Not Medical
On my website I am very clear that I see hypnotherapy as complimentary and not an alternative to medical treatment. I also point out that like most hypnotherapists in the UK I am not medically trained. I do no diagnose or comment on medical diagnosis. I do not treat medical conditions but I do offer ‘complimentary’ therapy helping with alleviating symptoms such as chronic pain, dealing with any emotional or behavioural fallout from a medical condition such as the social anxiety that can be associated with IBS.
That said, without needing to refer to my GP, I am pretty sure in my self-diagnosis that I have just got over a serious bout of Man Flu. I was properly unwell over the weekend with a temperature of 38.8 degrees, high enough to make my digital thermometer issue warning beeps and confine me to my bed!
I am now pretty much recovered and back in the saddle, kicking off my late start to this week with my blog…
Always Learning
As a hypnotherapist I am continually learning in many different ways. I read books, currently I am immersed in the world of neuroscience reading ’8 Keys to Brain Body Balance’ by Robert Scaer. I go on training courses, attend workshops, seminars and talks; the most recent being last week with the excellent and positively provocative Andrew T Austin speaking about IEMT.
I teach hypnotherapy, I tutor and mentor budding hypnotherapists. The school, run by Adam Eason, has a very progressive and evidence based approach; which for me means that as they refine the courses each year I get exposure to the very latest ideas that are backed up by research and trials. Training others also has a profound effect on your own need for understanding – when learning new material you always have in the back of your mind that you will perhaps have to teach this, explain this.
I have a phenomenal group of friends in the industry, my peers. These are people who trained me, people who were my course-mates and people who I helped train, my fellow professionals and the enthusiastically interested . We meet and share information, ideas, experiences and the occasional joke. Nowadays as we are geographically remote we have an on-line virtual 'coffee shop' at http://adamshypnosishub.com/ which is open to anyone with an interest in hypnosis, self-hypnosis or hypnotherapy.
Who Teaches me the Most?
However, the biggest source of education is my clients – each one of whom is an expert, indeed the only expert, on their problem as they experience it. Yet as expert as they may be on the problem, they are unable to reach a solution by themselves:thus they ask for my assistance.
It may be that they don't have the skills, knowledge to help themselves and need some training to help them gain insight and overcome their issue. The knowledge elicited from other people with a similar issue and elicited from their therapists who reported which therapeutic approaches worked best. To an ever increasing degree this now includes evidence for their effectiveness which has been academically tested and evaluated.
Some problems are not logical – an automatic, uncontrolled, phobic panic reaction to butterflies is one I often mention where the sufferer knows at some logical level that they are harmless. Described this way, is it not immediately obvious that using logical argument to overcome the problem is probably not going to work? The mind has a strong and incorrect belief that it has learnt emotionally.
Some problems apparently defy any attempt at self-correction by their very nature, simply because we can identify the effect but not the underlying cause.
Case in Point
I have been studying the very common issue of Bruxism. Put simply, this refers to problematic teeth grinding or clenching.
Its actual definition is as para-functional habit – meaning that this is a normal body process that is happening in an abnormal way.
Normal teeth clenching and grinding is obviously all part of how we eat – however the forces use are low, the stress on the teeth and jaw is directed in a direction that they can cope with and in practice whilst eating the teeth don’t spend much time in contact.
In contrast, in Bruxism the forces are massively increased, to the degree where they affect not only the teeth but the jaw, the jaw and associated muscles and the main temporomandibular joint (TMJ) of the jaw. The forces are also directed in a different plane which increases the potential for damage; the amount of teeth to teeth contact is also significantly greater.
The result of this is accelerated teeth wear or even fractured teeth, people can apply so much force that their teeth crack. There can be additional symptoms as jaw pain, muscle pain and headaches.
Whilst Bruxism can occur while awake it is often regarded as a sleep disorder as this is where the most damage occurs.
So how do you deal with an issue that you are not consciously aware of, indeed happens when you are asleep? You have no awareness of the behaviour about to start, starting or happening.
The Problem is not the Problem
In my early training in hypnotherapy, some 13 years ago, I was taught the above principle. The meaning of which is that the client will tell you about their problem but generally what they actually telling you are the symptoms. So if you target your therapy at the stated problem you are actually treating the symptom. You may be successful at alleviating or removing these symptoms but there would always be the nagging doubt or level or probability that the underlying issue will find another way of manifesting itself orthat the initial symptoms will recur.
So for example, with someone wanting help with weight loss, hypnotherapists won’t generally offer specific exercise or nutrition advice – in our information society people already know this stuff and yet they make bad decisions. As the late, great Jim Rohn might say, their failure is the result of making poor decisions on a daily basis; they chose the chocolate bar and not the apple, the lift and not the stairs.
So the hypnotherapist's job is to find the underlying issue – how are they making the poor choices. Are they using food as a drug to change their emotions; what then, are those emotions that trigger this coping strategy; what is their basis? Or is it their attitude or beliefs about food or exercise that are the issue - these can be re-aligned with the help of a skilled therapist.
So what about Bruxism
Let us ponder for a moment and speculate a little – so we need to identify the cause of the unwanted behaviour. The sufferer is asleep and not exposed to the level of external stimulus that they experience whilst awake. So the stimulus is probably something internally generated.
There are two things that come to my mind immediately. Firstly that dreaming can manifest a physical response. This is very clear in my mind as having spent a couple of days in bed with my dog asleep at the foot I was woken on a number of occasions by the bed shaking as he, still fast asleep, was running in his sleep, chasing rabbits with the occasional muffled yip of a sleep bark. I am sure that many people reading this will have had the common experience of having woken themselves from a vivid dream when their bodies jolted in a physical reaction to a dreamt fall.
Secondly, something that is a pet theory of mine and probably others, is that we live such full on cognitively engaged active mind lives that we don’t give our brains much daytime downtime. Perhaps when we sleep then the brain gets a chance to express itself? Any anxieties, fear, anger or other emotions that are suppressed by our attention being focussed on our busy day get their chance to get our attention?
Moving away from speculation, the cause of Bruxism is not known for sure but anxiety and stress is one of the prime candidates and the one I have come across the most in my research. Some other suggestions are misalignment of the teeth or that Bruxism is a side effect of some drugs.
If we deduce from this that the main cause is anxiety and stress then these are both things that hypnotherapy is good at dealing with. The case for using Hypnotherapy to work with Bruxism looks positive.
My research continues; having got clarity on what the issue is and its probable cause – I will be looking into possible therapeutic approaches and any evidence in the form of studies, trials and peer reviewed papers. I’ll get back to you!