Children and Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can greatly assist children from the age of four years old.

I often get asked the question ” Can children benefit from Hypnotherapy?”  The answer is definitely yes. Children have great imaginations and this seems to assist with their ability to respond to this type of therapy well.
Some of the problems that I work on with children regularly are:

Lack of confidence

Sleep Issues

Food Phobias

Sporting focus

Post operative recovery

Fears and anxieties

Exam recall

Emotional distress

and many more.

Childrens Sleep Therapy
Very young children have their personal therapy recorded onto a CD accompanied with sleep enhancing music. This therapy is played to them while they are in the first stages of sleep each night.

Many children enjoy also listening to their CD during the day and again as a bed time ritual to help them go to sleep at night.

I have worked with many children, from the age of four onwards, for many childhood related issues including  fear and anxiety. Children from the age of eight can find it easy to go into hypnosis, but it is not always easy to get a very young child to focus and relax deeply for any great length of time.

For this reason I use sleep hypnotherapy  where they have their carefully structured therapy played to them on CD each night as they go into and for the first 30 minutes or so of sleep.

Children can often fear situations just because they are new and they lack confidence in the unknown. They can also be fearful because they have had a negative experience and have lost confidence, such as falling off the family pony while learning to trot. They then develop a fear of riding at the trot again and suffer anxiety around trotting which prevents them from progressing with their riding at the same pace that would have occurred had they not fallen off.

Sometimes just tension lone can be a huge factor for children. Take the familiar situation with the child who cries and has anxiety about going into the ring at pony club events even though they may tend to do well once they are in there. The normal nerves, butterflies or excitement have spiralled into a huge build up of tension and then produce tears, tantrums and emotional outbursts. Parents, in particular, can find this type of behaviour stressful for them and often they don’t realise that this type of behaviour can actually be one of the symptoms of an anxiety attack.

All of the children in these scenarios have begun to talk to themselves in a negative way without realising it. Thoughts such as “I can’t “ “ I am not good enough” “I will get hurt” have become the sound track that they are playing over and over in their head. Self talk, or what you say to yourself in your own private thoughts may not necessarily be true but they do often become self fulfilling prophesies if you repeat them to yourself enough.

All of these situations can be assisted with Hypnotherapy. By simply increasing confidence in general, the child who is learning to ride can become more game to try new things and then gain further confidence quickly through their successes.

For the child who has had a negative experience or fall, increasing confidence around specific situations such as when they are about to trot and then while in trot, and tagging positive emotions to the experience, can help them to forget the fear and begin to relax again. Once again, confidence is increased quickly once they have experienced success.

For the child who is overly emotional before going into the ring, positive suggestions in their therapy about being deeply relaxed at this time and also giving them a trigger word that helps the body and mind to relax if they begin to feel anxious can help the child to become calmer in these situations. Parents can also assist by reinforcing the trigger word when they see any anxiety beginning.

Most children really enjoy having their own personalised therapy CD. Often the suggestions around anxiety reduction and increasing confidence, naturally spills into other aspects of a child’s life with friends, social situations and school. Parents often comment that their child just seem more relaxed and often that they are sleeping better.

If your child is experiencing fear or anxiety while riding, or in any other aspect of their life, consider Hypnotherapy to help them to discover their untapped potential. Provided you see a qualified and experienced Hypnotherapist, it is a safe and effective way to deal with stress related problems, increase confidence and overcome fears and phobias.

If your child has a problem that is disturbing their positive sense of well being or is holding them back, then give me a call me to see if Hypnotherapy could be the answer for you and your child.