A lot of our students have asked the question: “What can I treat as a hypnotist or a hypnotherapist?”
The answer is: basically all kinds of things, provided you don’t deal with disorders.
You might think that’s a huge issue. Most of our potential clients seek to get rid of disorders such as depression, specific anxiety conditions and other psychological diagnoses. What you need to understand, though, is that these words are nothing but labels.
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Not Our Circus
In a recent Youtube video, Mike explained a funny pattern interrupt used to dismiss a person who’s trying to get you to do something that isn’t your responsibility. We ought to adopt a similar approach when it comes to specific disorders diagnosed by other health care professionals.
DON’T – Prescribe, Diagnose or Treat for Specific Deseases
These three "don't's" are our golden rule for working with clients safely. If you don't take these precautions, you may be in for a lawsuit. So pay attention!
Don't prescribe means that you mustn't tell the person to take anything into their body. Even if you're just telling them to drink more water, that counts as a prescription, which we aren't allowed to do.
As for don't diagnose and don't treat for specific deseases, they basically mean we aren't allowed to label a person with a specific medical condition and neither to treat for one, even if that label was given by somebody else.
In most places, if you aren’t a certified doctor or psychologist, you aren’t legally allowed to diagnose or treat conditions such as depression. The key to recognizing if you’re stepping out of the scope of hypnosis is by checking if your client is coming to you with a specific label for the problem they'd wish to get solved. Obviously, you don't want to place such a label yourself either.
Things like OCD, bipolar disorder and the aforementioned depression are examples of these labels. But these are all things hypnosis can indeed help with, so how can you see clients suffering from these conditions without breaking any laws? Luckily, we don’t really need these labels to work.
These diagnoses have their function in the field of medicine, but they aren’t really useful for us as hypnotists. Our job is to use hypnosis to help people live better lives, not treat conditions defined by specific labels. The fact that we can’t treat depression shouldn’t stop us one bit from helping people who are depressed.
The reason for that is simple: just because we can’t help them with their depression, it doesn’t mean we can’t help them feel happier. The same goes for a person who is diagnosed with morbid obesity. There’s nothing stopping you from helping them lose weight, even though you’re not supposed to deal directly with the “morbid obesity” part of the problem.
To make it even more clear, instead of continuing to explain about the things we can’t do, let’s start talking about how we can indeed help people using hypnosis.
What Can Hypnosis Help With?
As we've discussed, we don’t care what a doctor or a psychologist has labeled their problem as. We don’t deal with labels; but we do care about their behaviors, beliefs and emotions.
Behaviors, Beliefs and Emotions
Let’s go back to the morbid obesity example. As we mentioned, when a client diagnosed with obesity comes to see you, what they’re really looking for is for you to help them lose weight. You may discover, as you interview them, that they have food cravings (in most cases, sugar) that need to be dealt with; and that’s something we can help them with no problem.
As you see, their diagnosis didn’t make one bit of a difference in the outcome of your work together. They came to you with an objective in mind and they got what they wanted. That’s what we do: we help people move from current undesirable conditions to more healthy and desirable ones. Whatever they call it, that doesn’t matter at all.
That's behavior, but what about beliefs?
You may find that issues such as depression and anxiety are rooted in deep self-esteem issues. Self-esteem, in essence, is a set of detrimental beliefs about oneself. They may think they aren’t good enough or that they’re an evil person. You’ll discover exactly what these beliefs are using the NLP meta model (click here to read full article).
Hypnosis is a more than adequate tool to reshape those beliefs into more functional and empowering ones. And if that happens to have a positive effect on their so-called “depression”; again, that’s not our circus 😉
It’s All About Feeling
All of these issues involve emotions to some degree. Depression is frequently linked to sadness and anxiety is closely related to fear and anticipation. None of these emotions can be considered a diagnosis or a “label”. These are words belonging to the English language that we’ve always used to express how we feel and what we experience in everyday life.
That means emotions are everybody’s business, not just doctors’ or psychologists’. As long as you keep addressing your client’s emotions while refraining from all else, you shouldn’t have any problems.
In Conclusion
We talked a lot about how hypnosis can help people with their problems in this article. Did any of it catch your attention? Would you be interested in learning more? Then you should definitely check out the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy. Our academy is the gold standard for online hypnosis training, designed to boost your hypnosis skills by several degrees, whether you’re a total beginner or an already experienced hypnotist.
In MMHA, we aren’t just going to teach you how to read scripts at people or give them a mechanical sequence of instructions. Instead, you’ll learn the very principles that make hypnosis work flawlessly. With 24 lesson modules packed with useful information, the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy is the ultimate hypnosis training program, all at an affordable monthly payment (cancel anytime).
Click here to join MMHA and get a 14-day FREE trial.
