A scar is a visible change in your tissue that shows that you once had a wound that has since healed. With scars, people often think this is something that is visible, but if you have ever had surgery or radiotherapy, you can also have scar tissue in your body that is not otherwise visible from the outside.
Influence of scars
Scars can affect you both physically and mentally. A scar is not seen by most people as something beautiful, and if being beautiful is important to you, you can suffer greatly from your scar.
But physically it can also affect you, as it can affect the functioning of the organ on or in which you are scarred. This can even lead to deformities of the body.
Internal scars can sometimes be painful , which can limit your daily functioning. This, in turn, can cause a lot of stress.
Mental problems can be particularly caused by scars from burns, acne and severe trauma. In particular, scars on the face, hands and genitals can cause mental health problems. For example, this can cause lack of sleep[1].
Other mental issues that can arise from scarring include a negative self-image about your body and lower self-confidence. This can cause depression and the onset of anxiety in some cases. Feelings of shame and even aggression can follow that in turn.
You can also begin to idealize the image of your body before the scar versus your body right now, which does have a scar.
Scars and feelings about them can also make social interactions more difficult, which is bad for your communication, intimacy and causes "I'm going to avoid this" behavior. Scars on the face, whether from acne or something else, also increase the risk of PTSD.
If a scar was caused by a violent act or other trauma, seeing the scar each time can also cause negative emotions to be triggered. The scar itself can then also be difficult to accept as a part of yourself because it was done to you.
Social impact of scars
In addition, people also react to your scars when they are visible. People have a natural aversion to someone who looks "different," and because of this you are more likely to face hostile signals, such as strangers staying further away from you. Or you may keep getting all kinds of questions about your scar. This, of course, does not feel pleasant.
Your family and friends are also affected by the change, and how they react again affects people with scars. If somewhat ignored, you may feel for yourself that you can't discuss the impact of the scar on your life with them, preventing you from expressing many frustrations. On the other hand, are your family and friends very compassionate? Then you may suffer from guilt again because you don't want to stress the people around you.
In addition, it can also affect your intimate relationship. For example, you may adopt different positions during intimacy so that your partner does not see the scar. It may also make it more difficult to enter into new relationships[2].
Scar treatment
So plenty of reasons to do something about scars. There are several treatment options available to reduce scarring, namely:
- Hormone Therapy
- Surgical intervention
- Radiation
- Herbal Medication
For example, certain Chinese herbal blends work better than hormone therapy in burns to reduce scarring.
Hormone therapy involves injecting hormones at the scar tissue you want to remove (source 1).
Hypnotherapy and scars
Hypnosis can also help reduce scarring in burns, as long as it is applied soon after the wound occurs[3]. Hypnosis also helps in surgery to help the wound heal faster. It can also help with burns and with dealing with pain that can result from scarring[4].
Only sometimes, then, all these techniques and hypnosis are not enough to make the scars disappear completely. So how should you deal with the impact of scars on your life? Hypnosis can play a role in that, too.
Hypnosis against the physical impact of scars
Hypnotherapy can help eliminate pain after the development of internal scar tissue that causes pain, for example. In a case study with a woman, it was found that this helped to eliminate pain.
In fact, the woman thought there was nothing that could be done about the pain, because you can't do that much about scars. This gave her a lot of stress and that is why she sought help from the hypnotherapist. The hypnotherapist indicated that this pain could have a certain function of attention for her. By talking about the pain, she could gain sympathy and understanding from other people. That was an indirect consequence of her pain. Letting go of the pain also meant letting go of that attention.
It was then explained that the body can heal scar tissue and even redirect signals from the nerves so that she experiences more comfort. Next, hypnosis was induced, contact was made with her subconscious and ideomotor signals were established so that the subconscious could respond with "yes" and "no." Her subconscious was then asked if it could remove the pain. To this, the answer was yes. Next, suggestions were given so that her critical mind could allow this change in her body.
After this, she had no pain and if she did have a little pain, she could eliminate it with NLP techniques. In addition, she was able to reduce her pain medication [5].
Hypnosis against the mental impact of scars
In addition, hypnotherapy can also help you maintain mental health if you suffer from scarring. For young people in America who suffer from acne, hypnotherapy is recommended in part to counteract the mental negative effects of scarring[6].
In this case, the focus is not so much on pain and the like, but more on the beliefs you have about the importance of your appearance and how much it affects your life.
For example, you might think that only beautiful people become successful . After all, it is often the "beautiful" people who end up becoming very rich as far as you see on television, but fortunately that is not true. Just look at pictures of Elon Musk and Christiano Ronaldo from when they were just starting out.
Success can also ensure that you just have enough money to do something about your appearance, but first you have to achieve that success, and so you can certainly do that even if you feel you are less handsome.
Eventually, we all get ugly, too. After all, how handsome do you find elderly people? And then it really takes something other than good looks to have friends and people who want to do business with you.
But where does this belief that a scar would be bad come from? This is something you can explore with hypnosis. Often in childhood, you determine how the world works and how you should function in it. Perhaps your parents made comments about people with scars. Or you noticed that bad guys in movies often have scars, and so you have to be beautiful to be a good person. It could have been anything.
This is something you can figure out with regression. Then you go back in your mind to the first moment when you got the idea that scars are not good for you. Then you can do something with that moment to reinterpret it now with your adult knowledge. This alone can do much to make you feel less burdened if you suffer from visible scars.
Sometimes it is not only necessary to remove limiting beliefs in this way. It is then also helpful to get new helping beliefs in their place. This is where a hypnotherapist can help you. This can be done, for example, by repeating suggestions such as:
"Behavior is more important than how you look."
"People who only care about appearance are unimportant to me."
"My character is more important than my appearance."
"Because of my character, people stay with me."
These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs and obstacles, you may receive other suggestions from a hypnotherapist.
Scars can have a lot of impact on your life. Sometimes they can cause physical and mental pain. In either case, hypnotherapy can help you get rid of that pain.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class.
Or register for a seminar or one of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training courses.
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