You could think of the mind as having two parts, the conscious, and the subconscious.  Traditional therapies can be quite lengthy as they work with the conscious mind and focus on helping you to understand why you think and behave in certain ways and use those cognitions to change your behaviour.  When we use hypnosis we work directly with the subconscious and can therefore get to the root of the issue more rapidly, change perceptions and install new behaviours.  That doesn't mean I'm not a fan of traditional therapies because they certainly can be very effective, in fact I often combine approaches from disciplines such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with hypnosis to ensure that I work in the fastest and most effective way with you.

The conscious and subconscious mind could be likened to a computer.  The conscious mind being the monitor and keyboard, and the subconscious mind the hard drive.  The conscious mind is receiving data input from the world around us: what we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste, bringing it into our conciousness - just like we might input data into a computer using the keyboard and see it displayed on the monitor.  It can only represent a few things at a time, just like you would open the relevant documents you need to see at any given moment on your computer.  The subconscious mind stores all the memories and the programs relating to everything we’ve learned.  All our beliefs are tied in with the memories and all our habits and behaviours stored as little programs.  The subconscious mind is a bit like the hard drive of the computer which contains all the files and software programs that we have installed and saved.  To make a change to a computer program, we need to access a programming environment and communicate in a language that the computer understands.  Hypnosis provides the programming environment for the mind, and hypnotherapy speaks the language of the subconsious mind.  

Hypnosis is a very natural state similar to dreaming, only you’re awake.  When we sleep at night, we have periods of REM sleep where we dream.  I believe that what happens when we dream is that our mind is processing the events of the day, looking for solutions to our problems, learning what it needs to learn and filing the rest away.  The subconscious always wants to help you find solutions, problem behaviour is often a solution to another problem, like smoking to fit in when you’re a teenager.   When dreaming our subconscious uses metaphors and symbols that our conscious mind doesn’t always understand. The conscious mind is very rational and logical it understands words and their meanings to us.  The subconscious mind is very creative, and emotional.  The language of the subconscious is symbols, pictures, sounds and feelings.  It doesn’t understand negation.  If I say to you “Don’t think of a blue hippo wearing a pink tutu.”   What happens?  You think of a blue hippo wearing a pink tutu, you form a picture of it in your mind.  Because there is no such thing as Not hippo wearing a blue tutu, only nothing.  Just as you can’t get a Not tree, you can have a tree or nothing at all.   When clients come to me and I ask what their goal is they usually say things like “I don’t want to smoke anymore” or “I don’t want to feel anxious”.  What they’re doing in their head is sending an instruction to the subconscious to say I want to smoke or I want to feel anxious.   As a hypnotherapist I use words and metaphors to invoke a wonderful dream-like, symbol rich, sensory experience in my clients’ imagination, focusing on how they really want to be e.g. fit and healthy or calm and relaxed.  This creates a powerful instruction to the subconscious asking it to the right solution for them, to achieve their goal. 

Hypnosis is a state of very focused concentration which is perfect for learning.   In this state we can also use hypnosis to mentally rehearse ourselves behaving differently.  A habit is really like a map, we make the map once and then follow it over and over again.  After sometime it becomes an automatic program in the brain.  The brain doesn’t really know the difference between what is real and what is imagined.  Using hypnosis we can create a new map and follow the map in our imagination over and over again until it becomes the preferred route and the new automatic program.

There are many ways to achieve a hypnotic state but generally it involves you following a set of simple instructions.  You are free to choose whether or not you follow those instructions, so it's not mind control.  You will be aware of what is happening and you will be an active participant in the process.  Think of me more as a tour guide taking you on a mini-excursion.  Most often I will guide you into a relaxed hypnotic state, sometimes I will work with you in an active and alert hypnotic state, but always it is enjoyable.