Hypnotherapy Associates Blog

May 2013

• SOCIAL PHOBIA? HOW TO MAKE MAY A TIME OF FUN INSTEAD OF FEAR

  14
  May

  by on Tue 14 May 2013 17:53:42 GMT

  May - time of Flowers and Fun!
  
  How can we still have fun while coping with the daily tasks of life, not to mention work and family? Well, one way of having fun is to make social contact with friends and acquaintances through enjoyable activities.   One thing worth remembering is that social contact is often free - it costs nothing to visit or phone a friend. 

  But what about if you have a phobia about socialising, which means that instead of having fun you end up feeling very anxious? It may surprise you to know that very many people have social phobias.   If you do it's hard to have fun in the way that you would like to.   Instead of enjoying social contact, you tend to avoid it and find your self becoming more and more isolated. Being isolated is not fun and it can be lonely too. 

  I started this blog by saying that May can be the time for flowers...and fun.   It may sometimes be noted that young children have fun naturally.   They want to connect with people and, even before going to school, if they are taken to a playground or playgroup, they will naturally gravitate to other children, given time to settle, from the age of about 3 or 4.   Before that age children tend to play alongside each other rather than connecting directly, because they need the security of the main carer before they develop the maturity to be able to play directly with other children.
  
  Someone may develop a social phobia because of something that happened when they were still a child, or some other event in adulthood that was unpleasant and put them off connecting with others.   By using hypnotherapy, it is possible to find ways of coming to terms with that unpleasnat experience, whether from childhood or later on, and be able to move forward so as to enjoy the present and look forward to a future feelng much more confident in a social setting.   Hypnotherapy is very relaxing and enables people to much more easily come to terms with difficult past experiences and put these experiences in the past where they belong.  

  When you are very relaxed in the state of hypnosis, it is then possible to visualise the kind of social experiences you would most like to have, in a realistic and satisfactory way.   You may have heard that pilots are trained to fly aeroplanes by simulating flights? Well, this is true. The brain reacts in exactly the same way when simulating an experience as when actually having that experience. Through hypnosis, someone is enabled to not only visualise but to hear and see the experience and 'anchor' it, just like clicking onto a file in a computer.   It is sometimes said that the brain is like a computer.   Well, this is true, but the brain is a hundred times more complex than any computer, and consequently more powerful too.   It is said that we only use one tenth of the capability of our brain power!   Imagine what you could do if you were able to acccess more that power? Well, through hypnotherapy you can, you can create the experiences you would like to have through simulatiion and, as long as they are realistic, your brain will file away that simulation and enable you to work towards it over the next days and weeks, without even realising you are doing so! That is, your brain will act unconsciouly to produce the kind of experiences you TELL it to.   That is why it is important to come to terms with unpleasant experiences and put them behind you, so that you can imagine the pleasant experiences you would like to have in the future.  
  
  So be sure you  are aware whether you are giving yourself negative or POSITIVE messages - because if you give it a negative message like: "I'm never going to be able to strike up a conversation with a new person at the party I've been invited to" - then you won't!  Whereas if you give your brain a POSITIVE message about the forthcoming party - and you can pick your own message to suit you - your brain will obey you obligingly and give you that pleasant experience when you attend the party!
  
  So here's to a summer of fun - feeling emotionally healthy, happy and relaxed!