When Reason Fails to Tame Anxiety

Anxiety is often irrational or disproportionate to the facts of a situation. You or your therapist may try to reason with it, but without success. Sometimes our fears stubbornly defy therapeutic approaches that rely on reason, such as CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). Similarly, the practice of repeating positive affirmations to yourself can meet with resistance and fail when faced with "but" and "what if?" Your logical mind may tell you that your pessimistic projection is unlikely, but your gut (or heart) may say otherwise, probably because of painful or traumatic past experience. 

Anxiety and fear are difficult to eradicate because we expect negative events in our history to repeat themselves. For example, if you have had a traumatic medical experience, you are more likely to be fearful about health issues. If you have been in an abusive relationship, you may have difficulty finding or trusting a new partner. We can also inherit our anxieties from family members. For exampe, if your parents experienced unemployment or poverty, you are more likely to worry about money than someone whose childhood was financially secure. 

Hypnotherapy allows you to access the deeper level of the mind where negative memories and false conclusions are stored. Once you are in hypnosis, your therapist will help you reframe and rewrite your reactions and responses so that you can move through fear.

Combining Affirmations with Self-Hypnosis

An early researcher into stress, hypnotherapist David Cheek, M.D., theorized that severe stress causes an altered, hypnotic state of consciousness which encodes related problems and symptoms. In other words, stress and trauma cause us to go into a negative hypnotic state that preserves the feelings, thoughts and conclusions that occurred at that time. This negative state is likely to be reactivated by subsequent stressful events.

Because stress and trauma cause the mind to go into a spontaneous trance, it makes sense to address chronic anxiety by going back into trance (in the safe context of hypnotherapy) to unravel and rewrite the code. You are likely to achieve greater clarity and be more open to rational argument and positive affirmations when in a hypnotic state. Here again, persistence and repetition are key. Remember, anxiety developed over time as a coping strategy, and it may take time to break the habit. A good hypnotherapist will make you a personalized CD or audio file leading you into a trance and repeating the affirmations you need to hear.

Regression and Emotional Clearing

Affirmations by themselves may not be sufficient to clear anxiety. You may need a hypnotherapist to lead you through a "regression" to go back to its source, namely the event or series of events that triggered it. Once transported back in time, you will work to clear the emotional charge of the event with a process called "emotional clearing," in which fantasy and the imagination are used to rewrite the memory. Of course neither events nor memories can be erased. But their emotional charge can be drained, and healing can be brought in. One of my teachers, Randal Churchill, has written a couple of books with transcripts of sessions in which he used this process ("Regression Hypnotherapy: Transcripts of Transformation").

Here's an example from my own practice. One client of mine was experiencing general anxiety around her job. In a regression, she went back to some painful high school years. As a teenager. she had been socially ostracized and repeatedly threatened with violence because of the punk persona she had assumed. In hypnosis, she returned to these memories and reimagined them. Using a magic pencil like the one in the children’s story, “Harold’s Purple Crayon,” she drew herself a whole new world. In her alternate reality, she gave herself a positive high school experience. She saw herself at an art school in Paris, then relaxing and painting by the Seine. She experienced a feeling of release around her job, which I reinforced with positive hypnotic suggestions. 

This kind of healing through fantasy is available to everyone. People who have grown up with abusive or neglectful parents may not have any positive experiences to draw upon, but they can create alternate realities based on movies or even video games. That’s fine. These fantasies, however playful or fantastic they seem, do serious work: they enable clients to contact some healthy part of the self that was stunted in its development but is still, in spite of everything, capable of regeneration and positive change. Once accessed, that part can then be cultivated as a safe inner resource and the starting point of journey toward a more joy-oriented life.

Using Guided Imagery

Occasionally the root cause of an anxiety pattern or phobia remains a mystery, and even hypnosis cannot find it. One of my clients had a fear of traveling more than a few miles away from home. Crossing a bridge and taking an airplane were out of the question. She had a sense that her phobia had begun in childhood, but our attempts to understand it yielded no answers. Staying with a more straightforward approach over a few sessions, I had her imagine, while in a hypnotic state, traveling a couple miles from home, then a few more, and so on, while I interspersed her fantasy with affirmations and encouraged her to draw on positive memories. Thus I gradually increased her tolerance of moving farther from home and was able to free her of her phobia.