Welcome to Trailhead Health. In this video, Roberto Fernandes, a Board Certified Hypnotist and Certified Instructor explains how hypnosis can be beneficial for children.
I also work a lot with children. Usually six and above the child has to have a certain level of maturity to be able to work with them, but I do a course called Parents Are Hypnotists Too. I used to own a Montessori School. I found it in Florida and ran that for 11 years and we had children from 3 to 12. I wish I would have been a hypnotist then because I could have been so much more effective in helping parents parent their children in understanding what is going on in the development of the child's mind. I have had several children in here with bedwetting problems. They're 10-12 years old, and still wetting the bed and this is not an uncommon problem. It's not everyday, but typically it is caused by the parents. Not intentionally, but the child has experienced a time where they had an accident at night in bed and mom looks so disappointed in me, or mom was angry when she was changing the sheets, or you know, now that is the child's perception. That may not actually have been what mom was portraying. Maybe mom was hurrying out the door to go to work and she was running late and she had to get those sheets off the bed before the mattress got saturated right? But the child's perception of whatever happened is what is important, and so it's simply getting the child to see that differently and perceive and understand that differently.
Parenting is huge, parents are hypnotists. When a child is very young in fact children about 7 or 8, we don't really have a conscious logical mind, so we are totally functioning at that age in our subconscious mind and the subconscious mind is literal so everything goes in. Good, bad or indifferent, and the child has no context for that. It's why every four-year-old believes that Santa comes to everyone's house on the same night down a fireplace even if you don't have one. That doesn't matter in their head, it just happens because mom and dad said it was gonna happen, right, and they liked getting presents, that always helps.
It's not until the child gets into elementary school that they start questioning. Parents look at that as pushing back and not being obedient or whatever, but it is a natural process of brain development. The child isn't necessarily questioning the parent, they're just trying to logic things out this is a new tool they have. And so things start changing there. What a parent says to a child before that critical factor that protective mechanism is formed is critical for the child.
Sometimes a parent might have very good intentions but the child perceives it very poorly. An example would be, I had a gentleman in for confidence, he was an extremely handsome man and I that not for any other reason except that was part of the problem. When he was a little boy he was very cute, very good-looking child and he had an older sister that was constantly ragging on him. Being the typical mean older sister and teasing and you're just a baby and you're so stupid and all of those kinds of things, and she was good at everything and everybody loved her and she was very popular. One day she's kind of being mean to him and dad walks in and sees what's going on and he feels bad for his son because this is a common occurrence in their household right, and so he walks over to his son and he puts his arm around. He's four and he says, “Son don't worry. They may got all the brains in the family but we got the good looks.”
Now at that moment that little boy was feeling pretty vulnerable and he took that in literally. And his whole life, he was in his 40s when he came to me, he was a very handsome man. I am sure that throughout his life people constantly remarked to him how good-looking he was and that reinforced that belief that he took as the truth at that moment.
And here he is 40 years later with no confidence, because he just believes that he just looks good. He's never going to be smart. Now that was a total misperception, but it became his truth and so that's something that's easily fixed and changed but something that consciously, a) we would never remember happening and b) we can't get to it in our conscious mind. We can only get to that through the process of hypnosis.
