Tag Archives: Hertfordshire

Anxiety and Panic, Panic, Panic

Excessive anxiety is often associated with other mental problems such as depression and anxiety is only considered to be a mental health problem when it’s long lasting, severe and is interfering with everyday activities.

Anxiety attacks usually last for only five or ten minutes. Now if you’re someone who has ever had anxiety (and I think we all have at some stage) you’ll remember then the feeling passed but anyone who’s had any kind of prolonged issues with anxiety, whose had a period of anxiety attacks or anything like that, would probably say that it starts to envelop all of their world. It forms the basis for their day and I think what that tells us is that the feeling is so strong and so intense that even though it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction a tiny fragment of what might be going on in any twenty-four-hour period that the intensity of the feeling is so strong, even those five or ten minutes seem like an absolute lifetime.

If you ever have or you know anyone who has experienced the feeling of being anxious and it’s causing them a problem, ask them to make it worse. Now that sounds a little bit evil and twisted but if you can make the feeling worse, then you can also make the feeling better. If you can intensify that feeling and make yourself feel worse is that you are controlling that feeling. You are doing it. You have control over it if you can make it worse and we can also then presuppose that if you can make it worse that you can make it better, just by doing the opposite to what you’re doing already.

So, if with that anxious feeling that’s inside, you can make it worse by spinning it faster and making it seem bigger and more intense or tightening your muscles up further collapsing your lungs down and shrinking down your breathing so you’re getting less oxygen into your body, if you can do those things to make it worse, then you just have to do the opposite to start getting the feeling under control and making yourself feel better.

So instead of spinning the feeling fast you see what happens if you slow it down and spin it back the other way. Instead of shrinking down into your body and collapsing those lungs down so they don’t get much oxygen in, instead you sit yourself up and have them open and lots of air going in. If you notice that you can imagine in your mind making the feeling bigger and it makes it worse, then imagine in your mind making it smaller to make it better.

You brain doesn’t forget memories and experiences. Unlike a computer where you can delete files that you don’t want, you can’t do that in your brain. They’re always stored in there somewhere so in order for us to be able to go through life without continuously referring back to negative memories and negative experiences we need to know how to program our mind in such a way that it always refers back to positive memories and experiences.

If we’re having an experience where every day there is a negative thought that’s being replayed then actually what we want to start training our brain to do is to refer back to positive experiences and memories instead. If you have a negative memory that you consistently referring back to, be it any kind of negative thing or be it related directly to anxiety. If you’ve got something like that all you have to do is create for yourself a new memory to put on top of the one that you don’t want to keep referring back to.

An NLP therapist and hypnotherapy are both useful ways for you to be able to get rid of anxiety and stop having anxiety attacks. Speak to one of our qualified therapists in Hertfordshire or North London.

And here’s something else. How much fun are you having? Do an evaluation of how much fun you consciously make an effort to go out and have and the chances are it’s not nearly where it needs to be. If you don’t do what you like in your life you can expect that you’re going to end up feeling bad about it.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Using NLP to Get rid of Anger

The best thing about NLP is the way in which one can covertly weave it to an everyday focus and conversation and spin it into something more resourceful. You can talk to people and be NLPing them, without them even knowing it is happening.

I was out with a friend of mine in Hertfordshire, North London who had recently separated from her boyfriend. We knew that on this particular evening out, there was the possibility of bumping in to the ex-boyfriend so she was in a bit of a wound-up state. As we sat with our bottle of wine in the pub, a song came on in the background as my friend began to tune into it aware of the familiarity of it, she started to cry. Through the blubs and wales she explained that it had been their song – her and the ex-boyfriend’s and that she still loved him so much. It’s a good job I’m an NLP therapist and not a counsellor because sympathy just isn’t my thing. I reached over and touched her on the shoulder and said “It’s all going to be fine and I am sure he was an idiot anyway.”

This was closely followed by a snot-filled rage in which she exclaimed how she couldn’t believe how he had treated her, how could he do this etc and how much she hated him.

When this stage kicked in I quickly withdrew my comforting hand. Those of you who know NLP would have identified that I had accidentally anchored her melancholy state to her shoulder. You might think this was a bad thing. The truth is it would have been if I had not utilised it resourcefully later on. Really, I should skip the part where I tell you that this all happened by accident, and make out this entire event happened completely on purpose as a result of my marvellous skill set, but that wouldn’t be totally true!

Later on, we went to a Hertfordshire night club and guess who showed up? At this moment in time, there were several reactions she could have gone for and I thought she might go for blubbering wreck but to my surprise and his she launched into straight into snot-filled rage.

As she catapulted herself towards him, I spotted an expression in his face. In NLP we like to be very clear about the difference between a sensory observation and a hallucination. A hallucination is when you think you know what you have seen in the other person. The sensory based observation of the ex-boyfriend was this: His eyes widened. His jaw lowered. His skin tone became more pale. His forehead began to sweat. He became short of breath. The hallucination of what I saw, I will call ‘man having fear of ex-girlfriend’.

At this moment I grabbed her shoulder, yes, the same one as earlier and said something like: “I know that this isn’t the real feeling you are feeling towards him, isn’t it?” The snot-filled rage fizzled and vanished and the melancholy of earlier returned, though without the crying.

They had a conversation about staying friends and it was all okay. When she popped to the loo a little later he came over and spoke to me. He said: “I have no idea what strange therapy you did to her but you did something. She was ready to kill me and you diffused her somehow. How did you do that?”

At that point I realised what I had done. I realised I really could help others using NLP.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Find Your Happy

Some might say happiness is the absence of fear, stress or anxiety. For me it is more than that. Happiness helps us to access confidence more easily and is responsible for generating your overall feeling of positivity and contentment.

Since happiness is an emotion, it means we have full-time access to it, after all, we are the generators of our emotions. Of course, our circumstances might cause us to feel other emotions too. Ones that interfere with out ability to access happiness in that moment. Although it is estimated that only 10% of our overall happiness comes from your environment.

This means that whilst we could take a universal tragedy, that depending on how someone perceived that situation, there could still be people who would consider themselves happy in spite of it. This can only be caused by how they chose to think about the life rather than what life actually presents them with.

Learning to find happiness (especially if you have grown up with or work in an environment with particularly negative people) can be a real challenge. How can you condition yourself to have more happiness more of the time?

Comparative thinking is just one of the ways that we teach clients at the hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire. Comparative thinking is when, if you’re in a bad place and you notice someone who’s in a worse position than you, it starts to make you feel better as a result of comparing your situation to that of somebody who is, in some way, worse off. Comparative thinking comes from the school of positive psychology and is a way that people can effectively begin to change how they feel about their present circumstances.

Another way to increase your levels of happiness is to stop only rewarding yourself with happiness when you have achieved a goal. You’ve probably heard about the dangers in seeing yourself as successful once you have completed something. The problem this creates is you only have a very short moment of feeling successful before you have to create another goal post somewhere further away. If you do this with happiness too, it’s something you will constantly seek and never find. Avoid telling yourself things like “I’ll be happy when I’m with my perfect partner” or “I’ll be happy when I’ve bought a new car.” Find happiness in the now.

If happiness for what you have right now seems like to big an undertaking, then a smaller step can be to begin to find happiness in the every day things that you have learned to take for granted. For example, seeing a butterfly or a moment of warm sunshine on your face before the clouds blow over. When you have these experiences remark out loud or in your mind how lovely they are, or how grate fun you are. This will start to reprogram your mind to seek out more experiences like this. Plus it increases your positive memory references so that you have good memories you can return to for a top-up or ‘happy’ when you need it.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Bringing Down the Barriers – Dealing With Someone Who is Defensive

“Have you thought about getting a part time job?” I asked
“What are you trying to say?” Was barked back at me. |
“Errrm, literally just that. Have you thought about getting a part time job?” “Oh for God-sake!”

This was a recent encounter with a relative who, unbeknownst to me at that time, had, having recently retired, been asked the same question by many of our other relatives.

I hadn’t anticipated that such a simple and innocent question could prompt such a defensive response. If I had, I would have avoided asking it.

But sometimes we need to ask questions or make suggestions that we know are going to be provocative, either because of who we are dealing with or what the subject matter is going to be.

It seems unreasonable that you should have to formulate strategies to avoid upsetting the apple cart and so assisting the other person in changing their behaviour may be a more desirable alternative.

At The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we subscribe to a set of NLP presuppositions. One of these is “You cannot change others. When you change yourself others change also.” So when I make the suggestion of changing the other persons defensive behaviour, this is a change that will occur as a result of your new way of managing them.

Firstly, you’ve got to start thinking about life from their perspective. What are these unjust that they are protecting themselves from? What are the ways that their perceive their value to be challenges or violated? When you have identified these consider their other motivators too. What do they like, what gets their interest?

If you can begin to communicate with them in a way that has them feel as if their needs are being met, as if you too have their best interests at heart they will not have the need to defend themselves as they felt they did before.

You need to create the sense that you are on their side or, that at the very least you understand there side, if you want to remove from them the feeling that they need to defend themselves from you.

In the example above, my relative was complaining about not getting enough pension. This told me that they were concerned about the finances. The rest of us were concerned about how much money she was spending due to boredom. But having recently gained the freedom of retirement, she was in no hurry to put herself in a position of employment as the above outburst had demonstrated.

I waited a while and had to pick the right moment to casually say “Wow, that’s a decent amount of money.” As I flicked through the newspaper.
“What? What’s that?” She asked.
“Huh? Oh nothing. It’s an advert for part time Christmas work at the post office. I didn’t realise they paid such a good hourly rate.”

The ‘planting of the seed’ proved to be a useful way to covertly work around what would have otherwise been a suggestion that was disregarded due to stubbornness and defensiveness.

When you begin to see the world as they do, you can change how you communicate to fit with them. As the trust between you develops the barriers of defensiveness will soften meaning that when you need to cut-to-the-chase with them, they will already regard what you say as being reasonable.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Moving On After a Relationship Break-Up

There are no set rules when it comes to the best way in dealing with a relationship break up because most of the actions you need to take will need to be customised to your own unique situation.

That’s why at The hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we always perform a consultation (fact finding) session first to find out more about how you are thinking and feeling presently and where you’d like to get to in your thinking and feelings to be able to cope better with what has happened.

Some people will feel hurt, anger or simply lost when when a relationship fails. Part of moving on can be to look at why things didn’t work out so that you can be better prepared in the future to avoid the mistakes or clues that might have shown you that things were not as you would have hoped.

If you feel you have been wronged in some way, these are particularly important emotions to resolve so that you are able to be more robust in the future and avoid having what could otherwise remain as a vulnerability from being exploited.

Of course, we all know that time is a healer and that pain can fade with time. However, I also fully appreciate that when you are in emotional pain, waiting for it to pass with time can be an unrealistic expectation. When the heart break is interfering with your interactions in the rest of your life or preventing you from functioning as you need to, then it’s time to take some action to speed up the process of recovery.

When a relationship has gone bad and there were clear signs, perhaps for some time, that the partnership was toxic in some way, you’d think that this would accelerate the healing process. In my experience I have found the reverse to be true. Often when a relationship is already showing signs of unpleasantness, we have a tendency to want to fix it before jumping ship. All of that effort and energy that goes into tolerating abuses, helping the other person, making excuses for the way things are is suddenly redundant. It’s proven to be a waste of time and this can make us feel that not only have we lost someone who is part of our lives, but we have lost a battle to save them/the relationship/ourselves too. It’s an extra blow. Logically your mind may say “Look at all the trouble you had. Remember how unhappy you were, all of those bad things they said!” and then it seems almost crazy that logically knowing that to be true, you’d still feel so sad.

A baby step that you can take to start moving in the right direction is to begin to slowly build yourself back up. What do you deserve in a relationship? What kind of standards do you want to set for yourself that your next partner should (within reason) adhere to? What will you not tolerate?

You can begin to remove the emotional charge from this situation by reminding yourself in a way that an empowering coach would say “You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be treated well. Remember that and move forward with your focus there.”

Make moving forward about becoming the best you can be and really knowing what you want from a relationship. That doesn’t mean you are seeking another relationship necessarily, it simply means that you are making a point of knowing yourself, knowing what you want and refusing to take anything less than that.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Relief From Defensiveness

Defensiveness occurs when we assume we are in some way being attacked or threatened. The importance of what we feel the need to protect will have have a direct correlation with the degree to which we defend.

Whilst being able to defend what is important to you and having the ability to stand up for yourself are admirable skills that can prevent other people taking you for granted, sometimes our levels of defensiveness are overly elevated such that they begin to cause a problem.

For example, if someone rudely criticises your appearance because they dislike your choice of fashion, it is entirely reasonable that you should respond and defend yourself. After all, those little unjust that you let creep by will eventually eat away at your self-esteem, if you do not either develop some resilience or stand up for yourself.

However, if you are criticised for your appearance because you work in a job with a strict dress code or uniform and you showed up that day dressed as if you were having a lazy Sunday at home, then reacting defensively instead of taking on board the criticism (or in this instance we might refer to it as being feedback instead) could cause a problem.

As linguistics is my favourite element of NLP, one of the things I like to do with clients that I meet at the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire is to help them devise good quality questions that they can ask themselves when they feel that their defensive barriers are coming up.

Some useful things to ask yourself when you notice that sensation of needing to defend yourself are:

Will my reaction really make a difference to this person or me? Is it therefore really worth my time and energy?

Is this really an attack or threat or could it be a misunderstanding?
Could I relax and explain my position instead of defending it?

Is it OK for someone to have a different idea or opinion to me on this? If so do I still need to defend myself?

Will I still be bothered by this tomorrow/next week/next month/next year/in 10 years time?

Could there be an entirely different message intended to the one I am receiving? Would that change how I am about to respond?

Would I still feel defensive if I found something humorous in all this?

Not too long ago, I had a dispute with a relative about something which was so minimal, I now cannot remember what it was. What I do remember is that it was by text (which is never a good way to understand the other persons point or have them understand yours). At the time, it seemed to be significant enough that I had pinged over a few messages defending my position.

Simultaneously, I was looking for a way to wrap up the dispute because it was time consuming at a point when I had better things to do and I could feel the tension increasing as I began to feel more defensive. This was something that I wanted to avoid.

The other person then responded with a message saying “You always have to have the last word.”

Rather than defending myself again and sending something else back that would no doubt fan the flames further, I instead decided to make the situation humorous (for myself) by deliberately not replying to the message that stated I always had to have the last word. I had a little chuckle to myself about it and by re-framing the importance of defending myself in that situation was able to let go of the stress that being defensive had created.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Overcoming Parental Abuse

Our parents are the people we should be able to depend on the most. They are the people who have the greatest responsibility in not just raising us in healthy and safe ways, but also in a way that will develop our self esteem to enable us to have robust mental well-being.

Sadly for some, this basic requirement was not met. There are multiple reasons why a parent would fail in this way and each case were this failure has happened has its own intricate web of history. Some parents simply lack skills, others had themselves experienced poor parenting and some were just not fit to parent or to deal with the many challenges that a child can bring. Some Parental abuse may be physical, verbal or worse still. Some abuse may be deliberate and other abuses come from ignorance. For that reason, we will not dwell too much on the reasons for abuse or the type of abuse that can occur because each case should be regarded as unique.

What is important to consider is how you as an adult, now move on with your life in a way that enables you to feel free of the past.

For some, knowing why something occurred is important to them. Knowing why doesn’t always provide a sense of peace and knowing the real reasons why someone did what they did may be impossible at times to explore, let alone understand.

However, at The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic, we use a framework called the six human needs. These are different to Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs. The six human needs are based around emotional drivers.

The human needs are as follows:

Certainty
Uncertainty
Significance
Love
Growth
Contribution

Most of the behaviours we do will meet one or more of the needs above. This includes our negative behaviours as well as the positive ones.

For example, being physically aggressive towards another person could meet the needs of:

Certainty – That the aggressor will be feared and therefore feel more in control.
Uncertainty – That the other person may react in an unexpected way. It’s easy to think we may dislike uncertainty, but actually excitement and thrill comes from our need for uncertainty.
Significance – The aggressor will be noticed, acknowledged, recognised etc. Love – Clearly I do not imply that this is in a loving, appropriate or meaningful way, but that a certain amount of connection and attention may come from being aggressive. The aggressor may also have reasoned with themselves that this behaviour is a way to teach/create boundaries/communicate the importance of their message which they believe is a loving one.

There is a presupposition within NLP that “All behaviour has a positive intention.”

For someone who has been abused by a parent, the idea that their parents behaviour was in any way positive can be a bitter pill to swallow. However, it is important to point out that the behaviour isn’t necessarily intended to have a positive effect on the person at the receiving end of it. It simply means that for the perpetrator of the behaviour, there is a positive intention. That positive intention doesn’t necessarily mean that they are doing the behaviour from a positive frame of mind or with positive emotion. It simply means that the intention behind their behaviour is to meet one of those six human needs.

In meeting their needs, this allows them to avoid having to deal with other unwanted emotions that perhaps they would not have the resources to deal with.

With a combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy at our clinic in Hertfordshire, you can find that you are able to forgive parental abuse. That is not to say that you will forget the abuse or suddenly develop loving feelings towards your abuser. In fact forgiveness is as much for yourself as it may be for your abuser. Hanging onto parental abuse only serves to continue to harm yourself and this is where forgiveness can be very valuable. Many people feel frustration at how they have allowed the past to continue to hurt them long after the abusive situations have ended. When you learn to forgive yourself for abusing yourself in this way, then the real healing from parental abuse can begin.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk