You don’t have to rely on seeing your therapist experience the benefits of hypnosis. By practicing self-hypnosis, you can improve your behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs about yourself and your success in recovery. Learning how to use self-hypnosis as a tool for healing in recovery will allow you to gain better control over your thoughts and experience deep relaxation along the way.
What is Self-Hypnosis?
Self-hypnosis can be used by anyone trying to heal from addiction, trauma, health challenges, phobias, and more. What makes self-hypnosis such a powerful tool to incorporate into your healing and recovery is its ability to reprogram your beliefs. Since your beliefs influence your behavior, creating a set of positive, health-promoting beliefs and using repetition to instill them into your consciousness is key to living a life free of fears and dysfunctional behaviors.
Self-hypnosis is something we engage in every day without even realizing it. Our self-talk, whether full of positive thinking, anxiety, worry, or self-judgment, influences our subconscious beliefs and how we act and perceive ourselves.
We can learn how to mindfully enter into self-hypnosis and use it to positively affect our lives rather than allowing us to sabotage ourselves with negative thinking. What sets self-hypnosis apart from meditation is the intention of having communication with our subconscious mind in self-hypnosis, while meditation is concerned with quieting our conscious minds.
4 Basic Steps to Using Self-Hypnosis in Recovery
Realizing the power of your mind to make your desired outcomes a reality is the first step to unleashing the potential of self-hypnosis in your life. Using self-hypnosis as a tool in recovery is similar to using it for reaching any of your other goals but tailor the hypnotic suggestions to your goals of a successful recovery.
The basic steps to practicing self-hypnosis are as follows:
- Settle into a quiet place where you are comfortable to practice and remove any distractions.
- Begin by taking a few deep breaths and finding a state of deep relaxation. Getting into this state can be done by releasing bodily tension with Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) or a body scan.
- Repeat affirming statements and/or visualize feeling happy and fulfilled as a long-time sober person. These hypnotic phrases can sound like “I am whole,” “I am getting better every day,” or “I am worthy of a happy, beautiful life and don’t need substances for that to happen.” Whatever statement speaks to your story is what you should use.
- Return to a waking state of consciousness and know that a shift has taken hold deep within.
Self-hypnosis allows you to take control of your thoughts by changing your beliefs on a subconscious level. This allows for making massive changes in your life and offers a huge benefit to people in recovery and those healing from many different things. If you or a loved one is struggling to get or remain sober, call Avalon Malibu. Located in Southern California, the staff at Avalon Malibu devote themselves to helping our clients find true healing of the mind, body, and spirit for their addiction or mental health disorder. Through our continuum of care, we offer holistic and clinical treatment options designed to fit all of your needs. For more information, contact us at (844) 857-5992.
