Choosing one of the Case Studies That You Developed Within Your Group During the Class, Explain the Cause of the Person’s Symptoms and Construct a Hypnoanalysis Treatment Plan and Required Outcome.

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at night time. A PMR would be appropriate here, as it would teach Miss S to relax, lower her adrenalin level at night, reduce her anxious thoughts and prepare her body for sleep. I would also install a trigger, such as “relax now. Calm now.” This will help Miss S when she is unable to sleep. Hearing these words in her head will enable her to become less anxious and to feel calmer and more in control of her feelings.

After the second session I would talk to Miss S about regression and hopefully gain her permission to try this with her during the third session. Although Miss S’s symptoms may have been decreasing and she may be sleeping better, unless she deals with the root cause of her issue, then it will never go away completely. Instead she may find herself sleeping better in the short term, but that the symptoms may reoccur at a later point in her life.

At this point in her treatment plan, I could try Free Association. This technique, originally developed by Freud, allows clients to speak freely and spontaneously: it is the “free-flowing process of linking and connecting thoughts, feelings and experiences, back to the root cause of the behaviour that you want to change.” Miss S would be instructed to say everything that came into her head and I, as the therapist would listen and absorb the information. However the trouble with this type of treatment is that it can take many, many sessions to reach the crux of the matter. Also the hypnotherapist has to interpret this information and tell the client what they think. As I said earlier it is important not to inflict your own ideas onto the client or to create more anxiety in them. It is also possible that a client may not accept the therapist’s interpretation; therefore the behaviour that they wish to address will remain unchanged.

I therefore feel that regression – “a more interactive form of therapy” – is better for Miss S and this could take anything from 6 up to 12 sessions. Regression is a gentle process where the hypnotherapist guides the client back to an earlier time in their life, usually through visualisation. During session 3 or 4, Miss S will hopefully feel comfortable enough with me to try. She will have had some practice with hypnosis and will therefore be in the best state to respond. Resistance (where a client cannot or will not respond to change) can be a problem at this stage, which is another reason why regression should not be attempted before the third session at the earliest. This is because the best way to combat resistance is to build rapport and ensure that the client is happy. This can only be done with time.

During the next few regression sessions I will encourage Miss S to talk to me through hypnosis and I will question her accordingly. Miss S may be worried that she will remember more than she can handle. However it is important to remember that the subconscious is there to protect us and therefore even under hypnosis, the subconscious will shelter Miss S from directly accessing information that she cannot handle. It is true though that retrieving information about her early childhood and her parent’s abandonment will be painful for Miss S and abreactions may occur. Abreaction is a term that describes the “expression and release of a previously repressed emotion,” Miss S may therefore get angry, cry or become childlike – needing security and reassurance. It is important as an ethical hypnotherapist that I can deal with this reaction in Miss S and that I explain to her that she may experience these types of reactions when she leaves my room, and that they are perfectly normal. In order to help with this, I would need to ensure that I leave 15 minutes in a session after I have regressed Miss S, in order to return her to her adult mode. I can do this by giving Miss S a hypnotic anchor and by bringing her back to her safe place before she fully wakes up. Relaxing her and talking to her about her normal adult world will also help. I would suggest as well that Miss S keeps a diary to record any feelings and emotions that she may feel after our session.

During my regression sessions with Miss S I would do Inner Child Therapy. During the early years of our lives we absorb many things from our environment – on both a conscious and a subconscious level. “We assign meaning to our experiences and the emotions we associate with them – joy, anger, fear, sadness, love. We become adults and live adult lives, yet the same ‘meanings’ or beliefs we took on in childhood remain unchanged. We may not be even consciously aware of them. And yet they continue to control our lives from a hidden level.” Inner Child Therapy recognises that although we are adults, if we had a traumatic childhood, as Miss S did in her earlier years, then this will affect the way we are as adults. Through visualisation I can invite Miss S’s inner child into a special place that she has created in her mind. I can then address Miss S’s difficult childhood, as this is what is unconsciously still limiting her in her adult life. The inner child can be shown to see how things would have been different if people had treated her with love and respect. As a result this new version of the inner child can now grow up feeling stronger, more capable, loved and more confident in themselves. They will also now know more about who they really are. “This version is then fully reintegrated into the adult self…a new future is then envisioned with all the new potential in place.”

Of course it is entirely possible that having accessed her inner child, Miss S may experience an overwhelming feeling of loss: she may need to grieve for her lost parents. Although hypnotherapy can be used to deal with the grief process, it should only be used by someone who is fully trained and experienced. At this point I would therefore need to refer Miss S to a counsellor or psychotherapist. She could return to me for hypnotherapy at a later date, once she has worked through the stages of grief.

In this essay I have explained Miss S’s issues and created a hypnoanalytical treatment plan using PMRs, relaxation, scripts for reducing anxiety and better sleep, regression and inner child therapy. By the end of her treatment I hope that Miss S would leave me having dealt with the issues in her traumatic early childhood that were still affecting her now as an adult. I wholly expect that at some point she will have left me for counselling or psychotherapy to deal further with the feelings of grief and loss that she must have uncovered once accessing her inner child. However through hypnotherapy I hope to have not merely papered over the cracks and simply dealt with her sleeping difficulties, but to have also dealt with the underlying issues that her painful childhood caused for her. Only