Everyone needs reassurance from time to time. As a child, you were reassured daily because every day you did something you had never done before. Constantly you were taken out of that wonderful comfort zone and you needed reassurance for that. Suddenly you are an adult and there seems to be no one (or rather few people) reassuring you. So what about reassurance and what role does it play in hypnotherapy? In this blog, I explore it in more detail.
What is reassurance?
Reassurance means removing someone's fear or worry[1]. For example, if someone is nervous about a test, you can reassure them with an encouragement such as "You learned well, so you will succeed at this."
Child reassurance
So as a child you are often reassured, but what should you do if you have children of your own to reassure them. It is then nice to know that until your children are about 7 or 8 years old, they are always in a hypnotic state. Their brain waves are obviously different from when you are a little older[2].
This means they will take anything you tell them. Therefore, focus mostly on the good and positive.
Saying "You can do this" works better than "You don't have to be afraid." In the first sentence, you focus on the positive. In the second sentence, you focus precisely on what your child is afraid of. Even though you are encouraging your child not to be afraid, the word afraid will cause your child to think about what he is afraid of, which then does not help your child move forward.
So focus primarily on what you do want for your child and not what your child is afraid of. Focus on overcoming fear.
In addition, distraction can also help your child in some situations. For example, research shows that when your child gets a vaccination, distraction works better than reassurance[3].
Peace of mind and your health
For your health, reassurance can also be very important. For example, if you are very afraid of getting sick, reassurances from doctors are needed to allay those fears. Unfortunately, with hypochondria , that reassurance often causes you to continue to suffer from fear of illness for longer[4].
At first, reassurance about your health relieves, but then you may have a new thought and want to be reassured again. This is especially problematic if you need the same reassurance from your doctor every time.
In addition, additional tests, such as blood tests or an MRI, can make you feel that the doctor himself is also unsure if he missed something, and that then still maintains your anxiety. Only an MRI, for example, is then suddenly good enough to keep your fear away. While that is by no means always necessary to establish that you do not have a certain problem[5].
If you are pregnant , an ultrasound is used to reassure you about the state of your fetus[6].
After surgery for a serious illness, further monitoring can also provide reassurance that it may not cause another problem[7].
Reassurance and fears
As mentioned, children are often reassured because they encounter new situations on a daily basis. The idea is that at some point you then stop being afraid. But we all know that anything can happen in life and you can still be afraid of certain things or situations.
So what about reassurance?
If you need a lot of reassurance, this could be a sign that you have an anxiety disorder. People with generalized anxiety disorder seek reassurance more often and avoid their fears more often than people who do not suffer from them[8].
Other research also shows a link to social anxiety and depression[9].
So reassurance isn't actually always going to help you overcome your fears. In fact, in the case of hypochondria, it can actually amplify fears. That actually sounds quite paradoxical.
The best thing you can do to reassure yourself is to overcome your fear yourself. Ultimately, no one else can do that better for you than yourself. You can, of course, be encouraged with the process of overcoming your anxiety.
Reassurance in hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy is widely used to overcome fears. One of the first fears a hypnotherapist helps you overcome is the fear of the hypnotic state.
Indeed, many people have all kinds of ideas about not knowing what is happening and that you would have no control when you are in hypnosis, but that is not true. It absolutely does not compare to general anesthesia during surgery, where indeed you do not know what is happening and you have no control.
Rather, it is a state of deep relaxation and a feeling of "yes, okay, I will do that, if you say so," but if you are given a task you don't want to do, your gut tells you just as much and you won't do that either. So you are absolutely in control and only participate in what you want to participate in.
Explaining this is often the first step in making hypnotherapy successful in people who have never been in hypnosis before.
Next, hypnosis is induced by the hypnotherapist, and that state does feel different. The hypnotherapist can tell from you if you are in hypnosis. This is checked, for example, by giving a command to your unconscious to lift your arm. You then do this while not consciously using your muscles to lift your arm.
In addition, there are other signs that you are in hypnosis. For example, your eyelids may twitch slightly as if you are asleep. Your breathing will be deeper than if you are not in hypnosis, and if you are standing during therapy you may wobble a little.
Mentally, you yourself can feel that you are in hypnosis, which can feel separate. The hypnotherapist can then reassure you that all is well and that you are well in hypnosis. That reassurance can then help you go even deeper into hypnosis and that in turn helps you when the therapy actually starts.
Arm-levitation can be a check by the therapist to see how deep you are in hypnosis, and then you can be helped to overcome the fear you want to overcome.
Visualizing fear to make it smaller
The hypnotherapist helps you reassure yourself about anxiety. There are a variety of techniques for this. For example, visualizing a fear, giving a shape to the fear and changing the shape is a technique that can be used with a non-tangible fear, such as a social fear.
Ridiculing a fear in a visualization can also be done very well and especially with fear of things, such as fear of spiders or anything else tangible that you fear.
Making fear tangible and changing shape can make you feel that what you fear is not at all as big as it has always felt. That it is not deep in your subconscious, but that you can just pull it out and crush it under your foot.
This alone can be very reassuring.
Reassuring your inner child
Another way you can reassure yourself is to use regression to go back to the moment when a particular fear arose. This is often a moment from your childhood. Then you can enter into a conversation in your mind with your inner child, the child you were at that moment, and reassure that inner child.
For example, you can tell how good your life is now and how nice everything has turned out and that you no longer have to be afraid. That your inner child is also allowed to enjoy life. You can ask if your inner child wants to grow with you to how you are now. Then you visualize, as it were, a fusion between you and your inner child and you take the journey of your life without the fear to the moment of therapy.
Reassuring and allowing your inner child to grow with you can also be very helpful in reducing the impact of certain fears.
So reassurance can go two ways. On one hand, you may need it to get out of your comfort zone, but on the other hand, it can cause you to need more and more reassurance.
Fortunately, you can also use reassurance to overcome certain fears, so you won't need reassurance at all after that.
For inducing hypnosis, reassurance can also play an important role for people who have never been in hypnosis before. This then helps to deepen hypnosis, making the therapy even more effective afterwards.
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Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
