By Erika Flint, BA, BCH, A+CPHI, OB
“One of the most challenging elements of life is watching someone we love suffer. ”— Erika Flint
Clients often feel trapped in a situation that is out of their control, including financial hardship or illness in the family. The feeling of overwhelm often worsens over time if not addressed, and can quickly lead to feelings of hopelessness.
Thankfully helping clients to regain control and feel hopeful again is not only possible with hypnosis – but outcomes are repeatable and results can be expected.
In this article I’ll be sharing examples from a 50-year-old weight loss client, who I’ll call Jane, whose husband had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
In the pre-hypnosis interview, Jane described feeling sad and alone – that she is slowly losing her best friend of over 30 years. And she’s also upset and overworked because she’s taking on more responsibility at home. No longer can her husband fix things around the house, pay the bills, or even help with dinner.
One of the most challenging elements of life is watching someone we love suffer. Whether it’s a sick friend or parent, or a child struggling with addiction — it’s extremely painful. We feel helpless and overwhelmed. Clients may feel that life is unfair and it leads to anxiety, sleeplessness, and too-much behaviors such as drinking, over-eating, and smoking. Thankfully there are things professional hypnotists can do. This is very challenging issue for our clients, however it’s also one of the areas where a skilled hypnotist really can make a world of difference not only for our client, but the other family members in our client's lives.
There are many ways our clients present this issue, and it all comes down to the hypnotist being a really good listener – present and in the moment with your clients.
Jane’s husband was suffering with Alzheimer’s and she was struggling to cope.
Here are 3 of them:
Listen for language such as “overwhelmed”, “out of control”, “trapped”, and “suck”.
Watch for gestures indicating overwhelm, for example clients will use their hands in sweeping gestures describing being trapped or “under” something large or as if something is about to fall upon them.
Watch for the “Deer in the Headlights” symptom: clients can feel so overwhelmed that they’re actually speechless or have a hard time describing how they’re feeling.
The sense of overwhelm and out of control is often the result of clients focusing on the entire problem all at once.
Instead, help clients focus on what they can do by focusing on what is in their control and breaking it into manageable chunks.
For example, with Jane, I asked her if even though it was harder for her at home with her husband’s illness, wouldn’t it be nice to regain control over her sugar cravings?
“Yes, of course – not thinking about food all the time would be extremely helpful.” she replied.
Once you have your client’s buy-in that focusing on what they can do will be helpful for them, then it’s time to get rid of erroneous emotions.
Age Regression (AR) is a powerful technique that helps tremendously with this particular issue. The sense of overwhelm is often fear – fear that things won’t be acceptable, or good in the future. Use your favorite AR technique, like Affect-Bridge, or the Time Tunneling Technique ™ to remove erroneous fear from your client.
For Jane, she was suffering from a sense of abandonment. Not only did her father leave her family at an early age, but her first husband betrayed her.
She recognized at some level, she felt her husband was leaving her as well and it was stirring up all those old uncomfortable feelings that made her feel out of control and led to her over-eating.
The AR session was very powerful for Jane because she recognized that her husband was not leaving her. In fact, once the erroneous fear was removed in AR, she realized there were plenty of wonderful moments every week with her husband that she had been overlooking.
She said the hypnosis session helped her to realize what she did have and to appreciate it - instead of focusing on what she felt she was losing.
Once your clients have made an insightful shift in the hypnosis session, you can suggest that they begin to shift in other ways too. Use any change you see in your client during the session as a model for the rest of their life.
For any situation that arises, suggest that your client asks this question of themselves first: ‘What can I do about this?’, or ‘What’s the next smallest thing I can do?’
Then take your client into their future using Future Progression to have them imagine having already made all these changes and receiving the benefits of those changes that they came in for.
The road to success
The sense of overwhelm will fade as they begin focusing on all the things they are getting done and that they have control over.
For Jane, she began focusing on all the ways she could eat healthier and lose weight. This gave her a sense of being in control, and a feeling of success every day – even if her husband was having a bad day, she could still feel good about eating healthier and losing weight.
The remarkable aspect for Jane was that because she was happier – her husband was too. They shared more joyful moments now that her focus was on what she could do and it led to an overall increase in happiness and peace in their entire household.
Not only did Jane lose weight, but she continued to enjoy her life with her husband. The sense of overwhelm and out of control was gone, and so was the sadness and anger she originally felt.
This 4-step process utilizes techniques we use as part of the hypnosis process every day – Age Regression, the Time Tunneling Technique ™, and Future Progression. Just listen and watch for the signs of client overwhelm (step 1), then reframe and focus your client on what they can do (step 2), remove erroneous beliefs and fear with Age Regression (step 3), and give them an expectation of success using Future Progression (step 4).
Helping clients who feel overwhelmed is easy with a systematic hypnosis approach because it comes built-in with the foundation for lasting change.