Direct drive

Best for: quitting habits, building confidence

Creative use: feeling in control, self-love

Direct drive is a very straightforward technique that sends your message directly to your subconscious mind. When the therapist induces you into a hypnotic state, it quiets your conscious analytical mind and creates an ideal environment for this desired communication.

It is rather common to work with habit-related problems such as smoking, alcohol, nail-biting, and weight management. For positive reinforcement, it can help people build confidence, feel in control and boost performance and creativity.

However, Direct drive is not exactly a therapy as it uses one-way communication. The therapist will guide you to repeat the suggestion that was agreed upon, and build up these suggestions with association to your body and mind. It is similar to planting a seed in your subconscious and allowing it to grow stronger within you throughout time. This technique could be easily introduced and repeated with a recording, that enables self-practice outside the session.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t go deep into the root cause of a problem as there is no conversation as we do in therapy. For example, someone may be eating a lot of sugar because it is trying to protect the feelings developed from a difficult time. Therefore, additional sessions are recommended to resolve at a deeper level.

Self Hypnosis

Best for: deep relaxation, self-communication, pain management

Creative use: inner journey, building your dream world

It is also very interesting to learn Self Hypnosis so you can run a session like Direct Drive on your own. This technique teaches you how to enter a trance and how to send the necessary messages to yourself.

Self Hypnosis allows you to reach a deep state of relaxation rather quickly. With practice, you can achieve it within 10 seconds.

Here are the visible signs you can experience:
– Racing mind is instantly quieted
– Breathing is slowly down and getting longer every second
– Muscles are losing the tension bit by bit with the digestive organs making those funny noises

So here comes the question: can you get stuck in Hypnosis?
Your body is capable of taking care of you in every situation. In fact, this deep state is so comfortable that a lot of people choose not to come out. You can easily go on an inner journey in this deep state, even by creating your dream world that belongs to you.

But don’t worry, we teach your subconscious the concept of time so you are always fully in control. By practicing Self Hypnosis, you will even learn how to go deeper every time. And the more you do, the more familiar/easy it gets.

Chair therapy

Best for: finding closure, offering forgiveness

Creative use: receive comfort and wisdom

Chair therapy is a technique that guides you to sit face-to-face with a person who has negatively impacted your emotions. It doesn’t mean it has to be someone who hurt you; often, our subconscious interprets actions and words very literally. For example, a child may not understand a caring mother putting him to bed.

This technique has helped many people to let go of negative emotions they are holding on to. By offering forgiveness, you can set yourself free from that difficult situation, and stop your suffering from everything that was built up in your mind. Sometimes it is turned into Deathbed therapy when you offer forgiveness to someone who has passed away. This approach recreates an opportunity for you to have proper closure, but also offers you a moment to receive comfort and wisdom from anyone you could imagine, living or already passed away.

Practising self-forgiveness is also a very strong tool, as it requires openness, courage and commitment. In Hypnotherapy, we invite people to face the other version of themselves and offer true forgiveness. Then slowly bring these two towards each other to melt into a new person. We also guide them to look into the mirror and fully accept this new version of themselves.

Sometimes this approach seems strange and awkward to our conscious self, but it is super beautiful in a hypnotic experience. It brings so many resolutions to our thoughts and emotions, and empowers us to become a more desired version of ourselves.

Grey room

Best for: removing negative labels

Creative use: self empowerment

It is also very powerful to combine the Grey room technique, where we name and remove any negative labels to ourselves. The Grey room is a place that holds all the different labels such as emotions, feelings and definitions. It offers instant relief as they are simply dispelled from our minds. For example, throwing away your feelings of “social anxiety” will give you the comfort of making that problem go away.

Afterwards, we also encourage the positive emotions to grow and occupy the room, so they build a stronger presence in the subconscious. It is a universal therapy for all kinds of “problems”, especially if the help is urgently required. Sometimes a person may not be completely ready to go deep and face strong emotions. Then this could be a super helpful tool to offer comfort, and allow healing to happen before a longer session.

Regression

Best for: finding the root cause, discovering new perspectives from past events

Creative use: dream about your future, know what you really want, discover your past life

Regression is one of my favourite techniques in Hypnotherapy! It effectively heals negative emotional imprints, resolves any blockage and reinforces positive thoughts.

You can consider it a linear travel back in time. It uses your lifetime as a baseline, and goes back to several moments that made a significant impact on you. When an emotion is attached to a certain event, some parts of your nerve correspondence light up and form a connection among themselves. As you have experienced similar situations throughout life, these emotions strengthened and developed into fear.

Working with regression will take you back to the very first moment of this particular emotion, and detach it from the Initial Event. Then it could also use progression to desensitise every Subsequent Event that was identified. The reveal may be shocking because our conscious mind tends to remember more of the Final Event.

This technique normally also replaces the emotion with a positive feeling, which allows you to feel more in control if you encounter a similar situation again. That makes it a super powerful tool to completely disassociate yourself from any triggers, which results in fewer possibilities for a relapse. On the contrary, it could also be used for positive reinforcement, where we visit the happy memories or beautiful future to enhance our relationship and performance.

Inner child therapy

Best for: healing, re-learning things from past memory

Creative use: offering wisdom, building confidence

Inner child therapy takes you back in time to relive a childhood memory. This is a beautiful technique used in a Regression therapy session. It allows you to experience that specific moment as your inner child and go through this event again feeling safe and secure.

It often invites the adult self from the present moment to share experience and wisdom with the child self. After they have reunited for a conversation, the informed child will be equipped with the knowledge that they have survived this difficult moment. Then they will also gain the ability to deal with those subsequent events moving forward. Oftentimes, it also brings the informed adult to go into the future, knowing the problem has been overcome and everything is going well.

Working with inner child often reveals the strength that we initially had. A lot of times we struggle with self-doubt, not knowing what we want. However, we may have had the answers all along. This technique offers a moment to communicate with your most authentic self, remove worries and build confidence.