Most people have a pretty jaundiced view of what hypnosis is and what it does, probably colored by the fact that the sum total of their exposure to hypnosis has done little to convince them of its very real benefits.
They have probably spent time watching a stage hypnosis show where people did seemingly absurd or crazy things, or perhaps their ideas came from some old black-and-white movie peopled by a hypnotist armed with a swinging fob watch, a top hat and a ludicrous moustache!
For people who have no real experience of hypnosis, it might therefore come as a surprise to know that hypnosis as a form of a valid medical treatment has been approved by the American Medical Association for just over 50 years!
However, hypnosis was not invented 50 years ago, or even a couple of centuries ago. Hypnosis as a treatment form for both medical and psychiatric problems is one that has been used across thousands of years of history, although in more recent times, the ‘father’ of modern hypnotism is generally agreed to be Mesmer who came up with the method of hypnotism that is still recognizable today.
What hypnotism attempts to do is get past the conscious mind with which we make every day decisions to communicate with the subconscious mind from where, in fact, the vast majority of your life is controlled.
To get some idea of the difference between the conscious and subconscious, imagine that you are going to drive the kids to school in the morning.
You make a conscious decision to get out of bed, to make the breakfast and to get the car out of the garage. However, as soon as you start to drive, you no longer have to think of the actions that you have to undertake in order to make the car move from your home to the school.
The action of turning the steering wheel, using the gearshift and operating the brakes are all skills that you learned before consigning them to your subconscious mind when you no longer needed to think about them on a conscious level.
Every human being does this with dozens of learned experiences every day, so that most people have a subconscious mind that is packed with actions that control almost everything they do (without thinking) on a daily basis.
However, whilst hypnosis (or hypnotherapy as it is more correctly called when it is used as a form of treatment) is generally thought to be related to the mind only, it is a fact that the body of every human being is controlled by their mind. Your subconscious mind is driving the car, but your hands are operating the steering wheel and the gear shift, so the relationship between your mind and your body cannot be ignored or denied.
Another common mistake that people make when they consider hypnosis is to think that people who are hypnotized unconscious or asleep. Nothing could be further than truth because people in a hypnotized state are super-conscious, extremely highly attuned to every word and suggestion the hypnotist or hypnotherapist makes.
However, in this hypnotized stake (and it is suggested that 90% of us can be hypnotized), most people report being far more in-tune with their body and their internal feelings, emotions and desires as the outside world is effectively shut out. Consequently, hypnotherapy is extremely effective as a way of educating and communicating with patients at a subconscious level, teaching them how to relax when faced with a stressful situation without thinking.
But the power of hypnotherapy or hypnosis goes much further than this, because whilst you are in a trance, you are infinitely more suggestible than you will ever be whilst you are awake. In a suggestible state like this, you are far more open to an acceptance of new ideas and thoughts, ideas that you might immediately reject on a conscious level.
Hence, once you are in this suggestible stake, a good hypnotherapist will be able to convince you that your IBS problem is not really such a big problem at all, and that through the power of positive thinking and actions, you can control and ultimately defeat it.
If you were fully conscious, you would probably reject this idea out of hand. However, under hypnosis, you will not only accept it but also embrace and ‘stash it away’ deep in your sub-conscious as a guiding principle for the future.
In effect, in the same way that you just accept driving a car is something that you can do without giving it a second thought, hypnosis allows you to adopt a very similar attitude and approach to irritable bowel syndrome.
In future, your subconscious will ‘tell’ you that it is something you can manage by yourself, something that you can eventually defeat and you will probably never entertain a dissenting thought about either of these beliefs.
In short, hypnosis or hypnotherapy is one of the most powerful strategies for learning how to handle and deal with stress and for training your subconscious to deal with IBS in a totally ‘can-do’ matter-of-fact way at the same time.
In order to learn more about hypnosis or hypnotherapy, the best option is to find a professionally qualified hypnotherapist in your own town or city by using Google maps. As an example and as an indication that it is not only the major cities where you will find hypnotherapists, these are the results of a Google search for ‘portland hypnotherapists’:
To back up these suggestions, there is now strong scientific evidence that hypnotherapy has a direct benefit for people who are suffering from irritable bowel syndrome too. The latest evidence can be seen by following the links here and here but these are just the latest results following 15 years of solid research and study in many different countries.
In fact, the connection between controlling irritable bowel syndrome and hypnosis is now so strong that it has been suggested (by Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD) that hypnotherapy should be the first alternative treatment of choice after traditional Western medicine has failed.
Hypnotherapy might just be the most effective way of dealing with irritable bowel syndrome. If your problem is really getting you down, it is selling something that I would recommend you should try at least once.
I can’t emphasize enough…
It seems likely that stress and anxiety is the number one cause of irritable bowel syndrome in 90% of sufferers.
Whilst poor dietary choices will not help, the theory that stress is the dominant factor that causes the condition is given credence by the fact that many IBS sufferers find that there are foods they can eat perfectly normally when they are calm and relaxed.
However, exactly the same foods will cause a major adverse reaction when they are stressed and under pressure, so the only possible conclusion to draw is that stress is the deciding factor in dictating their reaction.
All the strategies that you have read of in the chapter will help to reduce the amount of stress that you feel in your life because you have to accept that you cannot remove every potentially stressful situation from your day-to-day existence.
Instead, you have to learn to deal with stress and to conquer it.
Adopt the techniques and ideas that you have read of in this chapter, and getting on top of stress, becoming a master of it, should become progressively easier.
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