I saw today that Yasmina (Low Histamine Chef) has again opened up enrolment for her five week cognitive hypnotherapy course with the hypno who helped her: Hazel Gale.
Very kindly, Yasmina sent me a free copy and allowed me onto the Facebook group so I could do it myself and see if I liked it for all of you peeps.
I did.
BUT…I have some tips for you if you plan to do it too.
Why hypnotherapy?
First, some background: as many of you now know I used several techniques to change my hypersensitivity to foods – and life in the end – and I am now pretty much well with all foods except the grains and dairy going back in now and life is, very happily, returning.
The techniques I used – I counted 43 over 2.5 years! – basically revolved around calming the amygdala down, doing various forms of neuroplasticity brain retraining and hypnotherapy of several kinds.
It worked.
And I am now trying to pull together just how it worked so I can suggest ways forward for you. So far, I have rewritten the start of the new Healing Plan about six times – and the reason is that I have realised the order you do things in is really important and I keep changing my mind because, of course, I didn’t do it in the order I should have as I was making it up as I went along! Now I have the benefit of hindsight.
For example, I went straight into things like limbic retraining a la DNRS and Gupta and had to stop as it made me much worse – at that point. I had to go back and do the amygdala work much more before I could cope with limbic stuff. And then, it was only after the amgydala-calming was a daily established routine and that brain retraining had begun in earnest that I felt able to then start addressing learned behaviours, unhelpful beliefs etc – and that led to an outpouring of trauma, leading me ultimately to being diagnosed (3 times before I listened I was SO sure it was purely physical; I’m a nutritionist, what can I say..?) with PTSD and went through trauma therapy.
It was the hypnotherapy – with the lovely Julie Poole who, of course, is now part of our new virtual clinic team for you – that got me through that bit. I would not have got well without it, or her. Full stop.
Not all hypnotherapy types are the same!
So, when Yasmina sent me her original hypno course, I thought it would be quite similar to the stuff I had already done. It wasn’t. Cognitive hypno feels very different but, I discovered, is just as powerful. Here’s me thinking: ‘I’m through this’ and then I think it was even doing the first week’s written assignments – ostensibly to help you try and establish the core of your, in this case, histamine sensitivity – that I realised I had more to come up and deal with. I had a very strong emotional reaction to something that came straight out of left field and I was poorly with the usual physical reactions to emotional trauma for some days.
I didn’t see that coming. And, neither did quite a few people on the Facebook group. Hazel and Yasmina – and everyone, in fact – were very supportive for people who had emotional releases/trauma/enlightened moments, whatever you want to call it, come up, but it did make me think and reaffirmed my belief that this is powerful stuff, it does indeed work but I think you have to do it with the right kind of support and at the right time when your mind and body is ready to cope with it.
Hazel I think gained quite a few individual consultation patients as a result and was indeed there to offer support! I went to see Julie, of course, who sorted me out. Others did it on their own.
The timing needs to be right
Anyway, I think if I hadn’t have already done a lot of amygdala-calming and been somewhat aware of the emotional triggers/causes of the illness – and learned techniques like WHEE I’ve talked about before to lower emotional and physical reactions to such work – I may have had a tougher time of it. I definitely got the impression that the realisation that there was trauma underlying the sensitivity issue came as a shock to some people and they reeled and tried to cope with the fallout.
Of course that has to happen, but my advice is to be ready for it, have some techniques to hand to help you, have someone you can work with through it if things you don’t expect come up. It’s powerful, it works, but it ain’t easy, I can tell you.
Do it, but do it right for you
So, my advice is going to be: I will be including Yasmina’s course in my smorgasbord of things to do in the Healing Plan because it is well put together, has excellent resources and will help. But, it will be only after doing other things and I will be recommending you work with a practitioner preferably or at least have one ready if you need one. Not everyone will, but I have to say it.
Well done Yasmina and Hazel for putting together such a powerful course with a high level of support, which I’m sure must have knocked them for six let alone the participants! Some people had massive turnarounds, some lowered their sensitivity significantly, others are still working through, but I think probably all got something out of it from what I could see in the Facebook group comments.
Anyway, you can join the new course here if it feels the right time for you, and I look forward to including it in the Healing Plan when I get a chance to finish rewrite the start for the seventh time!