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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hypnotherapist’s most important task with a client on the first visit is to earn the client’s confidence.
Many people with intractable chronic pain syndromes feel hopeless, disillusioned, ashamed and angry. They don’t feel they are taken seriously, and they fear that people think they aren’t getting better because there is something wrong with them.
You can really help people out of this hopelessness trap – but you need to know some things about “pain trances”. You need to know where to redirect the client’s attention, and how to do it respectfully. Please listen to the following video to learn more. After taking my 2-day Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner Course on Aug 13-14 at HTL 2019, you will be well on your way to becoming an expert at this.
Learn Hypnotic Pain Control step-by-step. Learn how to adjust your induction and delivery style to promote success in every session you conduct. Observe your reputation grow and the referrals flow. Sign up for an upcoming Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner Course. Here is a snippet of a live demo at my Pain Control Hypnosis Course at Hypnothoughts Live 2018 last year.