Emotions have an important function in our survival. Emotions are also used to move people. For example, many songs are about love because this is a very powerful emotion. This also makes the songs sell well, which is nice for the artist and his team. Emotions are also used during hypnotherapy and even negative emotions can then be used in a good way.
In this blog, I discuss what negative emotions can be used during hypnotherapy to bring about change in the "patient."
Emotions and life change
Severe life events can cause you to look at life in a different way, but of course you don't want everyone to experience something violent before their outlook on life is changed and before someone's behavior is changed by it.
Many people come to a hypnotherapist because they are facing a problem that they cannot find a solution to on their own or are having difficulty implementing.
As a hypnotherapist, you use emotions to change a person's beliefs and remove any blockages.
Ultimately, emotions such as love and joy have been given a positive name and emotions such as fear and anger have been given a negative name. This is very unfortunate, because within the context in which the emotion arises, it does not have to be a bad emotion at all.
Ultimately, emotions exist to make you take action; fear causes you to push yourself to safety. Anger makes sure you don't let another person rip you off. How bad is an emotion if it causes you to protect yourself from suffering?
Negative emotions are really only a problem when they are triggered by irrational reasons. Fear of spiders , for example, is irrational. Being jealous of your partner because your previous partner cheated is irrational.
To use emotions in hypnotherapy, you need to understand the purpose of the emotion. Next, you must create a context that makes sense for the creation of this emotion. This context must help you achieve the goal of therapy.
So if someone wants to reduce fear of spiders, the context in which that fear is evoked is important to eventually overcome the fear.
Then you have to trigger the emotion that people actually want in that situation, so for example, love and empathy when it comes to changing jealous feelings for your new partner. Or just calmness when confronting the spider.
It is very important to transform these negative emotions so that you do not leave the person under hypnosis in that negative emotion. On the contrary, he/she is there for resolution. In the process, emotions often build up tension in the body as well. It is important to release that tension through an action. After a hypnotherapy session, it is important that people feel relaxed and even a little lighter.
You can still do a lot of good during hypnotherapy with the following 4 negative emotions.
- Anxiety
- Anger
- Hate
- Guilt
Using anxiety in a positive way
As mentioned, fear is an emotion that exists to protect you. Fear causes you not to drive too fast (for yourself, that is) and fear causes you to try to avoid unpleasant situations so you are not embarrassed by other people.
Keeping the goal of anxiety in mind, and especially that the goal has a positive ending, not that it always succeeds in achieving that positive state, ensures that you can work better with anxiety.
Anxiety is often triggered by expectations about the future. The closer that moment in the future is, the greater the anxiety. Expectations about the future are created by the beliefs you have about life and how the world works.
You can use the reactions to fear, namely fight and flight, to stop the fear. Fighting means you take physical action to confront the fear. Fleeing means changing the way you act or the route you take to your goal, which includes a fearful moment, so that this fearful moment is not in between.
The freeze response is even good because it prevents you from accidentally saying the wrong things that can be used against you.
You can reduce anxiety by:
- To move
- Living in the here and now
- Changing expectations about the future
- Recalling memories of a happy ending to a similarly anxious moment
- Make the goal big
- Make it inevitable
For the hypnotherapist, the last 4 steps are especially important. Changing expectations about the future is something you do with hypnotic suggestions, for example. Retrieving memories is something you do with regression therapy , and making goals big and inevitable is also something you help people with using various techniques.
Using anger in a positive way
Anger is a motivator to take action. Have you ever noticed that when someone says you can't do something you become furious and then do it to prove them wrong? So anger is a good emotion if it motivates you to take action.
After the action is taken, the anger also disappears and you can get on with your life as usual.
By keeping in mind the good purpose of anger, which is motivation, you can use this emotion in a very good way. For example, teachers often take advantage of this by telling students that they are worthless and will never make anything of their lives.
There are a number of ways that anger triggers. Generally, someone's self-esteem is brought down, unjustly, and because it is unjustified, that person can become angry and thus prove someone wrong.
In addition, anger is also something that can be generated by someone trying to raise their social status by undercutting your social status.
Betrayal is another method by which anger is triggered. Someone who is supposed to protect you then fails in this totally and often on purpose.
As a hypnotherapist, you often use anger to motivate people to do something about their situation. This can be done by playing on the person, then apologizing and practicing forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not about actually liking that person again then, it's about being able to let go of the anger .
In addition, you can also channel anger toward something else. For example, by pointing out a culprit, who may not even be guilty, or just by pointing out the suffering of the person you are angry with.
When there is unjustified anger at someone, you can point out that the anger is hurting the other person and this will make the anger disappear more quickly.
Using hate in a positive way
Hate, like anger, is an emotion you have to protect yourself. In this case, you may be suffering from a threat that just won't go away. The hatred you then feel makes you want to destroy that threat.
In the case of a man who continues to cheat/or a woman, this can cause terrible fighting divorces or wanting to socially destroy the person with whom the long-term cheater is cheating.
Unfortunately, this does not always save the marriage.
Hate is thus triggered by pain, fear, anger and disappointment that is prolonged or repeatedly generated. This can also eventually target a group of people, if, for example, you have a problem with people with blue eyes every time.
Hate is not something you want to consciously trigger, instead you need to remove the root cause for the hate. The fear, disappointment, pain and anger must be removed.
In addition, you can also present the person who is hated as a human being again instead of thing to be broken.
Forgiveness is also very important in reducing hate. Thereby, hate is sometimes self-destructive so it is very important to release the hate through forgiveness.
As a hypnotherapist, it is important to remove the source of pain. If that person does not need to be in the patient's life, it is important to convey that belief so that people leave happy and free of hate.
Using guilt in a positive way
Guilt makes you behave morally and ethically correct, and if you did go wrong you take steps to correct that mistake.
Guilt is triggered when you yourself feel that you have not done or even thought of something right. Also, when other people lead because of your actions, it can cause guilt.
Guilt can also arise when you do something without other people seeing it; it really says something about your own moral compass.
When used properly, guilt, like anger, can be a motivator and, in the case of guilt, a motivator to do good. Unfortunately, this is abused by some charities and narcissists and guilt is invoked to fulfill their own needs.
Guilt can be removed by, for example, apologizing or taking other steps to make up for a mistake.
In addition, guilt can be eliminated by viewing it as a life lesson. What you did was not right, the guilt is then necessary to avoid making a similar mistake in the future.
Also, watch this video to release negative emotions:
As a hypnotherapist, you can work with these emotions to motivate people to look at problems in a different way, but it is still important to rid people of that emotion as well.
To tackle this the right way, you can take the training courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.
