My goal in working with clients is not just the insights and progress gained in that session. Those alone can be transformational, for more quickly than conventional therapy, but my mission is to always empower clients to heal themselves. The goal is to not need me.
Healing is a process that takes time, certainly. Some deep trauma can take years to heal. At the same time, the goal of all therapy is to arrive at a destination of some kind, often times a goal set by a client (your chances of achieving your therapeutic goals are higher if you actually set them).
If you were building a house. you’d measure the success of the builder by the speed and quality of their building. Quality of therapy is subjective, but speed is something the entire therapeutic community should always be thinking about.
My goal is to have my clients be empowered to stop working wtih me as soon as possible. To feel like they got what they came for. And to assist with that, there are a few key principles that I hope every one of my clients learns, not just in theory, but in a pracitcal way that they can apply to their lives.
1. Buddhist Philosophy
Vipassana meditaiton was life changing for me – it offered me practical tools for emotional self regulation that many others promised and didnt’ deliver. What the bedrock of viapassna’s effectivenss is its roots in Buddhist philosphy – a non-nonsense approach that takes a pragmatic, real-world approach to things as they are, not as we want them to be.
Accepting what is as a starting point. Addressing the problems of human suffering – and recognizing that attaching to things by either craving them or having aversions to them is the source of all the unhappiness in the world.
When I work with clients, I encourage them to take this same pragmatic approach to life, observing things as they are. And I empower them to use non-attachment as a means to increase their “emotional pain tolerance” and handle the hard times with more grace, knowing that “this too shall pass”.
2. Meditation and progressive relaxation
Learning to relax your body and calm your mind is a skill that can be learned and improved upon. By practicing progressive relaxation and guided meditation, my clients learn that they can relax even when they thought “they aren’t able to”.
There are practical techniques that can make relaxing and focusing your mind a lot easier, and you often don’t realize what you’re capable of until you actually do it.
The benefits of meditation are scientifically proven and quantifiable, you can often feel the difference almost immediately. But it can be hard to know where to start, and having a guide get you off to a good start is a great way to break through into this highly beneficial practice.
3. Rapid mindset shifts
Our mind can get caught up in very specific, unproductive ruts. Narratives that color our entire existence. Moods that affect our choices and creativity.
With Hishalmoot, you realize just how quickly you can snap out of an unproductive state and into a more beneficial one. Through guided imagery and suggestion, you can quickly change your attitude towards things, and your mood can soon follow. This is a key tenet of NLP and is a transformative experience to have had.
4. Reconnect to your inner child
So much of our emotional challenges in life relate to unmet childhood needs. Learning to deliberately recognize, validate, and attend to the needs of our inner child can be empowering and deeply healing. It’s a way of looking at yourself in a more compassionate light, and a mindset you can continue to adopt when times get tough even if you’re not actually working with a healer.
5. The power of inner dialogue
Hishtalmoot teaches you that you have all the answers, you just need to ask the questions. You can have full fledged conversations with yourself to discover what you want, what you’re afraid of, and what’s holding you back.
Within a few sessions, you’ll learn to identify different “parts” in yourself, embrace and accept them, and then have meaningful and respectful dialogue with them. This is easier to do with a guide, but is definitely possible to do alone. You can integrate may of the theories espoused by IFS therapy in your own life, on your own.
6. Deeper integration
Once you work with hypnotherapy, you realize just how much more is going on in your mind than just your conscious, analytical thoughts. You realize that you can actually “send the insights deeper” when you have them, by closing your eyes, relaxing, being open to influence, and using the powers of your imagination.
I use hypnosis techniques even when working with non-hypnotherapy mental health practitioners. I’d close my eyes and drop in to my body when working with my therapists and life coaches. I explained what I was doing, and leveraged their help and insights to have an even deeper impact on me.
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Many of these benefits can initially be experienced in a single session, it may take a few more to integrate. I often say that I’d rather the whole world experience just three or four sessions instead of working with a few clients for longer (not that I don’t love my long-term relationships with my clients and watching them transform and grow over time).
