Categories
Depression Meditation Stress Uncategorized

What is Hypnotic Regression Therapy

There aren’t very many people who have a good understanding of what hypnotic regression therapy is – and what it can do. As soon as they hear the words “hypnotic regression,” some people automatically think of past-life regression. Rest assured; hypnotic regression therapy is something completely different. 

If you’ve ever spent any time on around rivers, you know that there can be powerful currents flowing beneath the surface of the water. The river might look calm and tranquil, but if you were to fall in, you might easily be swept away.

Your subconscious mind is like those currents, churning away beneath the surface of your conscious mind. You might not be aware of the powerful forces being exerted on your behavior by your subconscious mind.  

If your life seems like it’s going well – on the surface – but you are struggling with emotional undercurrents or sabotaging yourself, the thoughts, feelings and ideas churning away in your subconscious mind might be to blame. Hypnotic regression therapy can help access those subconscious thoughts and feelings and reduce their ability to impact your behavior.

Hypnotic Regression Therapy

As the experts at Good Therapy explain, “Regression therapyis an approach to treatment that focuses on resolving significant past events believed to be interfering with a person’s present mental and emotional wellness.”

According to John Ryder, Ph.D., a psychologist, hypnotherapist and the author of Positive Directions writing at PsychologyToday.com, “Hypnosis is one of the best ways to help people access those ‘buried’ memories. Everyone has memories or experiences in their unconscious mind that they may not be able to recall but still play a significant role in everyday life. Hypnotic regression is the process by which you enter a trance and recall material from deep inside that is normally not available to the conscious mind.”

Hypnotic regression therapy should only be undertaken by a licensed mental health professional who has been well trained in the use of clinical hypnosis and in hypnotic regression therapy theories and techniques. If you live in Boynton Beach, Delray Beach or Boca Raton, that licensed mental health professional can be Dr. Bruce Eimer. Dr. Bruce is a licensed psychologist and certified hypnotherapist living in Lake Worth. He is the co-author of two books on regression therapy and hypnoanalysis:

Ewin, D.M., & Eimer, B.N. (2006).  Ideomotor Signals for Rapid Hypnoanalysis: A How-To Manual

Hunter, C.R. & Eimer, B.N. (2012). The Art of Hypnotic Regression Therapy: A Clinical Guide.

If you would like more information about hypnosis and regression therapy, please contact us.

Categories
Depression Meditation Stress Uncategorized

Feeling Stressed? Meditation Can Help

Everyone is feeling the stress and strains involved with staying home and staying safe. If you suffer from chronic pain, you probably don’t need us to tell you that stress like that can exacerbate your pain. Psychotherapy and hypnotherapy help chronic pain sufferers to cope. But you can’t spend the whole day talking to your licensed psychologist in Delray Beach. Fortunately, there are things you can do on your own that will help ease your stress and your pain.

Even if you’re in good health, the stress of the current situation can be hard to manage. Mindfulness Meditation is a great way to reduce stress and help you navigate these unchartered waters. Essentially, mindfulness means being present without judging.

The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Meditation can give you a sense of calm, peace and balance that can benefit both your emotional well-being and your overall health. And these benefits don’t end when your meditation session ends. Meditation can help carry you more calmly through your day and may help you manage symptoms of certain medical conditions.”

The health experts at the Mayo Clinic say that those medical conditions may include:

  • Anxiety
  • Asthma
  • Cancer
  • Depression
  • Heart disease
  • High blood pressure
  • Irritable bowel syndrome
  • Sleep problems
  • Tension headaches
  • And, yes – Chronic pain

Getting Started

Lots of people give up on meditation before they’ve even begun because they’re under the impression that meditation means stopping your brain from thinking and they know they could never quiet their brain to that extent. Good news – you don’t have to. It’s not about shutting down your thoughts; it’s about not getting caught up in all those stray thoughts that pop up in a continuing stream. It is about practicing being present and non-judgmental.

There are lots of different ways to meditate, from simple deep breathing exercises to yoga, which is considered meditation with movement. Do some exploring and find a method that works for you and try to make it part of your normal routine.

And if you are interested in incorporating mindful psychotherapy in your pain management arsenal, please contact the offices of Dr. Bruce Eimer, a licensed psychologist serving Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach. Dr. Bruce recently released his new book on Mindfulness Meditation. It is entitled Taming Chronic Pain: A Mindful Approach to Bringing Pain Relief.

Categories
Depression Meditation Stress Uncategorized

Am I Depressed or Just Sad?

Many people looking for a licensed psychologist in the Delray Beach/Boca Raton area contact me because they are struggling with depression. Some are not sure what the problem is, they just know something is wrong. Others are familiar with the diagnosis of clinical depression and are interested in exploring the idea of hypnosis treatment for their depression.

If you think you might be depressed, you are not alone.  Estimates are that about one in every 15 adults will be affected by depression in any average year – and since this year is turning out to be anything but average – it wouldn’t be surprising to see those numbers grow.

It’s important to note, however, that being sad or feeling depressed about something – like the loss of a job as a result of Covid-19 – is not the same as having a diagnosis of clinical depression. If you lost your job or are worried about a loved one who might have been exposed to the virus, it would be only natural for you to be feeling down and/or scared. We all experience feelings of sadness; it’s a natural response when life serves up lemons, or when there is a lot of uncertainty as there has been as a result of COVID-19.

Symptoms of Depression

With clinical depression, you might be feeling down for no reason. And those feelings would last for at least two weeks, but usually longer.

Feeling sad is just one of many possible symptoms associated with depression. According to the American Psychiatric Association, if you suffer from clinical depression you may:

  • Lose interest in activities you once enjoyed
  • Experience changes in appetite, leading you to lose or gain weight
  • Have difficulty sleeping or may find yourself wanting to sleep all day
  • Feel worn out and fatigued
  • Feel worthless or guilty
  • Have difficulty thinking, concentrating or making decisions
  • Thoughts of death or suicide are also possible.

Don’t get discouraged! Depression is treatable. As a licensed psychologist serving Boynton Beach and Delray Beach, Dr. Bruce Eimer has extensive experience dealing with depression. If you would like information about hypnosis treatment for depression, contact us to arrange a free 15-minute phone consultation.

Categories
Articles

The Gift of Hypnotic Pain Relief is the Gift That Never Stops Giving

This is because it is so liberating to be free of pain! When you are pain free, it is as if the pain was part of a bad dream you can’t remember much of.

  • If you suffer from chronic pain, book an private online or office  session with Dr. Eimer here.
  • Health professionals and hypnotherapists can learn how to give the gift of hypnotic pain relief at my live Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner Courses as well as by taking this course online here.
  • If you are a professional hypnotherapist, complete our course, and return to your hypnotherapy practice prepared to teach client’s suffering in pain how to transform their daydreams of less pain into waking reality.

Some people are more complicated than others. When a client goes to a hypnotherapist for help and does not get better, it is never the client’s fault. It is that the therapist does not have the requisite skills, knowledge or personality to effectively help the client. Now hypnotherapists can acquire these skills here.

Training for hypnotherapists and health professionals.  We offer intensive one-day, two-day, and three-day fundamental and advanced Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner courses. These courses are designed for professional hypnotherapists, physicians, physician assistants, nurses, chiropractors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, dentists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals. All of these practitioners see patients with severe acute and chronic pain in their respective fields, and are in a position to offer precise hypnotic pain relief if they know what to do and how to do it.

The real world of pain is a lot more complicated and much less black-and-white than the distinctions and generalizations given in textbooks or on this website. Effectively treating any patient or client with hypnosis for pain control demands empathy, compassion, wisdom, knowledge, technical know-how, experience, interest, good intentions, good training, and a competent intake evaluation. It also requires a thorough knowledge of hypnosis, good hypnosis training, and adequate knowledge of pain mechanisms, human physiology and neurology, and psychology.

Acute pain requires an appropriate medical or dental work up. If you can confidently and competently explain to a client or patient the cause of the client’s pain, if you know it, and how treating the cause will alleviate the pain, this is likely to reduce the client’s anxiety. However, if the patient’s work-up doesn’t identify a treatable or fixable cause, we must address the patient’s anxiety. It has been said that the fear of pain is often worse than the pain. This is so true, plus fear can make pain worse too.

Chronic pain also requires an appropriate medical or dental work up. However, chronic pain is way more complicated. Living with severe and unrelenting chronic pain makes most people experience some type of depression. And depression makes pain worse. Successful employment of hypnotic techniques for altering pain sensations and distracting the client his/her preoccupations with the pain requires that the client believes that you take him or her seriously and that you agree that the pain is real and NOT all in the client’s head.

FACT. All pain is real. With chronic pain, there is almost always old emotional baggage that needs to be released. Hypnosis practitioners learn how to do this effectively in our courses. The problem of controlling chronic pain is compounded when a patient is diagnosed with a medical condition that isn’t going to go away. Patients with chronic or debilitating medical conditions associated with persistent pain face the challenge of figuring out how to get along with their pain and somehow make peace with it.

It is the Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner’s job to help patients with pain to accept their condition medically and accept responsibility for what they do about it.  

It is the Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner’s job to help patients with pain build ego strength, self-confidence, self-love, find faith, develop curiosity, and mobilize courage in order to be able to learn new pain coping skills.

Categories
Articles

Dr. Bruce Eimer emerging girl from trance

Emerging girl from trance and debriefing with her about her feelings and attitude about getting her medical school applications. She stated that she was now eager to get them done.

Categories
Articles

Dr. Bruce Eimer doing street hypnosis with girl in dog park

This is a video of Dr. Eimer doing a rapid induction with a girl in the dog park. She agreed to videotape me on my iPhone doing a pitch for a class, and in return I hypnotized her to help her change her attitude about working on her applications for medical school. Up until today, she was procrastinating and unable to get them done.

Categories
Videos

Dr. Bruce Eimer’s Short History of Hypnosis

Three thousands years of hypnosis history summarized in several minutes. Not possible you say?

Well think about the fact that hypnosis is so flexible that a hypnotized individual can re-experience a lifetime in trance in just several minutes of real time. An experience that occurred over years can be unconsciously reviewed in seconds. The language of hypnosis is the language of the imagination. Therapeutic or Clinical Hypnosis is just the well-directed use of the imagination. The human imagination knows no bounds.

Categories
Articles

What HypnoThoughts Live has done for me

It’s time to give back now! Please watch this video. See you at HTL2019 at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in just a week on August 13th through the 21st. Also, consider taking my 2-day practitioner workshop on Pain Control Hypnosis on Aug 13-14.

Categories
Articles

The evolution of hypnosis

Hypnosis has been around for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Egyptian and Greek sleep temples, in the forms of faith healing and the directed use of the imagination.

The term “Mesmerism”, which means to entrance or induce trance, came from the work of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician who lived in 18th century Europe. He was discredited by a commission headed by none other than Ben Franklin in the 1780’s. Franklin concluded that the powerful effects of Mesmerism on Dr. Mesmer’s followers were real, but that Dr. Mesmer himself was a huckster because at that time in history, there was no credible scientific support for Dr. Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism”. Franklin attributed the very real effectiveness of “Mesmerism” to the directed use of the imagination! 

Years later, in the 1840’s, a Scottish physician named Dr. James Braid coined the term “hypnosis” and ushered in the modern era of medical hypnosis. Braid’s style of hypnosis as the sole form of surgical anesthesia was pioneered by a British surgeon named Dr. James Esdaile in India who performed major surgeries on thousands of cases with marked reductions in surgery mortalities. Sigmund Freud’s physician mentors such as Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, a noted French neurologist of the day, used James Braid’s style of hypnosis successfully in treating various neuropsychological syndromes with psychological causes. Dr. Freud tried hypnosis with his neurotic patients but he soon abandoned it due to his fears that he would not be able to control the so-called “erotic transference” after he hypnotized his female patients. Freud was a brilliant doctor and theorist, but a poor hypnotist and he was paranoid.

This paved the way for Dr. Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis and his psychosexual theories of neurosis. Dr. Braid’s and Dr. Mesmer’s forms of clinical hypnosis lost popularity in medical circles to psychoanalysis and free association, itself a form of trancework. Classical hypnosis became more popular at the turn of the 19th century in the world of stage hypnosis. However, psychologists as laboratory researchers at ivory tower universities continued to investigate hypnotic phenomena.  

Milton Erickson, MD, an innovative psychiatrist, pioneered new creative approaches to clinical hypnosis with medical and psychiatric patients. Erickson might rightfully be considered the founding father of modern medical hypnosis and he co-founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) in the 50’s. David Cheek, MD, an innovative Ob-Gyn, was Erickson’s contemporary, and he along with “lay hypnotist” Leslie LeCron developed unique approaches to hypnoanalysis using ideomotor techniques.

Richard Bandler and Jon Grinder were two of MHE’s many brilliant students and they invented NLP based on their conceptualization of the “deep structure” of Erickson’s work.  

In the latter half of the 20th century through the first decade of the 21st century, medical hypnosis societies such as ASCH and academic psychological hypnosis societies such as the Society for Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis (SCEH) refused to associate with or admit as members hypnosis practitioners whom they pejoratively labeled as “lay hypnotists”. At least medical psychoanalytic societies admitted non-physicians as members whom they called “lay analysts”. Lay analysts could take classes, teach, and get certified. Quite to the contrary, professional members of ASCH and SCEH were sanctioned if they were caught studying with or teaching with so-called “lay hypnotists. As a result of this ignorance, progress was stifled in the evolution of hypnosis because the cross fertilization of ideas was inhibited.

Yours truly stopped renewing his ASCH membership despite having been an elected fellow of ASCH.  He stopped renewing his SCEH membership too, and joined the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association (IMDHA), where he earned fellowship, and Hypnothoughts. 

Hypnothoughts Live has succeeded in bringing together from around the world the most brilliant minds in hypnosis. The result has been the creation of a great online forum on Facebook,   https://www.facebook.com/groups/HypnoThoughts/ and the annual Hypnothoughts Live (HTL) conference in Las Vegas, which is by far the best continuing education event I have ever attended.

I am 100% dedicated to supporting the growth of the HTL enterprise because the founders, Scott Sandland and Richard Clark are 100% dedicated to fostering the evolution of the science and practice of hypnosis in the 21st century, and they are fair minded, honest, and they are practicing hypnotherapists who work in the trenches just like me. 

My area of special expertise is Pain Control Hypnosis by virtue of my fortuitous clinical experiences over a period of more than 30 years in providing medical and psychiatric patients with hypnotic pain relief. Recently, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Polymyalgia Rheumatica or PMR. This condition untreated is severely disabling. With precipitously acute onset, it hits like a ton of bricks. You wake up one morning feeling as if you were beaten up by three WWE wrestlers. I have struggled with chronic back and leg pain for years following a motor vehicle accident in 1993 that left me with serious injuries. I developed Fibromyalgia. Self-hypnosis as I learned it from a hypnotist whom I saw early on worked for me. Then I added my own modifications. But this PMR was like a real test from God. I had to be put on Prednisone which is the first line treatment for PMR. Untreated all of your major joints lock up in severe pain. But you cannot remain on steroids for a long time without suffering the breakdown of your body. So, now I have been forced to walk the walk about which I have written books and talked. Good luck to me! I’ll keep you posted in my Pain Control Blog.

I will keep everyone posted. I will continue to help as many suffering individuals as I can with my brand of Pain Control Hypnosis. See www.PainControlHypnosis.com. I will learn from every person I work with and every challenge that I personally face in coping with my own PMR. And I will treat anyone who has been verifiably medically diagnosed with PMR for free with Pain Control Hypnosis.

I am teaching my 2-day intensive Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner course this August at HTL2019 in Las Vegas, and I will be teaching this PCHP course all over the country this coming year.

Categories
Articles

Two things a trained Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner does to succeed

We train hypnotherapists to become Certified Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioners (PCHPs).

Communicates to the client that he/she is aware that the pain feels like something in the client’s body has been, or is being damaged, and that the pain feels like a threat to the client’s functionality and health.

Finds out whether the client has been feeling anxious, fearful, angry or depressed, and the basis for any of these negative feeling states. Explains how these emotional states affect pain levels and why these persistent feelings must be addressed.