Many clients come into the clinic in their later years, wanting to let the past go. Releasing the past is immensely important in healing trauma and enabling space for new beliefs and experiences, no matter what age or stage you are at. We each have our own road, and sometimes a person is simply not ready until they reach their 70’s, or later, but imagine if they had been. How much more room would they have had for a better way of living their life.
Releasing the Past – Viv’s Story
Viv was 78 when she came to see me. She had spent some time in hospital care after a nervous breakdown, only months earlier. Although she was now stable, she decided to try hypnotherapy because she felt that the psychiatrists and psychologists she worked with, did not get to the core of her issues.
This was not the first time that Viv had experienced depression and overwhelm. She had a life history of emotional troubles, despite her wonderful marriage and her loving sons. She said she felt this inner turmoil, since she could remember. Viv was well aware that she felt that she was not good enough, and that this belief had been driving her moods.
We commenced our work exploring that not good enough feeling, and traced it back to the source. Once we identified it, we reframed the event to enable Viv to move through that time more powerfully. When we finished, she was crying with joy as the release she felt was immense.
We then did some work around her relationship with her mother, which perpetuated this negative feeling. Again, for the first time, Viv felt free. Following on from this was some inner child work to help rebuild Viv’s sense of self; and some NLP techniques to further assist in releasing the past, while embracing a new reality. Hypnosis was, of course, also used to metaphorically assist in releasing the past, where Viv’s past worries were symbolised by clouds, dispersing to nothing.
Moving Forwards
It is one thing to let the past go, and another to instruct the unconscious mind where it needs to go next. It is the principle of replacing old behaviours with new ones that comes into play here. The old behaviour of feeling and expressing that not good enough belief needed to be replaced with a new behaviour that demonstrated safety. Why? Because Viv’s unconscious mind was holding onto that belief of being not good enough in order to keep her down, so that she would not risk failure. If you are kept down, you do not rise (or you could be knocked down again). We determined this in the early stages of the treatment.
So now that we understood the role of that not good enough belief, we needed to find ways that Viv could feel safe, so that she could now move forwards without fear. With those new behaviours in place, there was no reason that the unconscious mind could have to hold onto that old belief of not being good enough.
Hypnotherapy is a very abstract therapy. You need to be willing to go along and see what happens, without necessarily understanding it. If you are interested in moving forwards and releasing the past, we can help. Horizons Clinical Hypnotherapy Sunshine Coast.