Hypnotherapy for youth workers: transforming youth

For sociable people, working with young people is something they enjoy doing. A youth worker often works with young people between the ages of 10 and 22. There are several ways to do this. The most important thing a youth worker does is support vulnerable young people in their development, so they have the opportunity to become engaged, active, and independent adults.

A youth worker is like a resource for all kinds of agencies. You interact with parents, schools, youth aid, neighborhood teams, sports clubs, mental health, HALT office, addiction services, labor market and the police. They can indicate where there are problems with certain young people. After which the youth worker can address the youth in their own language and inspire them to develop themselves[1].

In this way, young people can be helped to find a positive way to spend their free time and build a good social circle.

In addition, a youth worker can serve as a role model and inspire young people to find a sense of purpose for the future.

There are all kinds of youth workers. For example, you might work at community centers and organize events there to keep young people engaged. There, you can connect with young people to inspire them to make the most of their lives. These events can include performances as well as debates. Community centers can also provide homework help.

Then you also have youth workers who actually seek out problem youth on the streets to connect with them and guide the youth to pathways for help, education or even finding work[2].

The goal is often to initiate a change process. So that a young person now walking with his soul under his arm can choose a direction in life and then make the most of it.

Youth worker competencies

As a youth worker, you actually take on a considerable amount of responsibility , but this doesn’t mean you need a college degree. Depending on the young people you work with, a vocational or community college degree in social work may be sufficient to get started.

In addition, it is helpful if you can empathize with young people and connect with them communicatively. You speak the language of youth.

You can make connections, which means you’re sociable.

At the same time, you’ll be confident enough to set boundaries with young people when you see them making unwise choices.

You have an understanding about how society works and know which agencies and/or organizations to turn to in order to help young people.

There are different levels at which a youth worker can get started.

The youth worker as coach

Depending on where they work, youth workers may have a wide range of responsibilities. In any case, they often play a coaching role for young people and, at times, for parents who may need assistance in raising their adolescents or young adults.

This is also the part where knowledge of hypnosis can enhance the work for youth workers.

With knowledge of hypnosis, you can teach young people how to control their emotions. This knowledge can be incredibly helpful to young people, especially when dealing with issues such as short tempers, impulsive behavior, and making rash decisions.

In the process, the hypnotic state has been used for centuries, and still is, in some cultures in rituals and ceremonies. Those rituals, for example, mark the transformation from boy to man. In that sense, it is actually already a proven technique that can help young people become adults.

Child hypnosis, the therapeutic form of hypnosis for children and adolescents, actually began in 1891 with the book "Suggestion in Infancy," so it is not a technique that is just around the corner. Workshops in child hypnosis have also been taught by child psychology experts for more than 50 years now[3].

So what is hypnosis?

Now, as a youth worker, you may wonder what hypnosis is. It is another state of consciousness. You can even tell young people who use (soft) drugs that with hypnosis they don't even need more drugs to reach another state 😉 .

In any case, it is a state in which a person is fully focused and feels deeply connected to themselves. This state ensures that new information is absorbed effectively. Suggestions given to someone under hypnosis cause psychological and neurological functions to change (source 3).

These changes can even be seen with medical equipment, such as an fMRI.

Changes in the brain and psychology occur because, during hypnosis, people respond more strongly to suggestions given to them than when they are not under hypnosis. These suggestions—and the response to them—enable people to develop new ideas, associations, reinforcements, changes, and reframings regarding their perspective on life or the problems they face.

As a result, the response to smart suggestions can completely transform thinking about certain problems (source 3).

What can hypnosis do for young people?

Young people can sometimes get completely stuck in a certain train of thought. With hypnosis, you can shift the attention—which is completely focused on a specific topic or problem in that stuck train of thought—to something else, thereby breaking the thought pattern.

In addition, reflexes can be changed and hypnosis can help to better postpone rewards. For example, adolescents may use substances to feel good "quickly," while doing something they can be proud of can also create this good feeling. However, that often takes a little longer (at least a workout, or a meditation) than taking a drug.

Being able to defer rewards helps young people make wiser choices.

In addition, hypnotherapy or hypnocoaching helps young people gain greater skills in problem solving, self-regulating, changing their thoughts, altering their emotions, changing their behavior and responding differently to certain stimuli (source 3).

Sometimes young people can also be incredibly pessimistic, but with hypnosis you can actually cause them to have some more positive expectations about life (source 3). In the process, they can also gain the belief that as long as the body and mind work together, it will lead to desired results.

Examples of problems young people have been helped with

Even with “simpler” problems, such as asthma , self-hypnosis can help manage symptoms. An 11-year-old boy has already benefited from this. Young people often don’t understand “why” it works, but they do know that it works (source 3).

In another case involving a young boy (age 10) who struggled with anger —manifesting as stomping his feet and slamming doors—he was helped through hypnocoaching. When he said he didn’t like being angry, it was a real revelation for him to hear that it’s okay to be angry, but that how you deal with it is what matters. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to just start destroying things.

Then they did an exercise to trace memories on which the boy was angry but did not react angrily. This reinforced the idea that he did manage his anger in a normal way, and could return himself to a more normal state after anger was triggered.

In addition, the boy was empowered by focusing specifically on the things he was good at. For example, he was good at soccer and a quick learner.

They also worked with a visualization to get rid of anger.

Over time, the "real" problem also emerged, and that was bedwetting. Through clever suggestions about brain-bladder communication and what he could say to his brain and bladder before bedtime, bedwetting had become a much smaller problem.

Hypnosis was also used with a young woman (15 years old) who suffered from headaches to help her focus less on how severe the headaches were and instead shift her attention toward positive expectations of self-healing. It also became clear that the headaches were a way for her to connect with other people—something that, of course, can be achieved in more enjoyable ways. So she was given alternatives for that as well.

In the process, she learned self-hypnosis techniques, from her favorite place, for example, to relax properly. This helped a lot against headaches (source 3).

Learn Hypnosis

So, as a youth worker, hypnosis can be used for a variety of problems to help youth change their minds, if they currently have a train of thought that is not helping them at all.

Due to waiting times in healthcare, a youth worker with knowledge of hypnosis can already give young people with mental health problems a start to solve those problems.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how you can use it to provide hypnotherapy or hypnocoaching? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

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