Behavioral problems are often linked to children, but they can also affect you as an adult. Examples include aggressive behavior, compulsive behavior, overly impulsive behavior, socially inappropriate behavior, self-destructive behavior, addictive behavior and even when people isolate themselves it is considered a behavioral problem.
Those behavioral problems are problems because it is awkward for your social ties and thus your functioning in society. It hinders your own survival, so to speak.
This is because your behavior affects other people, and if you have a behavioral problem, it can cause other people to have a problem with you. This makes it more difficult to find or hold a job. Even working together as an entrepreneur can be made more difficult because of behavioral problems.
As a result, behavioral problems can make the life of someone suffering from them impossible, or at least much more difficult than necessary.
A hypnotherapist can help people suffering from behavioral problems in several ways. After all, behavior is the result of emotions and choices. Those choices and emotions, in turn, are the result of thoughts and beliefs. And it is precisely with these beliefs and thoughts that hypnosis can play a role. By changing these, you can change a person's behavior.
So even if you are an adult, hypnosis can still help "parenting" succeed. Instead of depending on your parents for this, a hypnotherapist helps people raise themselves.
Hypnotherapy for aggression
If aggressive behavior is your problem, hypnosis helps, too. In men suffering from depressive symptoms, for example, aggression plays a role more often than in women.
Research shows that hypnosis combined with cognitive behavioral therapy helps against depressive symptoms (and, in men, the aggression it can provoke). Compared to people receiving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) alone, depression, anxiety and hopelessness were reduced 6%, 5% and 8%, respectively, with hypnotherapy[1].
Another study comparing hypnotherapy to CBT even found that people with hypnotherapy were better served[2].
Not only men can suffer from aggression. Women can also be slightly more aggressive than usual at certain times of the month due to their hormone levels. Research shows that women can also be helped with hypnosis to suffer less from this[3].
Stopping Compulsive Behavior with Hypnosis
Compulsive behavior, or in extreme cases even OCD, can also be treated with hypnosis. You can have compulsive behaviors and even compulsive thoughts. Both of these can be treated with hypnosis.
In the case of compulsive thoughts, hypnosis can help you be more mindful about your thoughts and stop and change a compulsive train of thought. The latter can be done, for example, with reframing.
In addition, you can also distract yourself, by shifting your focus. This is something a hypnotherapist can help with if compulsive thoughts are the problem.
As for compulsive behavior, this can also be changed with hypnosis. In one case study, a man was helped by replacing awkward compulsive behavior with desired compulsive behavior[4].
This is also a technique we teach our trainees.
I once used the technique myself to help a woman who compulsively ate a cookie every time she came into her kitchen. We replaced this behavior with briefly sweeping the floor. In time, she indicated to me that her kitchen had never been so clean. And she had lost weight because she could now just leave the cookies alone.
A super result!
For socially inappropriate behavior, this technique can also be used to replace the awkward behavior with healthy "normal" behavior. Erickson himself also helped his psychiatric patients with suggestions. For example, if someone was pretending to drink blood, when in reality it just wasn't happening and the person was just making a drinking gesture, he would give the suggestion to do it on the toilet then. In this way, a person with socially inappropriate behavior could still function in a normal environment because he would then do all those inappropriate things privately.
Then no one else was bothered by it, and the person had still found a way to get a little weird for themselves.
Making impulsive behavior more thoughtful with hypnosis
Impulsive behavior can also be incredibly awkward. Especially if those impulses cause you to miss appointments or do really stupid things. Reason enough, then, to do something about it.
Impulsive behavior is often the result of a particular emotion a person does not want to feel. In a study of a successful woman with bulimia and an unemployed man with mental health problems, who both suffered from impulsive behavior, it was found that the hypnotic state could be used to break the connection of the emotion to the impulsive behavior.
Hypnosis was used to create a different link to the emotion, then to resolve it with the impulsive behavior[5].
The hypnotic state was used to make clients more aware of how their bodies felt just before the impulsive behavior. This was done to make it more recognizable and to make the feeling more tolerable. Then these feelings were linked to helping thoughts so that the impulse did not have to be carried out.
Stopping self-destructive behavior with hypnosis
Sometimes you also have people, when life is going well, it scares them so much that they do something to ruin it for themselves. After all, then it "adds up" again. Terribly inconvenient, because it's also allowed to just go right, right?
Self-destructive behavior can also involve hurting yourself without killing you. Examples include scratching yourself, banging your head against a wall, hitting yourself and the like. In Pakistan, adolescents were studied to see if hypnotherapy combined with CBT helped stop this, and it did. They were much less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior[6].
To do this, the young people received weekly sessions of about 1 hour. They did this for 12 to 13 weeks. They were also given homework in the form of self-hypnosis.
Treating addictive behaviors with hypnosis
Someone who is really quite addicted, who does all kinds of things for their drug addiction. Steal, lie, cheat, and always choose for himself. This is very inconvenient because it costs you your social relationships. In addition, addiction also costs yourself your health. So you are doubly at a loss if you continue with addictive behavior.
Ericksonian hypnotherapy is one way to treat addictive behaviors. A study of hypnosis in the treatment of alcohol addiction found that the long-term effects for people treated with hypnosis were better than those treated with motivational interviewing[7].
Hypnosis can also play an important role for other addictions. I myself also have experience with this, as I used to love certain substances and had to quit. I even accidentally did this with a hypnosis technique, but I only found that out later when I started studying hypnosis.
This technique is also now being taught to people in training at the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.
Agoraphobia, or agoraphobia
Isolating yourself is also considered a behavioral disorder. If you have agoraphobia and cannot leave the house because of it, it is important to do something. After all, despite social media, going outside is often one of the things that make life a success.
Fortunately, a hypnotherapist can offer a helping hand here as well. Research shows that hypnotherapy works well for people with agoraphobia. In the study, people on the waiting list for regular mental health care actually received hypnotherapy. These were 8 to 12 sessions over three months (far more than necessary, but for scientific research, people should be given roughly the same suggestions). Even in this way, which was not fully adapted to the person, hypnotherapy helped to reduce symptoms with this anxiety[8] and thus to lower social isolation as well.
Other research on a 20-year-old boy with social anxiety also showed that hypnosis combined with Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) helped to overcome this anxiety. This involved 1 session that lasted 3.5 hours. This also eliminated the need for medication to deal with social anxiety[9].
Hypnosis for behavioral problems
Behavioral problems can arise over the course of your life due to a variety of issues and triggers. A hypnotherapist can help people transform behavioral problems so that people become "model citizens" 😉 .
In this article, you have mostly read that hypnosis works, but not yet "how" hypnosis works exactly.
Want to learn more about this? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or register directly for one of our events or trainings. Then you will immediately learn techniques to help people. After the initial training you can already tackle many behavioral problems and help people transform their lives.
(Just think what you can do when you have done all the training.)
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