Hypnotherapy can help save or improving love relationships.
This is the first in a series of blog posts about how hypnotherapy can improve all kinds of relationships – from intimate, love relationships to workplace relationships.
“Marriage is not just spiritual communion. It’s also remembering to take out the trash.” – Dr. Joyce Brothers
Practically, everyone wants to be in a solid, intimate, loving relationship. Being happy with a partner colors the rest of life and seems to make life worth living. Lasting love, however, takes work and has a lot in common with cultivating a garden. Human beings, like plants, grow best when they are nurtured in an appropriate way. Daisies don’t like to be treated like roses. Lemons don’t grow the same way as beets.
When we grow a plant, we don't think about ourselves and what we need – we only think about what’s right for the plant. Human love is not such a one-way street. So ideally, in a romantic pair, each partner treats the other like a plant to be cultivated and also receives the right kind of nurturing.
What are the five love languages?
In the groundbreaking 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, author Gary Chapman outlines five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love—or, to use my garden analogy, ways that human beings nurture and accept nurturing. The ways are: 1) words of affirmation, 2) acts of service, 3) gifts, 4) quality time, and 5) physical touch. So, most relationships can benefit just by determining how the partners like to express and receive love and then giving them what they want.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? All we have to do is change our behavior. However, changing behavior is not as simple as it seems. Subconscious programming—that is, belief systems that guide our behavior or interpretation of events—has developed throughout our entire lives. Even our experiences in the womb or at birth can imprint our perceptions and behaviors. And this is a good thing because it’s how our minds learn to what works and what doesn’t, as well as how to protect ourselves. The subconscious, however, fills 95% of the mind’s activity, and the trouble with the subconscious mind is that it's not always correct. Learn How Hypnotherapy works.
Can hypnotherapy help me treat my partner better?
Have you ever heard that it’s common to choose life partners who share similarities with your parents? That theory goes back to Sigmund Freud, but it’s also been backed up in modern research. And while it may be true that your partner does resemble one or both of your parents, the fact is that he or she is not your parent. If you have trauma associated with a parent, you may seek out a partner whose traits require you to work through that trauma. On the other hand, you may be projecting attitudes or behavior onto your partner that simply isn’t there. For example, if a woman’s father cheated on her mother, she may expect her husband to cheat on her, whether or not he’s actually inclined to do so. If a man’s mother is domineering, he may accuse his wife of being a b___h, whether or not her behavior is in fact overbearing.
So, it’s actually important to recognize that our perception of another’s behavior is strongly influenced by our own past experience and that our love relationships are strongly influenced by our earliest experiences of love. That piece of understanding can be daunting to a couple who want more love and understanding in the partnership. What’s real? How am I being perceived? Am I hurting him? Or is he hurting me?
Don’t tell me I’ve grown up to be just like my mother?
People also project the expectations or behavior of their parents onto themselves. For example, a woman whose mother was sick in her childhood might grow up expecting to take care of others before herself, or she might expect to be sick and require the care of others more than she actually needs. In any case, such expectations could be a strain on her loving relationship because she’s seeing it through the lens of the past.
Hypnotherapy can help individuals quickly unpack their earliest relationships and even neutralize their emotional memories of trauma. It can also help individuals separate themselves and their behavior from false expectations. In so doing, a client discards false belief systems and reconnects them with innate values. In other words, they become more themselves and are therefore more willing participants in the relationship. Because they are dealing with what’s actually there, and not with a false perception or trying to heal a false wound, they are better equipped to really see the partner and treat their partner with kindness and compassion. Having freed themselves from past traumas and expectations, clients also have more compassion for themselves and see themselves in a positive light.
What about traumatic relationships?
Naturally, a relationship that is heading toward a breakup or divorce has baggage from within the relationship itself. Fights over money, child rearing, and religious and political values can leave what seems like permanent scars on a relationship. Some wounds can be so deep that it feels impossible for one or both partners to start over.
Of course, some relationships should end – or at least to take a long, long break until the partners have steadied themselves and acknowledged/corrected their wrongful behavior. Situations in which there is substance abuse or domestic violence, for example, are not easily healed with hypnosis—or any kind of therapy—and sometimes it’s best for people to just move on.
However, most people do want to cultivate the garden of their loving relationship. They just need help. They need help, not only putting their separate pasts behind them, but also their past together. Perhaps there has been trauma outside of their marriage that affected it – such as job loss, infertility, death in the family, illness of a partner or a child—these experiences can build up resentment, anger, and fear. One or both partners might be wondering if "for better or worse" meant giving up all their hopes and dreams.
In such cases, hypnotherapy can help clients neutralize highly charged memories and come together again. For people with spiritual or religious beliefs, hypnosis can help them reconnect to God or get in touch with a higher power that gives them the courage to go through unexpected life challenges. Hypnosis can also give individuals the tools to handle stress better, to change how they perceive stress, and to even find meaning in it. Events that are perceived as stress tend to weigh an individual down. However, when people experience events as challenges, they become energized and feel proud of themselves for embracing the challenge.
On a problematic relationship? No doubt, hypnotherapy can help you.
How does hypnotherapy work?
After a lengthy intake interview, a hypnotherapist will start to shape a plan for the types of sessions that can help the client. The approach should be highly individual, as each person is unique and has different needs. Depending on the focus of the session, the therapy may include affirmations, guided meditations that feel like interactive stories, or even regressions in which a client returns to key moments in his or her life. A session may also be a combination of these. Clients usually leave with some kind of recording that they listen to again and again to instill the new behavior or outlook.
Hypnotherapy is ideal for people who know that they are getting in their own way. Such people observe their own behavior and thought processes and see that it is causing harm to the relationship. Hypnotherapy is less good for people who have no idea what’s wrong. These clients may benefit from traditional marriage counseling so that they can learn, through the mediation a therapist provides, how their partner experiences their behavior. Most importantly, hypnosis never works if a client doesn’t want it to. For example, it’s a bad idea for a wife to haul in a husband to make him change. For the right client, however, hypnotherapy is a quick and affordable way to make change and find peace in a loving relationship.
Seek the help you need.
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