Test Anxiety & Hypnosis

Stress is a formidable enemy of so many people taking tests.  Hypnosis is a good tool to walk a person through the test-taking situation.  The key is to calm the emotions, to help the client stay in the present, and to visualize a calming image to anchor with a calm emotion to cool the intellectual engine to more efficiently produce the thought processes involved in the identification of the right choice of answers.   The calmer a person's physical state, and the subsequent quieting of the mind, the swifter the thought processes occur at an alarming rate of speed thus unleashing from the conscious and unconscious regions of the brain the problem-solving, mental resources requisite for satisfactory test-taking performance.  If a participant in the hypnosis session has enough desire to accomplish a desired goal, they will follow the hypnotist's simple instructions and be able to induce a calm state of mind necessary to guide the client through a pathway of guided imagery of themselves accomplishing that very desired goal.  It's not a difficult process to learn.  It really doesn't take practice.  It just takes the desire and the willingness to believe enough in the process.  The brain will do the rest of the work when psychic energy is most conserved.  The optimal environment is one of calm, an environment in which electro-chemical impulses travel most directly from point A to point B, umimpeded by neuronal pockets of diffuse energy flow.  A calm body is a calm mind, and its neuronal circuitry consists of pathways over which impulses travel with the least impedence of inefficient wiring.

Father Martin (Legendary Advocate of AA) Tells Joke About Honesty in Recovery

Click  to Hear Father Martin

Change and Hypnosis: How it Works

Change and hypnosis go hand in hand.  Through relaxation, with the help of a hypnotist-facilitator or autogenically (self-directed) induced, you can focus on a specific issue or situation in an altered way that rearranges the order of internal percepts and thereby reshapes your internal reality.  When someone asks, "How many sessions does it take me to stop smoking?"  I tell them there are some key factors that one needs to consider when considering such a question:  individual differences that include level of motivation, level of suggestibility, and other resources that they might take advantage of--medications, Nicotine Anonymous, family support, etc. . 

The Psychodyamics of Psychiatry

I am not an M.D. psychiatrist but I've worked on psychiatric units since 1988, which is to say I have an understanding of the 'psychodynamics' that occur in the interventions on an acute, inpatient psychiatric hospital treatment unit.  The models of counseling are the contexts in which I 'make sense' of the application of psychiatric, or psychopharmacologic (medicines used by the psychiatrist), interventions. What I tell patients during the group therapy sessions is that the brain, or central topic of the field of psychiatry, is one of the most complex things known to man.  In fact, an inherent characteristic of the brain is the inability to understand itself. To give some perspective to the levels of understanding of the brain, I use the analogy of a cruise ship floating atop the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  Far below, some 1500 feet below the water's surface, lie the answers to the mysterious complexities of the workings of the brain. I suggest that a scale of understanding could be viewed this way: on the eleventh floor of the cruise ship, the laymen looks down at the surface of the water, and view down upon the hidden answers far below the water surface.  On the seventh floor, the counselor peers down upon the gulf and is a miniscule distance closer to a clear view of the answers.  And the psychiatrist, armed with water goggles, pokes his head just below the water surface and gazes downward perhaps a couple of hundred feet, at best in clear water, and gazes in the direction whereupon which the answers to the workings of the brain lie. But you don't have to know the mechanical intricacies of an engine to drive a car, and neither do you have to understand everything about the brain to introduce chemicals to the system (body) above which it rests to effect positive change of a thought or emotional disturbance. In the cognitive (thought-based) model of counseling we look at the interplay of the effect of thoughts on feelings (referred to as 'affect' in psychiatry). The premise is, "If we can change our thoughts, we can change our feelings." And if we can change our feelings, we can change our behaviors, but that's another chapter in this story to which we'll get later.  A model of counseling is only a way to look at the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. After a patient receives psychiatric drugs they hopefully begin to feel better as hallucinations, either sounds of voices, for example, or visual experiences of people, or scary things like flaming faces shooting out from the walls, diminish and/or cease to exist. If the disturbance of thoughts is successfully addressed, then the feelings will change as well. And if one is not experiencing disturbing thoughts and feelings, then their behaviors will follow suit in accord with the more reality-based, healthier state-of-mind. I will talk more about the cognitive based model of counseling in the psychiatric setting, and in the outpatient setting, in the next blog.

Hypnosis as an Focusing Tool

Hypnosis is an effective means to focus on a task, or set of tasks, through relaxation and facilitated guided imagery. This is what we help people do at the San Antonio Hypnosis Center. Initially, I used to help people with concrete tasks such as smoking, weight loss, or test-taking, among others; however, I have found that a mindset can be altered through hypnotic suggestions--as long as the subject wants the change to occur. There may be resistances to those changes, as we all have some sort of mental or attitudinal resistance(s) to change, but that's what the therapist can help with.

Accomplishing Goals With Hypnosis

Whether through the use of medical hypnosis in the amelioration of acute or chronic pain, or for the purpose of accomplishing a specific goal activity in sports, social behaviors (extinguishing blushing, managing social phobias, conquering fear of speaking in front of groups), health concerns (smoking or chewing tobacco; drinking alcohol excessively), or confidence and competence improvement (test-taking; task-performance enhancement) hypnosis can be a powerful tool in helping one to pull it all together. Depending on the client, I use variations of the above components--relaxation, rhythmic breathing, and guided imagery--to induce the hypnotic trance in which suggested scripts are virtually structured by the client. Many people from many walks of life have come to the San Antonio Hypnosis Center (SAHC) to accomplish many of the above goals. Fear of driving over these new 'fly-away' overpasses ('ribbons in the sky') brought two people to the SAHC in the same week. The fear was too much for them, causing them both to pull their car over and change drivers: "Fortunately my friend was riding with me! I don't know what I would have done!" Crisis situations often bring people to our office. Sometimes it's not one thing, but the one thing on top of all the others that results in making a decision to change an aspect of one's lifestyle, whether it was a doctor telling them they really should lose weight for their health, or seeing the deleterious effects that smoking had on a close friend or loved one. www.sahypnosis.net 210-590-9292 or 210-710-8768.

A Few Thoughts on the Mind

I'll never forget what a neurologist said in an interview on an episode of the television show "Nova", that "an inherent characteristic of the brain is the inabilty to understand itself." That struck me as a profound statement, not really knowing why, but a statement that has returned to mind on many, many occasions as I work as a psychotherapist, counselor, therapist, what have you. The mind/brain processes data looping back and forth from the seeming infinite locations in the body, sorting information and transmitting encoded impulses to various organs, in multidinous processes that somehow work in unison with the others. And it's all done automatically, as I understand automation. And as the body, with the facilitation of the processing unit of the brain, seeks homeostasis of its internal events and processes, all is not well in that, as the neurologist said, "a life-threatening immunological crisis developes and resolves itself about three times every hour."
I, frankly, am not surprised what with all the complex processes that would, in comparison, make a major oil refinery look like a game of "Mousetrap!". As in refineries where things occasionally go wrong and engineering sets out to isolate the constellation of pertinent variables and devise measures to return the refinery to a safe level of functioning, so the body experiences variable conditions and events that spin temporarily out of balance; and all the while the brain automatically registers, sorts, and processes the multitudinous permutations of hazardous events and inexplicably returns the body back again to an optimal level of functioning. www.gordonleith.com