The healing
The goal of medicine is to heal - which may include remission of disease, control of the disease, relief of symptoms, or comfort.
Somatic Hypnotherapy assumes that your mind and body have an innate ability to heal themselves. Your body knows how to rebuild broken bones, heal wounds, repair or eliminate diseased cells, restore healthy physiological processes, fight infections and preserve vitality. The goal of this approach is to trigger this inborn healing process.
But here's the catch! These natural self-healing mechanisms are energy-intensive and therefore cannot occur as long as you are so exhausted from your intense or persistent stress or anxiety that all you can do is fight to survive it. This is how, by releasing stress, anxiety, and traumas, the body creates a loop of positive feedback through the autonomic nervous system, feedback that can trigger a process of healing and lead thus to significant improvements in the state of mind and symptoms of various medical conditions.
Even though healing is a self-healing process that you trigger when you remove or correct the causes of your problems, healing cannot go against your will or your beliefs - be it the healing of the bones or the spirit. It is up to you to understand, make sense of, and rejoice in your ongoing healing process or at least to welcome and protect it. When it comes to a fractured bone, the best your orthopedist can do is to line up and immobilize the broken pieces of the bone into a cast and let it heal. Wanting to heal and understanding that you need to avoid straining the limb with the broken bone while it heals, is your job!
Same as, when it comes to emotional issues, helping you understand that the harsh emotional reality you are facing is most likely due to an unintentional projection of your negative emotional buildup into your emotional reality of daily life, as well as helping you uproot your traumas, stress, and anxiety, is my job! Although helping you understand that living with negative emotional patterns is like walking with stones in your shoes and the process of removing the stones from your shoes is still my job, understand that walking for a long time with those stones in your shoes most likely ended up hurting your feet, and healing those deep wounds won't happen overnight, that's your job!
The above assumptions were the guiding philosophy behind the whole process of identifying and uprooting the top layer of negative emotional buildup made up of your worst memories, a process we completed during your first therapy session. Not only did we remove the unpleasant emotional feelings associated with your worst nightmares, but towards the end of our meeting, we double-tested and made sure we had removed all the negative feelings associated with your worst memories on which we worked. Suddenly, when you review your once troubling experiences, you look at them emotionally equidistant. These profound changes that have already taken place should be your undeniable proof that you are definitely on the right path to recovery.
Even if "by removing the stones from your shoes" your emotional reality has already shifted and your healing has been triggered, you are probably only in the early stages of your recovery, and, most likely, still far from being "out of the woods" yet. If until now you have actively participated in the process of eliminating the causes of your problems that I have piloted, the healing that follows is a process for which you are in charge. From now on, the path of your ongoing healing is mainly determined by whether you are one of those who believe that everything in life is a miracle, or of those who believe that nothing is miraculous.
If you are of the former, you already know that no matter what you think, your real life always happens inside your heart and spirit, and you become aware of your real life by listening and trusting your feelings. While knowing that what has the potential to fulfill or jeopardize your life are your feelings, you came to see me because of your overwhelming unpleasant feelings. In your case, avoiding denial or disbelief of your out-of-the-ordinary experience, and mainly expressing gratitude for the immediate shift in your emotional reality, are by far the simplest and most efficient ways to protect and nurture your ongoing healing.
Right after your session, you will be surprised to find that when you mentally review the once stressful, anxious, or traumatic events we worked on, your emotional reality has already shifted.