Roberta, in terms of success stories, could you share some of your patient’s experiences with us?
As far as success stories, oh my gosh you know, it just depends on what you're talking about. Pain, I had a woman drive from Wisconsin and she came over for what I call an intensive. So she spent four solid days, we worked together, rather than spreading it out over time. There's some advantages and disadvantages to doing it that way but, she was out of town. She had fibromyalgia for 20-some years. She had to take a nap at 4 o'clock. She couldn't work full-time. She couldn't sleep with her husband anymore. Half the time she couldn't put sheets on her body, they hurt too much. There were times when she would try, if she will left work a little too late, she would get that fibro fog that people talk about. She would have to call someone to come and get her, she couldn't find her way home.
It's pretty severe case, this woman is managing her fibromyalgia. She doesn't have pain, she doesn't take a nap anymore, she works full-time, she has had amazing results. She took what I said to heart. She practices every single day, five minutes. That's it. Five minutes of hypnosis every single day and she has her life back.
I have clients that have come in, that have had no surgery, no illness, no diagnosis of any kind, except the doctor doesn't know why they're having pain. It's emotional pain. When we get to the root of that emotion, the pain can go away. You can let it go away.
Clients that have had pre-surgical, post-surgical pain, I'm an example of that. That's very typically why people come to see me.
So, with pain the efficacy around hypnosis and pain management is huge. It's a great compliment. Sleep it's amazing; first of all, teaching people good sleep hygiene is important, and a lot of people have very poor sleep hygiene. We work on that, but hypnotically it's really interesting what we discover.
I had a client she could only sleep three or four hours a night and she'd been doing that for a long time, and it was wearing on her, developing health problems, she looked terrible and she would get up and just had these random thoughts. Not the typical thoughts that people would have; like oh I got to do this, I have to do that. They were random. Like you know, “Why'd Bob wear that blue tie with that purple shirt, it looked terrible?” I mean why would people think that right?
So in hypnosis, she recalled a time when she was four and she's in her room, she has a lot of siblings, everybody's crying and mom tells her Aunt Betty went to sleep last night and didn't wake up! She's four and she's desperate to make people feel better. She's telling jokes or telling this one a story, or trying to distract somebody else. There is the randomness. But that one, that one instance of Aunt Betty didn't wake up; that was deeply embedded in her subconscious mind at a time when she was very open, and her subconscious mind was very literal. It affected her sleep her whole life.
Our subconscious mind is very, very literal. It doesn't understand nuances, and humor, and sarcasm. It takes everything in, as it is said as the truth and a lot of times we hold on to beliefs that we get when we're very young, that at the time serve us just fine or that really have no context or an effect on us. But when we get older, there might be something that happens that triggers that in our subconscious mind and consciously we have no awareness of what is even being triggered, or why we feel that way? So, there's this disconnect with what consciously we think and a belief that's very embedded in our subconscious. In hypnosis it's very easy to get to the root cause of a lot of issues that we're having in our current life that we don't understand.
