Healer, Heal Thyself

I just finished my hypnotherapy training, level II. So much to remember! But to tell the truth, it’s not as much about remembering facts and techniques, as being confronted with my own issues. I’m not alone, pretty much every one of us seem to be dealing with a certain amount of overwhelm. From my personal, and selfish, perspective, I feel that the more you allow yourself to deal with your stuff now, the better you’ll be able to understand and work with your clients later. I can’t help but feel that walling yourself off from the process during training will be counterproductive in the long run, the stuff you refuse to deal with now will come to haunt you later.

I think I’ve mentioned before how much of my own stuff comes up while I’m engaged in these studies, but it’s interesting to note that this training is somewhat different than most courses of study, because we don’t study illnesses, per se, but therapeutic techniques that can be applied to a range of conditions. And we do exercises were we gain experience being both the therapist and the client. For instance, last week we were working with a technique called Soul Families, where you work to heal your relationships with relatives. For our exercise we used parents and grandparents. (Working with father and mother in separate sessions) In my case, I found that I could do the work just fine with my dad as the target, but I could not work with my mother at all. I just could not envision her as anything but the mess I she was in her later years.

When the exercise was over, I had an Ah Ha moment: I had not realized that I still could not forgive my mother! It’s funny how I never noticed that before. I always considered my dad to be the worst of the two, but, underneath I held a different opinion. Mom was a much bigger embarrassment and had a much bigger impact on my relationships, especially with women.

This was two weeks ago. At the time, I made a mental note to look into that whole issue, but hadn’t really gotten around to it. Despite that, I noticed this week that something had shifted, and my view of her had undergone a definite change. This week I chose her as the target of another exercise where we contacted a “dearly departed” for healing. (For you purists out there, you could say that I imagined a conversation with my subconscious that allowed me to restructure my memories of that person in order to let go of hurts and grudges, and find peace around that person) When we are the “client” in this exercise, we chose a person, then write questions for the “therapist” to ask that person while we are in trance. In my case, the process of formulating the questions led me to consider that the few facts I had of her life could be interpreted in a very different than I always assumed. Maybe she was actually the victim serious trauma, and was surviving as best she could, without and any treatment or even any recognition of her pain. Put in that light, the facts of her life make a lot more sense, and allow me room for understanding and, perhaps, forgiveness.

Everybody’s experience is different, and your milage may vary, but I have found that studying hypnotherapy, in this way, to be a profoundly healing experience, in a way that studying “standard” medicine could not be. I can only hope that this translates into being a better resource for my clients.