I Don't Treat Anxiety, I Treat The Person Who Feels Anxious
Treating anxiety is a misleading term. It is not the anxiety that is being treated. The anxiety is a result of something that is happening in your mind, a subconscious pattern, a neurological process consisting of electrochemical activity. The anxiety is the effect, and it is the cause that must be treated; treat the cause and the effect changes. I do not treat anxiety; I treat my client.
I once heard hypnosis described as brain surgery without the knives. Hypnotists such as myself are not brain surgeons or neurologists; our work is based on imagination and intuition mixed with a phenomenon called hypnosis. It is an art, not a science. The brain is divided into areas that do certain things, but the mind is not that cut and dry – in the mind, anything can happen – but hypnosis can often be a lot quicker, and it's always a lot less messy and less painful and a lot more fun.
If you come and see me for some hypnotherapy in Worthing, the session is led by you. What worked for my previous client will not necessarily work for you. I have to work out what you are doing that is creating that anxious feeling, and then I need to find the part of your mind doing it and change it.
Last week, I worked with a client who was being affected by an experience she had when she was 5. She described the panic attacks as if they were someone else who would be with her all her life. I spoke with the 5-year-old girl in her mind and asked her to come into the present day and trust the woman that she had become to take care of her. I got her agreement on this, and by the end of the session, she did not feel panicky about certain situations. I took another client to The Village inside her mind, in which she was trapped, and I helped her liberate herself from The Village as described on my Change Your Life page. I've used other methods as well and will use many more over the length of my career. At neither of the above examples was I treating anxiety – I was treating the person who felt anxious.
UPDATE 08/12/25
The Village is a metaphor I used a lot in my early days, but I have gained a lot of experience since then.
I refer to ‘the cause’ in this post, but my language has changed these days. I talk more about changing the story that creates the anxiety, rather than the cause.