Posted on April 4, 2022.

Many psychological conditions, ranging from mild anxiety and depression to narcissism and dissociation, often lead to the life difficulties that bring people to therapy. When we first meet clients with these complaints, it might seem as though they’re ready to do just about anything to change, so they can make their lives better.

We begin with talking, taking a history, carefully listening for clues that might help us make a diagnosis and formulate a treatment plan. Then, once the work begins, we often hit a wall. Why can’t the client seem to remember a certain time of life? What exactly happened in that childhood home, or in the elementary school? They don’t seem to want to remember, and we discover that maybe we’ve found that one thing that they’re not ready to do.

The blocks that come up with clients are not really something we can blame on them. The mind often protects people from the truth of what has happened to them, particularly when the events in question were far too much for any person’s psyche to bear. It seems reasonable, then, for clients to put up a “wall” to protect themselves from revisiting memories of being severely traumatized.

Many psychological conditions, ranging from mild anxiety and depression to narcissism and dissociation, often lead to the life difficulties that bring people to therapy. When we first meet clients with these complaints, it might seem as though they’re ready to do just about anything to change, so they can make their lives better.

We begin with talking, taking a history, carefully listening for clues that might help us make a diagnosis and formulate a treatment plan. Then, once the work begins, we often hit a wall. Why can’t the client seem to remember a certain time of life? What exactly happened in that childhood home, or in the elementary school? They don’t seem to want to remember, and we discover that maybe we’ve found that one thing that they’re not ready to do.

The blocks that come up with clients are not really something we can blame on them. The mind often protects people from the truth of what has happened to them, particularly when the events in question were far too much for any person’s psyche to bear. It seems reasonable, then, for clients to put up a “wall” to protect themselves from revisiting memories of being severely traumatized.

A client’s defense: the “trauma-self”

In their 2016 article, The trauma-self and its resistances in psychotherapy , authors Erdinc Ozturk and Vedat Sar identify the trauma-self as

“...a front-line construct which hides further psychopathological contents and hinders the entrance to it (Ozturk and Sar, 2016).”

This construct, which most therapists would perceive to be a “block,” is actually a part of the client’s “wall” against the painful memories of traumatic experiences. The client tries to skip over the traumatic experience, and continue to develop and transform without processing it. This, not surprisingly, is not an effective path to growth and self-actualization.

This kind of separation from the actual experience often results in many of the problems clients bring to therapy, including:

• depression
• feeling “abnormal”
• being afraid of “going crazy”
• becoming incapable of forming form healthy attachments
• narcissism
• dissociation
• addiction and relationship problems

In order to overcome defensive and undesirable behaviors such as these, the client will need to go back to the traumatic memories and process them so that they can be properly overcome and appropriately integrated into the person’s life experience. This is not easy for a person to do.

Therapists engaging solely in talk therapy, as we mentioned, will often encounter a block that can take quite some time to overcome.

Healing: a miracle that can happen every day

It’s fairly easy to see how, once a client can go back to a traumatic experience and disarm its potential to overpower the client’s life, that the healing process can be accelerated. Hypnotherapy helps the client to go behind that wall that has been built up, and tear it down so that the traumatic memory can be placed into context. Even more important, new ideas about self-assessment and self-control can be established through positive affirmation.

The relaxed state that hypnotherapy creates for the client permits clear communication between the subconscious and conscious parts of the mind. This, in turn, enables the client to make sense out of confusing and upsetting experiences, place them in context, and integrate them in a manner that allows them to discard the facade of the “trauma-self.”

Hypnotherapy empowers the client, and it makes it easier for the therapist to assist the client as they undergo the process of healing from trauma. Hypnotherapy is an extremely powerful tool for therapists, but thankfully, it’s quite easy to learn.

Original Post: https://web.wellness-institute.org/blog/when-talking-isnt-enough-using-hypnotherapy-to-break-through-the-resistance-of-the-trauma-self