Goblins and ghouls are coming – as they have every year for millennia. I know because my kids have been talking for weeks about what to wear for Halloween. My daughter wants to be a super-spy and my son has chosen Freddy Krueger.
Actually, dressing up – or guising as it was called – is an ancient tradition. Celtic people apparently believed the autumn festival time offered an opportunity for the dead and assorted spirits to pass from their realms into this one, and dressing up like them was a protection.
All the same, dressing up like someone else can be fun. Throughout the year, I meet people who also want to be someone else; or at least want to change an important aspect of who they are now. As Woody Allen once said: “My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else.”
If you want to change a part of your life, the first step is being able to explore how that part is currently not getting you the results you want. I suppose it’s like opening the hood of a car and actually looking at the machinery. The best way that I know of how to do that – not the only way – is through mindfulness.
With mindfulness you stop paying attention to the story that you’ve been telling yourself. The content doesn’t really matter that much. Person A is afraid of dogs and person B is afraid of pickles. Yet in both cases there is a structure to how each individual is making themselves afraid, and mindfulness is an excellent way to explore that structure.
The next step is about creatively imaging things in a way that makes you salivate. You know how good menus stimulate your imagination so that you can practically savour the food? Well, utilising your imagination so that the new you is equally irresistible eliminates the need for self-discipline at this stage. Who needs discipline to eat something delicious? Hypnosis is the best way I know of to utilise your imagination.
A woman with a crippling clown phobia has agreed to pose with one in her face for a questionable photoshoot.
She seems scared (Picture: Mercury Press)
Courtney Blighton, 18, said she had to leave her flat in Leeds city centre and put her studies on hold after the numerous ‘killer clown’ sightings across the country.
Here is the English Lit student, whose clown fear seriously disrupted her life, until she was cured with hypnotherapy.
I can’t remember it starting at a certain point, but when I was a child I absolutely hated clowns,’ she said, standing next to a clown.
‘If I ever saw one on TV it used to freak me out so much, I would get really scared.
‘I used to cry and have nightmares about them.’
She then explained that she underwent hypnotherapy to get rid of her fear of clowns.
a crippling clown phobia was left HOUSEBOUND during this monthís terrifying killer clown craze. The numerous ëkiller clowní sightings which gripped the UK earlier this month forced 18-year-old Courtney Blighton to leave her Leeds city centre flat and put her studies on hold. And the teenagerís lifelong fear of clowns ñ known as coulrophobia ñ meant she would not step outside mum Lorna Blightonís home in nearby Menston, West Yorks, for more than a week. But English Literature student Courtney is fearful no more after being hypnotised to make her forget her phobia ñ and she is even planning to go clubbing in fancy dress this Halloween. Courtney’s hypnotherapist Krystyna Szczygiel said: ‘When Courtney first spoke to me she couldn’t even look at a picture of a clown without feeling anxious.
‘We used hypnotherapy to help gain control over her thought processes and feelings to create permanent positive change.
‘Changes can occur within moments in the right setting.’
Now that her coulrophobia is gone, Courtney is able to have a bit of fun and pose in photos like these
It may sound ridiculous, but it was pretty effective.
Source gettyimages
I’ve had this habit of messing with my pores that I haven’t quite been able to shake since I started doing it at the age of 15. It wasn’t to the point that I was pulling actual chunks of skin off my face (apologies for the visual), but if there were something, anything, trapped inside a pore, you better believe I would not ease up until I freed it. I would analyze and zero in on each specific spot, only to end up stepping away from the mirror defeated, red-faced, and with certain half moon-shaped nail marks indented into my skin. The habit got better year by year, but it was still present, and so freaking embarrassing at that.
Whispers around the internet claimed that hypnotherapy could help deal with the issue—people swore it helped them quit smoking, pulling out their hair, picking at their nails, and more, so with that, I decided to hit up hypnotherapist and stress relief expert Grace Smith. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
Perhaps due to the magic shows you see on cruise ships, people assume hypnotherapy will prompt them to make animal noises until some Gob Bluth a la Arrested Development type snaps his fingers, and you return to the real world. Smith assured me that the real deal was nothing like that.
“Hypnotherapy is more along the lines of meditation with a goal, and the way it works is that I help people relax into a state where they feel safe,” Smith explains. “Most people try to make change when they’re really stressed out, angry, and fed up, but when you’re coming from that state, your subconscious isn’t going to make a lasting change because you’re in panic survival mode, whereas when you’re relaxed, you become open to suggestion.”
For the longest time, I just thought I had terrible skin—constantly breaking out and in belief that I was still going through puberty, so I felt compelled to pick at it, or punish it for being bad, if you will. Whether it’s hair-pulling, or picking at either your cuticles or skin, Grace assure me that it was all driven by anxiety, which made total sense. On the nights I happened to be freaking out about something, I’d spend the most time in the magnifying mirror. In hypnotherapy, she would change the habit from the subconscious level, and your logical mind would follow accordingly.
“There’s some part of us that feels good when we squeeze that whitehead out, it’s weird. The conscious, logical mind knows it’s not good for us, but the subconscious doesn’t, so that’w why these behaviors continue,” she tells me. “Logic means nothing to the subconscious mind. It’s all about emotion and habit. We have to tell the subconscious that no matter how good the emotional release may be, it’s actually bad for us, but we can only have that conversation when we’re feeling safe.”
It had worked for Smith’s clients in the past—she told me of a young girl she previously worked with, who had problems with pulling out her eyelashes, and was able to stop after one session (and she has the adorable new school pictures to prove it). Of course, you have to want to make the change in order for the session to work.
“If someone wants to quit, they’ll be able to do it in a few sessions, whereas if a woman is bringing her teenage son to me and asking me to make him stop smoking because he doesn’t want to quit, it can take almost 50 sessions,” she says. “The efficacy of hypnosis is based on how much you want the result.”
Suffice it to say that I really wanted it.
Grace and I had our session over FaceTime, so after I commandeered one of the focus rooms at the office, we settled in. She told me that if I did have external thoughts that didn’t completely have to do with the session, that was fine, and just to go with it. She began talking me down, and getting me to a calmer, more meditative state. Despite the noise and activities happening outside of my little pod, I was able to relax and listen to her, guiding me to visualize a safe space.
My skin was my friend, she told me. We were going to have a better relationship, I would leave it alone, and I promised to behave. It may sound ridiculous, but it was pretty effective.
