Therapy

Young Lotus Hypnotherapy for Children and Teenagers

Solution-focused hypnotherapy not only works for adults but for children and teenagers as well who respond amazingly well to the treatment with an open innovative mind that embraces change.  As parents, it can be a worrying time when your child needs help, and you are faced with various options of therapy and extended waiting times for treatment.

The professional standards authority and the NHS recognise hypnotherapy as a treatment option and year on year more and more parents are turning to hypnotherapy to help children overcome anxiety and stress-related issues, behavioral problems, phobias, confidence building, and sleep disturbance, to name but a few.

Children have to navigate themselves through a whole range of changes in their early lives, including change in home life or friends, bullying, loss, low self-esteem, and the changes in their own bodies.  These changes can sometimes be overwhelming when handling the everyday life of school and friendships,  leading to feelings of inadequacy stress, and anxiety, or even a rise of depression.

Like adults, Children and teenagers show their reaction to stress in a variety of ways,  we may see a change in personality, they can become distracted and forgetful, they might have headaches and upset stomachs, bite their nails, begin bad wetting (enuresis), be prone to accidents or even become irritable or violent.  This then has a knock-on effect on their everyday life, they start to dislike and avoid school, become worried about talking in class, find subjects difficult and confusing, and become withdrawn.  Fears and phobias can start to appear and even though as parent’s we try to support them we often seem to not be able to change the situation.

Solution-focused hypnotherapy is a viable therapy option that can produce a positive change in a matter of weeks.  As a professional teacher who has worked with children and teenagers for the past 17 years, I am mindful of the stresses that teenagers are subjected to in modern life.  I have found that solution-focused hypnotherapy can get young people back on track, focusing on their goals and happiness and finding a balance in their life.

Phobias:

Fear can hold all of us back at certain times, and is a natural reaction to something that may be life threatening.  Sometimes however our fears become irrational and start to interfere with our everyday life and stop us doing the things that we want to do.  Phobias can start with an even, real or imagined, an activity or even an item, and the more often we experience a phobic reaction, the stronger that phobia can get.  Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help with all phobias from fear of spiders or flying to more complex issues such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia.

Specific phobias are when people have one specific trigger in their lives that causes a fear response, for example; needles, flying or spiders and can be dealt with in 4 sessions.

Non-specific phobias are more complex and tend to affect us more deeply, for example; agoraphobia, claustrophobia and emetophobia.  These issues being more complex may require 8-12 sessions.

If you want to discuss how Katrina can help you with any fear that you are experiencing, give Katrina a call today and we can discuss the process and arrange an initial consultation.  For flying, the 4 sessions are best booked just before you take your flight.

Anxiety Disorders:

Anxiety is a natural emotion that we feel in our everyday lives when we are faced with a stressful situation, for example a business meeting, a job interview or sitting an exam.  Normally we can handle these brief stressful moments but sometimes they can stay with us, making us feel worried and anxious for a lot of the time, leading us to feel out of control and overwhelmed with our everyday life.

Our anxiety can then lead onto conditions such as PTSD, generalised anxiety, panic attacks, social anxiety, and phobias.

We experience anxiety when we find ourselves in a threatening situation and the brain stimulates a fight, flight or freeze response.  When man was primitive and found himself in a life threatening situation this response was life preserving.  We don’t often find ourselves in today’s world in a life threatening situation, but the brain is still programmed to produce this response if we feel threatened in any way, even if it’s as simple as being late for work when we are stuck in traffic.  Anything that is out of our control or normal comfort zone the brain will see as a threat and will respond with our primitive fight, flight or freeze programmes.  Solution Focused Hypnotherapy enables us to consciously notice when we may be feeling this response so that we can logically think of situations in a less threatening manner and therefore find positive solutions to reduce our anxiety.

We discuss how the brain works and how it can make us suffer with all this anxiety in our initial consultation and what we can do to start reducing the amount of anxiety/stress that we feel.