Hypnotherapy & EMDR to help with stuck emotions.
When the feeling just won't go away.
You may know that the relationship is over, but you still feel heartbroken. You may understand that what happened wasn't your fault, yet shame continues to sit heavily in your body.
You may have experienced rejection, abandonment or loss and find that, months or even years later, the emotional response is still surprisingly strong.
Grief, heartbreak, rejection, abandonment, shame and emotional pain aren't simply thoughts. They can become deeply connected with memories, beliefs, body sensations and nervous-system. This is where hypnotherapy and EMDR can be useful.
Rather than simply talking about what happened, these approaches can help you work with the emotional and unconscious processes that may be keeping the response alive.
Why can an emotion become stuck?
Emotional experiences are stored in more than one way. You remember what happened, but your body may also remember how it felt.
A breakup might leave you with a belief such as “I'm not enough.”
Rejection might become “Nobody really wants me.”
Abandonment might create a constant expectation that people will leave.
Shame can become a feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with you.
After loss, the nervous system can remain attached to what has happened, repeatedly bringing the person, relationship or experience back into your emotional world. Sometimes the original event is obvious. Sometimes the emotion seems much bigger than the event itself. And sometimes you can't even identify exactly why you feel the way you do.
Therapy can help uncover what is underneath the emotion and allow the emotional response to change.
How can Hypnotherapy Help with Stuck Emotions
Hypnotherapy works with the unconscious mind — the part of your mind involved in emotional associations, learned responses, imagination, memories and automatic patterns. You enter a state of focused attention and increased absorption. This can make it easier to access emotional material without having to analyse everything intellectually.
Rather than trying to force yourself to “let go”, hypnotherapy can help you work with the underlying emotional pattern.
For example, if rejection has left you feeling that you are not good enough, therapy can explore the experiences that created that belief and begin developing a different internal response. If you are struggling with heartbreak, hypnotherapy may help reduce the emotional intensity attached to memories of the relationship, while helping you reconnect with your own sense of identity and safety.
With shame, the work may involve separating what happened to you from what you came to believe about yourself because of it.
Hypnotherapy can also be particularly useful for helping the body settle. When the nervous system becomes calmer, it can be easier to think differently, access resources and experience an emotion without becoming overwhelmed by it. Hypnotherapy isn't about forgetting. You don't lose control and you don't erase your memories.
The aim is to change the emotional relationship you have with the memory or experience so that it no longer has the same power over you.
How can EMDR Help with Stuck Emotions
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing — was originally developed as a treatment for trauma and is now widely used in trauma-focused psychotherapy. EMDR works with memories and experiences that remain emotionally disturbing and processes them to the point you can think about the experience or memory and no longer feel the strong emotional charge. It's a fast and effective therapy.
Research is particularly strong for EMDR in PTSD and trauma-related symptoms but it's also highly effective for heartbreak, grief, fear, shame, anger or sadness.
You don't necessarily have to remember a dramatic traumatic event for this to be relevant. Sometimes the important memory is something that may appear relatively ordinary but carried a powerful emotional message:
“I'm unwanted.”
“I'm not good enough.”
“I can't trust anyone.”
“I'm alone.”
“It's my fault.”
During EMDR, you briefly bring an emotionally significant memory, belief or feeling to mind while engaging in bilateral stimulation, such as guided eye movements or alternating taps. After three sessions you are likely to feel vey neutral about what may have been very triggering.
I've had very good results with processing stuck emotions with clients using EMDR, hypnotherapy but also Parts Therapy. Emotions can also be stuck in the body so breathwork and Somatic Therapy can be effective for emotional release.
I tailor sessions according to how you respond and what you need to get the change you are after. Many people come to me to stop smoking or lose weight and end up doing deep emotional therapy that turns their life around.
Diana Joy
Clinical Hypnotherapist, Balmain, Sydney
Advanced Diploma of Clinical Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy, & NLP 10501NAT
IICT Membership #6858852099
