both you and your future clients will be glad you did!

Descartes has a lot to answer for. His idea that the mind is somehow separate from the body has proved remarkably persistent. This way of thinking sees human beings as something like a Star Wars AT-AS Walker carrying around a magic ghost – a two-legged machine driven by a disconnected intelligence.

As beliefs go, it’s limiting, to say the least, and increasingly discredited. These days we understand a little bit more about the role of neurotransmitters and the constant flow of information around our bodies. In many ways, it seems that consciousness is something that’s distributed throughout the entire body, right down to cellular level.

Hypnotherapists have long had an intuitive understanding of this. We often use hypnosis to talk to the unconscious mind, with a view to producing changes in the body. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is in the realm of pain control.

The late Kay Thompson was a student of Milton Erickson, and a brilliantly gifted pioneer in the use of hypnosis for pain control. Her view of pain was that it’s a warning signal, and nothing else. When everything’s been done that can be done – when the warning’s been heeded, in other words – there’s no further need for the signal.

This is quite a radical reframe. Under the old Descartes model, chronic pain is a maddening conundrum. Many in the medical profession will have encountered people suffering from chronic pain for no apparent reason. In the Thompson model, chronic pain is simply obsolete. It’s like somebody keeping their thumb on your doorbell after you’ve opened the door to let them in.

It also brings pain into the realm of communication, which is what hypnotherapy is all about. As a practising therapist, I’m fascinated by the idea of “pain as communication”. You need to be alert for the language and the message.

The first thing to listen out for is the client’s own understanding of their pain. People can be very eloquent, even poetic, in their description of it.

“Scratchy, and dry.”
“Black and cold – very cold, and heavy too.”
“Like animal claws.”
“A sort of red sensation.”

These are just some of the things I’ve heard from clients, and I’m sure other therapists have heard similar things. Vivid, sensory metaphors like these are gifts for hypnotic work, of course, since they can be transformed. Scratchy and dry can be changed to smooth and lush. Red sensations can become calming green sensations and so on.

Pain can also be symbolic, and surprisingly literal. A colleague of mine treated a patient for lower back pain, who felt unsupported in their work. The therapist Pat Williams talks about working with a woman with a frozen shoulder, whose problems started when her parents went through some marital difficulties and had less time for their daughter – she’d literally been given the cold shoulder!

This fits in with the idea of consciousness being distributed throughout the body. We can begin to understand chronic pain as the body’s way of trying to tell us something, which is often emotional.

A recent experiment at Bangor University in the UK, brought these strands together and suggests a useful technique for pain control. In the experiment, forty-two rheumatoid arthritis sufferers were asked to visualise their pain in the form of a person, before thanking that person for letting them know something was wrong. They then politely but firmly asked that person to leave, visualising them walking off into the distance and eventually out of sight. The participants reported that this technique brought significant pain relief.

All of this offers us a more useful and effective way of helping people with chronic pain. Instead of subjecting them to endless and increasingly futile tests, or continually upping their dosage of painkillers, we need to ask – what is this pain trying to say, and how is trying to say it? Like so much else in life, it comes down to really listening.

About The Author

Ian Sherred is a freelance writer and a professional hypnotherapist. He is a partner in Tadpole Hypnotherapy, a Southampton, UK based hypnotherapy practice specializing in emotional and physical wellbeing. He believes that the more practical the therapy, the more successful it is!

www.tadpolehypnotherapy.com
www.totalstresscontrol.co.uk

Why Forgiveness Is So Important

This is a message I recently sent out to my mailing list and newsletter group from this blog and I thought it would make an interesting post and open up some great discussion.

So I decided to share it with all of my readers. This is just a small sample of the great stuff people in my newsletter get access to. I hope you all enjoy this post.

I hope all is going well for you today? I got a call from one of my hypnosis students a few weeks ago and I thought the conversation I had with him would make for an interesting thread.

Recently I was teaching a few of my select students a few advanced techniques which I felt could really improve their success with their clients. I was showing them how to use a technique called “Chair Therapy”. I personally don’t like to use the term “Chair Therapy” as it implies I do therapy, which I don’t as I’m not a therapist or trained to practice therapy. I prefer to use the term “Chair Work” or “Forgiveness Work” instead and that is how I address it to my students and my clients if needed.

Chair Work is a very powerful technique, which I learned from a great hypnosis teacher named Gerald Kein who I’m sure all of you know. Basically when you use Chair Work you have the person while in hypnosis imagine, pretend or visualize that the person that has hurt them the most or whatever the situation is in a chair across from them in a room.Typically you should give suggestions that the person who hurt your client in some way is tied to the chair or locked down in the chair so they can’t hurt them. Sometimes you can even gag the other person if needed. Whatever it takes to make your client feel comfortable with moving on.

I don’t have time to go over the whole technique, but the purpose of this technique is to work out any issues, release emotions, and build up anger or guilt that your client may have toward the person in the other chair. Your end goal is to have your client express what they feel they need to say or get off of their chest so that they can forgive the person in the other chair. This technique is very powerful because locked up guilt can cause a lot of problems if not dealt with in a timely fashion. As someone once said “Forgiveness is the eraser of guilt”

My student told me he had a client who he used this technique with and he got great results during the actually technique. He got his client to forgive the person in the other chair and everyone else who the client had put in the chair. Yes, sometimes it is more than one person that may end up in the chair. Well, everything went well during the technique and the post session wrap up went well, but my student said his client called him up a few days later and reported he wasn’t feeling as good as he did before and he still had his problem. The issue being dealt with was habitually sadness also known to some as depression. He did have proper referrals as well to work with this situation. My student talked some more with the client and said they would work on some other stuff in the next session.

So he called me up for some advice and we went through a few different thoughts and ideas, but eventually we got to the part where he did chair work and I asked him to recap that part of the session with me. As he recapped it to me I noticed something I thought was quite important that he missed. Now, as Hypnotists we know there is usually more than way to get the outcome we want for our client, but I felt quite strongly that the part of the technique that my student missed was SO IMPORTANT!

He got the client to place different people in the chair across from him and he was able to forgive all of them, but he forgot one person who was very important to the whole puzzle. Can you guess whom he forgets to tell the client to place in the chair across from him?

……………..HIMSELF or should I say the actual client. My student put all these people who hurt the client in the chair, but forgot to put the client himself in the chair across from himself. Why is this so important that the client do chair work with himself? The main reason is because most of the time when you deal with situations like the one the client is seeing my student for they tend to blame themselves at some level or hold themselves in some type of content for something in the past. They basically blame themselves for something.

The client was able to forgive all these people who hurt him but he also has to be able to forgive… himself.

You would be amazed at some of the conversations people have with themselves in the chair across from them. You would be amazed at the changes that can take place from this one little technique. I told my student to add this to the next session and report back to me. Well, my student had his session with the client and added this technique to the session. It has been a couple of days since I heard from my student, but when he called he reported that his client was doing great and that the moment the client emerged from hypnosis he said to him…

“It’s strange, but now I understand why I have felt the way I have and that I don’t have to blame myself anymore”

I wrote the statement down when talking with my student as I thought those words were just so powerful! By adding that one little part to the session my student was able to finally help his client to the point where the client now had all the resources he needed to get better.

My student also reports to me that the doctor sent him a thank you letter, which is pretty rare in our line of work. Either way the point of this message is while it’s important to forgive others we must always remember to forgive ourselves if we want true healing. If you forget something in one session it’s okay because our minds are built in a way where if you mess up you can always go back and add in the stuff you forget. Our mind is very powerful and very flexible. So at the end of the day remember that we can never truly heal if we still punish ourselves.

This technique isn’t needed with every session or situation, but if you think about it, who doesn’t need to release some stuff, built in within all of us? Sometimes you will also notice that forgiveness in it’s self can actually help the client more than the hypnosis in some cases.