Obsessive Behaviour
Obsessions can be minor annoyances or they can grow into significant problems that rob a person of their piece of mind and quality of life. We don't always need to understand the reason that the obsession started in order to deal with it effectively. Hypnosis can relieve the sometimes crippling strain of obsessions and often it is simpler and more comfortable than most people would realise.	We always begin with the simplest approach first and then address more complex factors if necessary.

Extended information about hypnosis for the relief of obsessions.

Obsessive behaviour can manifest in a wide variety of ways. Everything from feeling the need to flick the light switch a certain number of times to persistent feelings of doom and gloom can become obsessive behaviours and ultimately begin to interfere in the enjoyment that a person gets out of life. Although the focus of the obsession tends to vary from person to person the characteristics of how the obsessions mainfest can show definate identifiable patterns.

This is where hypnosis finds its role in treating obsessive behaviour. These identifiable patterns are often the result of very specific mental and physiological activities. That is, certain subconscious patterns of thought lead to certain feelings in the body and thus the need to carry out certain behaviours in a repetitive way. With hypnosis we focus on the internal mechanisms that maintain the obsession. Hypnosis can be used to uncover, identify and modify these patterns at the subconscious level and then the obsession often falls away painlessly as a natural result.

Hypnotherapy is a particularly goal oriented therapy. That means that as a hypnotherapist I am more interested in helping you to be free from the behaviour than I am in finding out why it started. I believe that sometimes these types of obsessions can begin purely as a magnification of the natural human tendency to recognise patterns in our everyday world. Little children like to avoid the cracks in the footpath (Actually...some adults do too), everyone loves to hear a story they identify with and say "hey, that happened to me too" and I believe this is part of the reason that poker machines and other superficial yet repetitive activities attract and hold so many people. Pattern-matching is a normal part of what human beings do all the time.

Often obsessions can be banished without needing to delve deeper into the reasons it started oin the first place. This is always my preferred approach. I ask clients, "If you could be free of this without knowing why it started... would that be OK?" The answer is almost always yes. Clients are free to try to figure it out once the obsession is gone, if they like, but I don't believe many do.

On the other hand there are times when the obsession is the expression of another underlying issue. Sometimes the client is aware of this other issue and sometimes they are not. In these cases hypnotherapy is used as a tool of self discovery and self organisation. The issue can be dealt with by the use of hypnotherapy once recognised and the obsession generally loses its purpose and fades or vanishes as a natural consequence of no longer being needed to express something else.