Social Anxiety/Hypnotherapy

[4ndr3w]

I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder around 5 months ago and have been on betablockers to try and calm the symptoms. I decided that i didnt want to take these and decided to deal with it alone. Ive managed to turn my life around and im getting to where i want to be.

 

However ive hit a major snag, ive exhausted everything i think is wrong with me. What i mean is, getting up to the stage where i am i could see things that were wrong with me that i needed to overcomb. However now i cant see them, its something inside me now which is still causing these feelings i have. Im at my wits end now mainly because i feel so hopeless.

 

I heard about hypnotherapy and people have said it can be used to treat social phobias and anxiety. I emailed a place near me that specialises in the treatment and he sent me a friendly email back just with some information and it all sounded great. However im very skeptical about this stuff and wondered if anyone had any experience with hypnotherapy.

 

Thanks in advance

 

aj

[Finchabald]

i havn't personally experienced it but a friend of mine had it to help him quit smoking and that was 9 months ago and he hasn't even wanted a ciggarette since then. However i also know that it doesn't work on everybody so if it doesn't work on you then you may need to find an alternative method. good luck.

[Mr. Cactus]

Yes, it works and it works well. I don't know how much you already know, but the term hypnotherapy probably conjures up the wrong image for a lot of people. The basic process is that you learn to induce your body into a state of total physical relaxation. Once you have learned how to do that, you then use a specific process of mental imagery which you are also taught. This basically involves continually "switching" your mind from an imagined, peaceful scene back to a scene that you find stressful (ie, a social situation in your case). You basically run through a whole heap of imagined scenarios during each "session", switching back and forth. You ultimately reach a point where you can visualise the stressful scenes in a total state of physical relaxation. Then, when you finally do the thing for real, your body is "programmed" to enter into that same relaxed state. It can often take from 3 to 6 months hard work before you can start to see positive results though. And it does take a lot of effort too. It requires a lot of concentration to be able to block everything from your mind and discipline yourself to imagine the specific scenes correctly. It might not cure you 100%, but it can certainly make things better than they are. I tend to think people who suffer these sorts of anxieties are "made" that way and sometimes they can't be completely cured, although they can be substantially cured.

 

I learned it when I was a teenager so that I could stop taking beta blockers when I went on stage to perform solo music recitials. It works well. It never cured me to the point where I still felt totally happy about getting up on stage, but before that I was so petrified I almost would have done anything to avoid it. So it helped a lot. The only thing is (and this is purely my own opinion), it's not necessarily something you can just do for 6 months and that is it. You might find you need to do it for the rest of your life - maybe because like me your personally is just an "anxious" one. So you might find yourself slowly drifting back to the way you were if you were to stop. That said, there are other benefits too - less stress, a more calm demeanour, lower blood pressure, etc.