Hypnotherapy for Depression in Sydney

I always use different elements of traditional psychotherapy or CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) in every session, so every session is a step in resolving the past and the causes of depression. There is also a very strong focus on living in the current moment and on accessing and applying new approaches.

Here I describe types of therapy I use with most clients, depending on their needs:

• Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, which focuses on how previous memories and events, especially from childhood, have changed your beliefs and behaviour. This kind of therapy could be very lengthy when done in any other therapy, but it is very rapid with hypnotherapy, because all those memories are stored in the subconscious mind with all the resulting emotions. They can be easily accessed, resolved and left behind with the skillful use of hypnoanalytical methods.

• Interpersonal Therapy helps to find new ways to enjoy your relationships. Depression is usually accompanied by social anxiety and low self-esteem, feeling of “not good enough”, worthless and sadness is accompanied by constant thinking and worrying what others think about us, feeling of being judged and criticized. You may get upset by people's comments even if nobody was criticizing you. The therapy helps to see yourself and other people differently; again, it is rapid with hypnotherapy, because here the access to your internal resources is not blocked by the conscious part of your mind. The specific methods I use here involve Gestalt and NLP, together with some other humanistic approaches.

• Family Therapy, which focuses on the primary relationships with your family, especially your parents, but also other family members. The deeply ingrained emotions and feelings from those relationships affect deeply our decisions and choices and the way we think. Sometimes it is enough to realise and accept, sometimes we perceive facts through the “smoky glasses”, different from what they are, sometimes we carry other people's judgments as ours. This is again very rapid with hypnotherapy. I usually use it in conjunction with the psychodynamic and interpersonal therapy.

• Trauma Resolution Therapy, which is very useful for treating situational depression, resulting from some past trauma. It may be something from childhood, but it can be the recent past. It can be some strong trauma, like car accident or assault, but it can be also a prolonged period of emotional abuse, recent divorce, or anything else which was traumatic to the client. There are specific methods which I use in hypnotherapy to neutralise the effects of such stress.

• Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), which involves both dealing with “negative thinking” and finding better ways to behave in every day situations. CBT therapy is again faster and easier with hypnosis; and it is a bit more than classical CBT. On the cognitive level, it works differently; it is accepting and acknowledging the negative thoughts while seeing the truth of the positive thoughts. CBT involves monitoring and fighting your thoughts. I do not like the term “negative thoughts”; it is OK to be aware of what you think and recognise it, but with hypnotherapy it does not matter, you learn to like yourself and accept yourself the way you are, so there is no positive and negative. And behaviour is easily changed using the subconscious mind. Everything you do makes sense, even “faulty behaviour” (like drinking) brings some benefits, some positive effects, and in hypnosis it is easy to access your resources and to find better ways to have those benefits.

• NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), which is very useful especially for the future coaching, for rehearsing the new happy behaviours and for accessing the new levels of confidence and motivation.