Making changes to reduce anxiety

One of the first things I do when I meet a new client in the therapy room is to make it clear that hypnotherapy isn’t something I ‘do to them’. It’s a collaborative process where I help the client see how to make the changes necessary to reduce their anxiety.

And the reason we Solution Focused Hypnotherapists take this collaborative approach is so that we can provide our clients with skills for life. Rather than just dealing with the issue currently facing them, we show them how to think and act differently, so they can cope better with other issues in the future.

And the key here is thinking and acting differently. Occasionally I meet a client who wants to reduce their debilitating anxiety, and hopes to achieve that without adapting their current responses to situations. When I explain how the brain works, they’re able to see that their thoughts and actions are actually creating their current reality and they’re much more open to the possibility of change.

It may be that a mature client has a belief that they’re too old to change, and I’m able to reassure them that our brains remain ‘re-wirable’ for our entire lives. Even if we live to be over 100, it’s never too late to make new connections between the nerve cells in our brains.

Most clients get it, though. They’re ready and willing to change. They just need a guide to help them rewire their brains so they can enjoy a more fulfilling experience of life.

And once a client is prepared to change, it’s then a matter of helping them to take small, incremental steps towards an anxiety-free future. We keep each step small and manageable because of a feature of our brains that causes them to register change as a threat. If we were to encourage larger scale changes, we run the risk of putting the client’s brain on red alert and triggering the fight-flight-freeze response. And that’s likely to create anxiety.

It’s the reason we feel anxious when wide-reaching changes are thrust upon us, like redundancy or a bereavement. It’s also the reason we stay in unhelpful situations, like a job that we hate, or a toxic relationship. We have an in-built mechanism that prefers to maintain the status quo rather than do something that might be risky. In this scenario our inner self-talk will go something like, ‘There’s no point in applying for a new job, you don’t have any transferable skills, no one will want to employ you,’ or ‘I don’t want to rock the boat by stopping seeing my friend, what if she badmouths me to all my other friends?’

And, let’s be honest, there’s another factor at play here. Change requires energy and effort. It’s far easier to do what we’ve always done than it is to put the work in to learning a different way of dealing with things. First we have to identify what needs to change, then we have to work out how we want things to be, then we have to take the steps necessary to make that happen, and finally we have to sustain that new way of doing things until it becomes an ingrained habit.

All of that means we have to exert ourselves. It’s uncomfortable, possibly even painful. We have to let go of what was, we have to relinquish our past. And that’s never easy. I, and my Solution Focused colleagues, are quite used to clients expressing their wishes of a better future in terms of what they don’t want. ‘I don’t want to be anxious’,  ‘I don’t want to row with my partner’, ‘I don’t want to be overweight.’ And that negative reinforcement just keeps them stuck in the problem.

Learning to look for solutions means applying some effort to challenge the way you’ve habitually dealt with life’s problems. And that feels strange. But it’s absolutely possible to do, with the right guidance.

In the Solution Focused world, we provide that guidance using specific questioning techniques. They’re phrased entirely positively and are future-oriented. They’re designed to help clients see a clear way forward out of their current difficulty and into a future where their problem has either diminished or evaporated altogether. We don’t provide our clients with direct advice, because we’re not the expert in their lives. They are.

It's our job to tease out what the client’s preferred future looks like and how they’re going to get there. At a pace that suits them. In small, do-able steps. That way it feels achievable and is more likely to materialise.

And you know, the strangest thing is that clients already have the answers within them. At some level they know what they need to do to get themselves out of whatever unhelpful situation they’re in. When we therapists ask the right questions, those answers bubble up to the surface and the client has total clarity about what needs to happen next.

And it’s a total joy to witness those epiphanies, those moments when the client becomes aware that they are the architect of their own future. They’re not stuck in unhelpful patterns of thought or destructive patterns of behaviour. They don’t have to live with the tyranny of anxiety. They’re free to enjoy, rather than endure, life.

What’s more, because they now have the skills to cope with whatever life throws at them, they no longer need therapeutic support. Bonus!