Flore Pleno Hypnotherapy
What is hypnotherapy?
A hypnotic trance is the basis for all work done by a hypnotherapist. It’s a state of deep relaxation, during which, your ability to focus on one thing is much greater than normal.
During hypnosis, it’s easy to relax and block out unwanted thoughts and feelings. This happens because your brain literally begins to work on a different frequency during hypnosis.
The very act of being in a trance is physically and mentally healing, due to it being a sleep-like state. That said, hypnosis is NOT sleep, and contrary to common opinion, very very few people actually fall asleep during hypnosis.
You are in control the whole time. If you want to fidget, cough, scratch your nose or even break wind then it’s up to you. If you want to ‘wake up’ at any point, you can either signal to me to guide you quickly out of the trance, or simply open your eyes.
This has never happened while I’ve been with a client, but I’m telling you that it’s an option so you are fully aware of how completely in control you will always be.
Neither myself nor any other hypnotherapist can make you cluck like a chicken.
Hypnotherapy is what happens when you combine being in a hypnotic trance with meaningful therapeutic intervention. I will tailor this intervention to whatever you need help with.
Depending on the improvements you want to make, I may only see you for one session, or a longer course of treatment may be needed.
A session will typically involve a conversation about the problem, then some hypnotherapy during which you sit or recline in a comfortable position and I talk you into your state of relaxation
Once relaxed, you’ll probably have your eyes closed and you may not need to say much or indeed anything at all until you have been brought round and instructed to open your eyes at the end.
I may set you one or two simple tasks or challenges to do in between sessions, then you are free to go.
After your session, you will remember everything you need to about the session. The following night, many people are pleased to find they sleep very well.
Is it the right treatment for you?
The answer is YES, if:
You are looking for a solution focused way to resolve your difficulties
You want relatively fast change, compared to more traditional talking therapies
You feel that you may already have the answers, but need some help to find them.
You are looking for help that doesn’t require medication
You like to be fully in control at all times. Nothing at all can happen in a hypnotherapy session if you choose not to engage with the process, or if you choose to mentally ‘switch off’ halfway through. This is why I actually love working with people with control issues – they are owning their own power, and often make the best clients!
What I can offer you as a hypnotherapist:
-My time, energy and skill as a fully qualified, insured hypnotherapist. I am a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapists and adhere to their code of ethics for your peace of mind.
-A non-judgemental person to talk to and discuss your problems with
- Treatments that may lead you to intense change for the better
- An individually designed treatment plan, taking into account how much time you have available and whether you would like any ongoing support.
-New ways of thinking that you can adapt and reuse time and time again both now and in the future.
- A therapy that can be fitted safely around existing medical conditions. I am very happy to work alongside doctors or other professionals to provide you with another level of support.
- While I do use metaphors during hypnotherapy, I will do my best to follow the KISS rule whenever you are not in a trance – Keep It Simple & Straightforward. I want you to understand the process – after all, it’s your therapy!
-You may be surprised to find that hypnotherapy is actually quite fun at times!
What I cannot offer you as a hypnotherapist:
- I’m fascinated by the growing body of scientific evidence that supports hypnotherapy and its uses for medical and health purposes. If you are looking for an esoteric or magical therapy involving mystical practices then I am not the right therapist for you. As such, I do not offer past life regression
- I cannot offer miracle cures for anything – all successful hypnotherapy relies on the motivation and engagement of its clients, and as such, the only person who can improve your life is you – I am simply here to guide you in the right direction and hopefully get you there a little quicker.
- As a therapist, I am not your friend. I will be compassionate and empathic, but I don’t do tea and sympathy, because that doesn’t help.
It’s my job to get you being honest with yourself, and as such your therapy may involve me pushing you out of your comfort zone, and/or challenging your automatic patterns of thoughts and reactions. It may not feel good at the time, but it gets results.
- While I do have counselling training, I am not a counsellor and it would be unethical to provide this service. If you need separate ongoing counselling, then I’d be happy to help you find a suitable counsellor.
About Louise
I’ve always found it rewarding to help others with their emotional difficulties – it’s been my life path from an early age. I graduated age 20 with a degree in Psychology & Counselling, and went on to work in a private hospital for people with severe eating disorders, after which I worked with vulnerable adults at a range of drug and alcohol treatment centres.
Every single person I worked with had a complex and significant history which shaped who they are, how they think and what issues they struggle with.
It was in London in 2010 that I went on an introductory course in clinical hypnosis, and became intrigued by the power and effectiveness of this surprisingly gentle therapy. I integrated my skills into my job providing group support sessions at a rehabilitation unit for alcoholics.
The reasons for people’s emotional difficulties have always fascinated me, but after taking a year to study psychodynamic counselling in more depth, I then had my first child, so I put my career to one side to enjoy the demanding but precious early years with my daughter.
Since becoming a parent, it’s become clear to me how little time people have to nurture their inner wellbeing, especially when there is a busy job taking up our time, or when there’s family members to look after.
And yet, if we don’t look after ourselves, we are of very little help to others. This led me to returning to study hypnotherapy and gain a full qualification. I completed my studies in 2015, and launched Flore Pleno Hypnotherapy in early 2016.
What does Flore Pleno mean?
‘Flore pleno’ is a Latin phrase borrowed from horticulture, literally translated as ‘in full flower’ – which is a wonderful metaphor for how people feel once they have resolved their issues and started to move on in life.
It’s also a more obvious metaphor for a pregnant woman, which is relevant as I’m particularly passionate about supporting both men and women around pregnancy and parenting issues. I'll be offering a bespoke hypnobirthing course from May 2016.
Services I offer
Confidence issues
Confidence is the ability to go about your life and your day-to-day activities feeling happy, fulfilled, and capable. It’s normal to experience blips in confidence, but sometimes it just starts to fade away, or something happens that you can’t bounce back from – and before you know it, your confidence is gone, leaving you feeling not at all like yourself. In fact, if you were previously very confident, you may not really know who you are at all now.
Often a confidence drop leads to additional fatigue – either from all the extra thinking and worrying you’ve been doing, or from the effort of putting on a happy face.
Whether you know what caused your confidence decrease or not, we can work together on building it back up session by session, by showing you how to think and feel better about yourself. Hypnotherapy can also help you to live with your confidence levels right now, by teaching you short-term coping strategies until you either discover a new you, or get back to your old self.
Assertiveness training (includes hypnotherapy)
Do you find yourself struggling to express your thoughts and feelings? Perhaps someone else has described you as angry, sarcastic or passive aggressive – and you’ve realised they were right? It’s easy to act tough when it comes naturally, but these issues don’t feel good inside.
Whether you learnt a certain way of interacting from our family members, or whether you’ve developed a persona for work, the problem with being angry all the time is that often, the one you are angriest with the most is yourself, for being that way.
Then there’s the fact that not knowing how to assert yourself healthily can cause all sorts of damage to your closest relationships. Made a snide remark to your spouse? Flown off the handles at your teenage child? Felt the need to give someone ‘short shrift’ at work? All these examples cause hurt, fear and mistrust in the other person – and I bet they aren’t working for you either.
When you’re so busy expressing your frustration, often the real message of what you need and why you need it doesn’t get through. This then leads to a vicious cycle of needs not getting met, angry response, and then continuing to not ask for what you need.
But there’s a different way. If you want to put in the effort to make real positive changes, you can book yourself onto my one-to-one Assertiveness Training course today. You can use tactics and strategies from the field of NLP, as well as the power of your unconscious mind in trance, to reframe how you interact with yourself and others.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Session 1: Different types of assertiveness and non-assertiveness
A summary of defence mechanisms and where you learnt them
Confidence boosting to help you feel calmer
Self-hypnosis and why looking after yourself is so important
Session 2: Learning why you react in certain ways
What to do when your triggers are people!
More self-hypnosis and other ‘cool down’ techniques to use anywhere
Session 3: Recognising your patterns of communicating
Taking charge of what you say and do
Managing the changes that come with being more assertive
New patterns of interacting
Session 4: (typically 3-5 weeks after session 3)
An optional follow up session to go over anything you want to revisit
A focused review of the changes you have made within yourself
Practical self-hypnosis tuition, with ego strengthening
Anger management & reduction
Anger is often a secondary emotion which hides hurt, sadness or fear. A lot of people learn – sometimes from a very young age – that it’s easier to feel angry than it is to get in touch with the deeper feelings.
And that’s true – but the problem is that when we don’t recognise the feelings that the anger is covering up, our unconscious mind tries over and over again to get our conscious mind to recognise the very emotion we’re trying to avoid feeling.
This can lead to us getting stuck in cycles where everything and nothing makes us ridiculously angry, seemingly for no clear reason. Our words are angry, our actions are angry, even our inner thoughts are angry.
I can help you take a journey of self-discovery, at a pace that suits you, to find out where these patterns originated and how you can break them. You’ll learn how to be truly honest with yourself and others about why you’re angry and what is really going on for you.
Anger is often a big and complicated issue, so there’s no right or wrong timescale for how long it’ll take before those thoughts and feelings start to have less of a hold on you.
Depression
Whether you have been diagnosed with depression recently or you’ve had it for some time, it’s an overwhelming illness to have. The idea of getting help for it may seem pointless, or terrifying, or maybe both those things at once. You may have tried other ‘talking therapies’ before considering hypnotherapy, in which case you may be sceptical. That’s fine.
Come along for one session. I won’t promise miracles – you’ll have depression when you arrive and you’ll still have depression when you leave an hour later. BUT you will know that you have taken the first step towards getting some help for your condition, and therefore just for that day, you’ve done something positive for yourself.
You’ll be able to reflect on your new experience and slowly but surely, you’ll learn that it is possible to gain new ways of thinking about life. We’ll focus a bit on what the possible triggering experiences were for your depression – but we’ll focus a whole lot more on what you need in your life to feel better now. The answers may surprise you!
Stress management
We all have different life circumstances that cause us stress:
• High pressure job
• Busy or chaotic family life
• Working long hours
• Exams coming up
• Your own or others’ health needs
• Money worries
…gives you a headache just reading that list, right?
Now, imagine if you could train your brain to switch off for an hour at a time – I mean really switch off. As in, all those annoying thoughts that you don’t need to be having right now can just go and hang out somewhere else, far away, where they won’t bother you right now. Leaving you free to relax, focus on something more meaningful, and enjoy the spontaneity and creativity of your mind while deeply at rest.
You can choose to structure your sessions however you like – if you know that your stress is going to be condensed into one time period, then you can book more sessions either side of the main event. Alternatively, if your stress is ongoing, such as providing care for a family member or working in a high pressure environment, you might want to book a session for yourself once a fortnight or even once a month.
Post-traumatic stress disorder
More information on support for this condition coming soon
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Services for conception, pregnancy & beyond
Hypnobirthing available from summer 2016
- get in touch now to book your personal tuition
Getting ready to give birth starts on a mental level very early. Some women plan their birth before they even conceive.
Others spend time during pregnancy emotionally preparing for it, and working on being open to the experience. Whatever your own personal circumstances, you, your baby and your birth partner all deserve a labour that is calm, safe, and satisfying.
You may be thinking “any labour that results in a healthy baby will be fine” – and that’s absolutely true. But these days, pregnant women have greater autonomy and control over their births than ever before.
While the physical process of birthing is the same for everyone, many women will have individual preferences over other aspects of labour that affect their comfort and mental wellbeing.
Hypnobirthing is the art of using hypnotic techniques to feel fully, actively engaged with the birth and to enable you to feel comfortable and in control.
It makes use of a combination of a wonderfully relaxed state of mind, combined with total focus on one thing – in this case, birthing your baby!
It doesn’t mean that you’ll be in a trance or asleep during birth – quite the opposite, you’ll feel just as awake and in control as you need to feel during this important time.
Hypnobirthing techniques can help you and your birth partner to:
Recognise and then release any fears or worries about childbirth
Enhance the mind, body and spirit connection to create a more holistic birth
Learn that childbirth doesn’t have to equal pain
Work with your body to understand the way that your body works and how you can work with your body during childbirth to help your muscles and hormones do what they instinctively need to do.
Enable you to focus on bringing your baby into the world in a calm, loving atmosphere
Learn a way to manage your birth that you can use anytime, anywhere – where-ever and however you are planning on giving birth.
To be able to look back on birth and be completely, joyfully satisfied at how the experience went is a gift that every mother deserves to receive.
Get in touch to book your place on a group course or one to one course today.
No group course near you? If you have friends or family who are pregnant at the same time as you, why not form your own group and invite me to facilitate?
Minimum 3 pregnant women per course
Full payment required from all attendees before the first session
Please provide 8 weeks notice from your desired start date – at which you should be anywhere from 15 weeks to 32 weeks through your pregnancy, to enable you plenty of time to finish the course and practice before you give birth.
Please call or email me for more details, and I’ll be happy to help you.
Prenatal depression and anxiety
Pregnancy can be a stressful time, and it’s normal for pregnant women to feel heightened emotions over a wide range of things. Whether it’s an advert on TV making you cry, something messy making you excessively angry, or feeling guilty for some reason, emotions come as part of the pregnancy package.
While pregnancy hormones do have a lot to answer for, it wasn’t long ago that prenatal depression and anxiety weren’t recognised and every little thing experienced during pregnancy was ‘just down to your hormones’.
Nowadays, we are lucky to be much better informed. The causes of prenatal depression or anxiety are enormously varied, and where there are overlaps in stressors, a pregnant woman’s emotional health is recognised as more vulnerable.
If you suspect that you have prenatal anxiety or depression, please visit www.pandasfoundation.org.uk for more information on this condition.
Please make contact for a discussion on how I can help.
Postnatal depression and anxiety
Breastfeeding grief
Support and coping strategies during times of fertility treatment
When the worst happens
I also treat and provide support for the following (more information coming soon)
Addictions & compulsions
Alcohol
Treatment for cravings and relapse prevention for those recently off addictive drugs
Eating disorders, including binge eating disorder
Gambling
Self-harm
Management and reduction of distress caused by obsessive compulsive disorder
Smoking
Nail biting
Trichotillomania
Relationship difficulties
Romantic or marital relationship couples therapy seeing one or both partners at the same time
Codependency - not knowing who you are unless you are in a relationship
Letting go of a past relationship
Help for grown up children of toxic parents
Family difficulties, for example conflict with grown up children
Game-playing and troubles with trusting your partner
Phobias
Irrational fears can have a crippling effect on every day life. Whatever your fear, I can help you, but my particular focus is on:
Fear of animals, including spiders and flying insects
Fear of clowns
Fear of certain foods
Treatments for IBS will also be offered from summer 2016
