The answer is almost certainly yes, but probably not in what you might call the conventional sense! It’s much more about capturing their imagination through a story which is lightly hypnotic … which really just means that they totally engaged in the process.
The best way to think of it is as being in a comfy, relaxed day-dream where they can enjoy an interactive story or fantasy which has some very positive and helpful ideas and suggestions embedded within it.
My child won’t sit still for more than a couple of minutes!
Most people can’t see their three or four year old child sitting still long enough to relax with a hypnotherapist that they don’t even know and I quite agree with them! So what I do with under-fives is to consult with the parent and get lots of information about the problem and then write and record them a hypnotic story specific to the individual child and then give it to them as a CD or MP3.
When should they listen?
The best time to listen is at bedtime every night. It is very gentle and relaxing and very often they don’t hear the end of it before they drift off to sleep. This is a very creative time for the brain to get to work on solutions!
Hypnotic Stories
It’s always a story that directly involves the child and includes people and aspects of their life to captivate their interest. As far as they are concerned it is just a nice bedtime story about them where I might take them off in their imagination to a magic garden to find a special magic pebble that will help them feel brave and strong in activities where they were previously anxious.
They can (in their imagination) put the magic pebble in their pocket and take it with them to nursery school / hospital / to the park / to the dentist and every time they want to feel a bit more brave they can give it a bit of a rub and feel all those amazing brave feelings all over and all the way through.
Or I might let them find the fountain and stand underneath it where they can let the water wash all their worries away and then have the fountain turn into magic golden stars that shower down on them filling them with happy, smiley, safe feelings. Then I could have them look into the pond and see a picture of them going to the park and walking past the dogs feeling so proud of themselves that with Mum and Dad, for example being really impressed.
The proof is in the pudding!
“My daughter was totally dry in the daytime but if we went out anywhere, like the cinema for example, she always felt that she needed to go the toilet every half an hour or so. She got quite anxious that she wouldn’t be able to hold on. Lynda made her a special recording of a story that she listened to for a couple of weeks. We didn’t mention the problem after that and it just disappeared like magic!”
What makes it hypnotic and not just a story?
All the stories will have certain elements in them that, put together, help to get the required results over a period of time. Regular listening is the key to success!
Look out for next week’s blog where I’ll give you some examples of these different elements that, unless you were specifically looking for them you probably might not even notice they were there!
