First use of Parts Therapy

I had my first real use of parts therapy recently (it was covered at school back on weekend 3), the person I'd decided to try it with had said something like they "feel that some part of themselves is holding them back", so given their choice of words (and the context it was in) it seemed like a reasonable time to give parts work a go. I was surprised how well it ended up working, this person has a strong internal voice - for positive things, as well as criticizing themselves. But the negative voice would usually 'win' when they're thinking about how something is going to turn out, or to put a downer on something good that is happening.

During the parts therapy, I had him visualize the part that's holding him back in one hand, with the part that can help in the other hand. Then after a bit of internal negotiation, bring those parts together and back into himself (which all sounds very weird indeed, and that's the main reason I wasn't keen on parts work when I first learnt about it). Afterwards, he said he saw the negative 'part' as a ball of red light, and the positive one as a ball of blue light. Then when bringing them together, he ended up holding a ball of green light that he brought back into himself. He'd said the red ball was his way of visualizing the negative internal voice, and the blue ball was the positive one. And after integrating them together, the negative one shouldn't be 'wining' all the time anymore - and so things should be more balanced. Even though I'm pretty sure it'll have a good change of helping to deal with the issues we're trying to cover, I still find very, very, weird. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually thought :)

Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 6.2

The second day of this weekend covered all kinds of things, although it was a little light on the practical sessions (only one of them). We spent a fair bit of time on Obstetrics, which makes sense given the interest in hypnotherapy for childbirth. The pain management we covered the day before would also come in very handy here. I doubt I'll be getting involved in any of that though, the childbirth side of things that is. It's not really my cup of tea - although still very useful for those folks that are interested in helping out in that area.

We also spent a bit of time on time distortion (which was also the practical we covered). It didn't seem very useful to me at first, mostly because I couldn’t think of a situation when I'd want to use it. When we went into more depth about it, it started to seem more useful - such as with helping sports performance (e.g. getting them to experience the event/game/whatever in slow-motion), or even just a simple case of making some boring task feel like it takes less time (the way things do when you enjoy them). And it can also be useful for some types of sexual problems, which we covered as well. Again, I can't really see myself using it very often, still interesting though. And I did say that about the weight control stuff when we first covered it, but I've been doing some of that after all so maybe I will get involved in this as well. Still a good weekend though, even if it is only the pain management stuff I end up having much use for.

Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 6.1

Today was all about pain management, we spent some time discussing various methods for it using hypnosis. For the practical side of things, we covered glove anesthesia which I found pretty impressive. In a clinical setting, you would use it to remove all sensations of pain from the clients hand then get them to transfer that anesthesia (well, actually analgesia) to wherever their pain is - thus leaving that area pain free. For the practical, the analgesia was just transferred from one hand to the other, and tested by a firm twist of the skin on the back of the hand. It felt very strange being able to feel everything apart from the pain, although when the analgesia was transferred from my right hand to my left, it did leave my right hand stinging a bit from the skin twisting :) A very useful technique though, but I probably wouldn't use it very often. I wouldn't want to completely remove the pain. I'd be more likely to use something like replacing the painful feeling with one of warmth - so that the client would still know that the pain was there (and be able to notice if gets worse), it just wouldn't be as much of a burden to them. But obviously I'm not going to be doing any of those things unless their doctor has said it's ok - I wouldn't want to 'hide' someone's headache then find out it was really a brain tumor.

I've already tried a 'turning down' the pain method a little while ago for my friends mother, which went pretty well. I didn't check with her doctor first for that one, but she was already on the waiting list for an operation as well as taking pain killers for it. If I didn't already know her I would have definitely checked with her doctor first though.