Cognitive Hypnotherapy For Children & Teenagers
Children and teenagers minds are continuously developing and changing as they move gradually towards adulthood, although from a subconscious perspective they usually have most of the capabilities of an adult brain by the time they reach the age of 12 or thereabouts (even if the mental "orchestra" isn't all quite playing together in harmony by this point). During the childhood and teenage period the subconscious mind is continuing to rapidly construct , adapt and change the many thousands of patterns it stores and uses to help keep the youngster safe from harm, and take them towards the things it believes are in their best interests in the immediate and longer term future, based on their experiences and perhaps some natural pre-disposition or genetic bias.
But of course the subconscious can make mistakes in its processing of situations, events, people, or even the way we perceive ourselves. The brain does the best it can with what it has available at the time, but the mind of a 6 year old will usually process a difficult situation quite differently to a 13 year old or a fully-fledged adult. There will often also be differences in how each individual child perceives and reacts.
These early subconscious patterns might be the most useful response that the brain can come up with at the time but they may outlive their usefulness as we get older. Some will naturally drop away as time passes but others (perhaps more difficult or traumatic ones, or patterns related to some of the more fundamental areas of life such as survival) may stick around longer than the youngster and possibly their parents / carers would like.
plays a significant role in our day-to-day lives, and depending to a certain degree on what we are consciously doing, it can be in charge of our actions and behaviours for approaching 90% of our day. It operates very differently to our conscious thought processes. Trance is not some sort of special state - we drop into and out of it all the time, such as when we daydream.
Eating disorders are no different. The subconscious triggers off trance states that, over time, manifest themselves as the diagnosable "boxes" of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and other related eating disorder conditions. These produce changes in a person's eating patterns, exercise levels, mood etc because somewhere along the line the subconscious is attempting to protect the sufferer in some way.
Eating disorders are a special interest area for me. I find them both challenging and highly rewarding and I've worked with many patients with anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disoder over the years. Often (but not always) eating disoders are connected to control issues, either being excessively controlling (sometimes appearing with either classic OCD involving repeated checking / washing of hands etc, or a solely mental form known as Pure-O) or feeling unable to control (or have controlled in the past) a situation, area of life, other people etc.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy has a whole range of tools and techniques to help people with eating disorders at a subconscious level, working through and utilising the patient's own model of the world to understand how they uniquely relate to the problem in their own minds, and helping them to resolve the underlying patterns and stressors. Some previous clients of mine have cracked the ED they have had for many years with just QCH in 5 or 6 sessions.
Others have needed considerably longer and involved the help of other health professionals for medication, CBT or counselling (which can be used without problems alongside QCH), and periods of inpatient stay to recover weight, plus perhaps some carer re-education via the excellent courses run by Jenny Langley (Kent) or Veronica Kamerling (London) based on Janet Treasure's New Maudsley Method.
For more information about Cognitive Hypnotherapy and its growning involvement in eating disoders, you might to take a look at the main Cognitive Hypnotherapy For Eating Disoderssite.