We talked about new year resolutions, all the things she must give up (smoking, peter-pan men) and all the things I must (chocolate, overdrafts) and then the conversation took an unexpected turn. I like where we ended up because it challenges beliefs and values and what ‘you should’ do as opposed to what ‘you can’ do. After all, the aim for all of us is a happier, more joyous life.

Me: I’m going to go heavily into mindfulness this year. Find the inner calm.

Cat: Really?

Me: yeah. I’ll feel at one. I won’t shout at my kids ever again. Or leave the oven on.  I’ll never again fight with the ex. I’m going to find a silent retreat for when he next has them for holidays. Two weeks’ silence for self-discovery and I’ll go somewhere that does detox. Like a liquid diet or something so I feel really good too. Actually, maybe fasting. I’ve never tried that.

(she re-fills my glass)

Cat: So no food and total silence.

Me: It’s like going over a pain threshold to come out feeling great. Like that army-bootcamp hell thing we did.  Will you do it with me?

Cat: No.

Me: Why not?

Cat: Coz it sounds crap.

Me: Challenging i think you mean.

Cat: I want friendship, laughter and lightness. All this close your eyes go deep within and hum; I want a group of strong, intelligent, independent women around me and to laugh until my ribs hurt.

Me: (after a long pause) Me too!

By the time we had left that spa, we had left behind my ‘zen’ ambitions along with several empty bottles. This year, we are not giving up anything, finding anything at all. Instead, we are going to live with the intention of two words:

Lightness and kindness.

I wonder what words you want to live this year by?

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As a hypnotherapist, or any therapist for that matter, you’d think I would know better than to spend so long in denial. It turns out iIm prone to procrastination like everyone else!

And so today, I let someone talk me through ‘his services’ and, no wonder I spent ten years avoiding this meeting because my hour went something like this.

Fear of dying.

Fear of girls surviving.

Fear of being left ‘single’ with young kids.

Fear of their future.

Fear of not leaving them enough money.

As he talked in a language of ‘what if’ and ‘just suppose’ and ‘imagine if’, I made myself listen to him, but I noticed how my body reacted.

FEAR. PANIC. ANXIETY. It was like rolling waves, one crashing in after another.

Lawyer: ‘Without a will, your children would go into care for months before they appointed guardians’.

This alarm siren went straight to my jaw and teeth. Clenched to hurting.

Lawyer: ‘The life insurance he has, is taxed as income so you’d only get half.’

I felt panic constrict my throat. Anxiety like a steel ball in my chest.

‘Your accounts are frozen, so if one of you died, the other can’t access the money for months.’

A tingling in my stomach. My face was now hot, my palms clammy. My breathing was  short, fast.

While my brain registered the ‘information’ and tried to process calmly, my  body picked up stress signals of fear.

You are scared, I told myself. You are afraid. You are frightened, that is how what he says makes you feel.

My body relaxed a little. Just noticing and naming it, helped. I’ve taught so many clients at Brixton Hypnotherapy to do just this. Without moving, avoiding, ignoring; just name it.

As he spoke, my brain used rationality to control fear, for e.g. ‘it’s his job to scare you, he’ll want to maximise the services you buy’ but my body wasn’t on board, so I decided to calm it. I uncrossed my legs, I planted my feet on the ground, placed my hands in my lap and I breathed slowly as I noticed and named my feelings. I feel fear in my lower stomach. I am scared.

My body calmed, my brain continued to go off-piste on some rant about industries built on fear and anxiety.  To prove myself right, I counted them up in his language. The ‘just suppose’ and ‘if’ etc. that profits multi-billion dollar insurance industries. What I was actually doing was erecting an emotional shield between him and me.

I had to have the session, but I also had to control the impact it had on me. We are wired to respond to signals of fear and that is a good thing, and having anxiety or feeling a little anxious isn’t a bad thing either; it can be a great motivator. But we have to be in control of them and not let them control us.

Hypnotherapy offers tools, techniques, exercises and strategies to examine your triggers and how best to avoid or eradicate them. Fear is part of our daily life and that is okay. We can accept it and accommodate is, so long as we are not being overwhelmed by it to the point it is negatively affecting our lives.

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One of my favourite exercises, last year, was a ‘worry-buster’ which works for adults and children alike:

On paper, they write down all the things that worry them. We then cut and fold them, putting them in two boxes. One box is for the things we (or someone else) can do something about so the worry can go away, and the other box is for things we can’t do anything about. Most things go in the first box. The client then tells me what they can do to help or what they need others to do to help. I hold the worry and they tell me what will solve it. I write the solution on the back and put it back in the box.

Then we turn to the other box. Often, a few worries on reflection, will end up in the other box. But there are a few left; things like the weather always end up in that box. National and International policy around Covid is also out of our control, so in the second box that goes.

What follows, is a chat about outlook and attitude. The ‘thing’ might be out of our control but our attitude isn’t. I saw a lovely sketch yesterday; X saying to Y; 2022 can’t be as shite as 2021 and Y replying ‘I’m expecting flowers’ to which X grumpily says ‘how can you?’ and Y says ‘because i’m planting seeds’. It’s a modern take on ‘you reap what you sow.’

My point is this; however hopeless we feel in the face of current times, we can focus on what we sow; whether that’s a change in direction, a new commitment to give up a bad habit, a decision to flip our outlook, to get on top of anxiety, to take back control of issues like alcohol or sleep. This is exactly what people come to Brixton Hypnotherapy for me to help them with. Hypnotherapy is a talking therapy, just like others but using hypnosis to nudge your sub-conscious to achieve your goals and desires. Someone wrote to me this morning asking if I could ‘cure’ them – hypnotherapy doesn’t cure anyone, but I certainly see a lot of people change their life around!

You might be able to change it by yourself; simply by willpower but you might want a bit of help and that’s where Brixton Hypnotherapy comes in; a good therapist will hold you to account, to nudge and direct you and put boxes in front of your face to show you we have a lot more solutions in ourselves than we ever realised!

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• Step One: Is called ‘watering the flowers’ and all this is, is starting with what you love, admire and appreciate about that person.
• Step Two: Is called ‘regrets’ and all this is, is telling them things you have done (big or small) that you think have hurt them and you are sorry you did.
• Step Three: is called ‘hurts’ and you explain the things they did to you that caused little (or big) hurts.

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Like everything else, ‘NORMAL’ is a perception. But the backdrop it falls onto are those experiences that have shaped our lives.

My ‘backdrop’ is an eccentric, chaotic, exciting childhood in which being ‘normal’ was (silently) not valued!

So what are five associative words that come up for you, if I say ‘of course a normal person would…’

I can bet that every single person will come up with completely different words.

In therapy, we listen for the ‘damning conclusions’ people come to about themselves and we point them out to clients; the big statements of ‘facts’ that are not facts at all but more likely fears. So we’d say ‘I notice that you are saying ALL people are like this – but can you really be certain it’s ALL?’

Invariably a client will pause to consider and realise that they can’t say ‘all’.

So why do we do allow limiting beliefs? We concoct them and embed them to feel in control and safer and pre-warned. That’s comforting apart from the fact we’ve forced ourselves into a boxing ring for a mental self punch-up.

Fretting about being different (not being normal) is one of these punch ups.

If you put a (useless/unhelpful) thought under cross-examination you will find how inaccurate it is, how full of suppositions and bias it is and how the ultimate ‘belief’ we’ve told ourselves is not only wrong, but useless and pointless.

“Yes, but I still feel this way…’ will be the come back to this.

And, absolutely, I don’t doubt how people feel. But I once you start to NOTICE your thought patterns, you can at least choose whether to keep shining inside them.

So, let’s take NORMAL to cross-examination:

Who is NORMAL? What is NORMAL? If you were NORMAL what would that look like smell like, taste like, act like, behave like? Sound like? Where is the evidence? How else you could view this? Who was the first person or event that made you think/feel this way?

Normal, like all perceptions, doesn’t truly exist. It’s almost a red-herring to the real, powerful changes we can make; who we want to be (not who others want us to be) what we want to change and what we are actually secretly quite okay with (even if our loved ones tell us otherwise!)

There is no wrong or right with perceptions; there’s simply understanding that helpful, affirmative ones propel us forward, and negative, damaging ones hold us back.

Every day, we get to choose the thoughts we obsess and feed, and the ones we give less attention to, so like unwatered plants, will eventually wither and die.

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Overwhelm; the feeling is horrible. A mounting feeling in which anywhere you turn your head you simply can’t do it. Weary, exhausted with zero mojo. In fact whatever Mojo is, it has more energy simply in those four letters than you have in your entire, depleted system.

Out goes the exercise, in comes the eating any of junk you can get hour hands on….the next thing you know, you feel more tired, your body feels more shit and you can’t cope with anything…bang; hit around the head with the frying-pan labelled ‘OVERWHELM’

So here goes:

1/ Get post-it notes and write down all the ‘can’t’ thoughts on separate post-it notes – what it is on one side, why you can’t do it on the other

2/ Get a board or piece of paper and put two columns A: Things I can control B: Things I can’t control.

3/ Stick your post-its in each column

4/ There should only be ‘weather’ in ‘things you can’t control. If you really believe there’s other stuff in that column, think creatively about ways to get it in the other one

5/ For each post-it in the ‘can control’ column write how you can and when you’ll do it on another post-it and stick it on top. You might need a further post-it for ‘resources I need and how/when I’ll get them’

6/ For any post-its that simply HAVE to be in the ‘can’t control’ column, get a box and put them in it. That’s your worry box. Go bury it some place and take it out if it you need to have a look at them again or realise they can go in the ‘can control’ column. When you bury it, you can have a little moment of anger or grief that you can’t control it – that’s okay, what you can’t control sucks….and that IS OKAY.

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We have more lung tissue in the back of us than we do in the front, so when you breath (in a ‘thinking about it’ way) ,you may be thinking about ‘filling up the balloon’ which is really your stomach. However, when you do this ‘back’ breathing exercise above, you realise that breathing into the balloon is a 360 degree thing and your back takes a whole heap of it too.

I have always been a ‘mindful breather’ because I am an acute asthmatic. At some point in my childhood a lung collapsed and I still remember the blue lips, white face in the wing mirror of the car as my mum drove me to hospital. The way I have coped with this is by learning to breathe deeply and right down to my navel. I simply breathe every breath in this way. I also have to keep a level of fitness for the level of lung capacity I need.

In a recent hypnobirthing workshop, I was teaching the ‘in for 20 and out for 20′ balloon breathing and realised quite a few people can’t even get to 10 comfortably. It takes practise but it is so worth doing. Breathing long, slow and deep is literally gold; it doesn’t matter where you are, or how you are physically you can always pull yourself into this thoughtful breathing – in to 20 and out for 20 with a slow, easy flow. Your body relaxes, your mind clears, you feel better and it really helps clear ‘the funk’.

Before kids, I could do just a few minutes of deep breathing as soon as I woke up. Kids don’t really go for the horizontal, deep breathing morning things, so I just had to learn to blank them out while I did it myself. Okay, it didn’t feel as good but it was better than nothing. At some point, I realised my toddler was copying me and by the time she was four, she would just fall into line. My younger daughter is now doing the same. She likes to get her belly out and feel her ‘balloon’ (or ‘daddy’s tummy’ as she calls it’) expanding under her little hands.

I don’t think they get much benefit out of mindful breathing as a morning routine but when they lose the plot, tantrum, get furious because Mummy said no – I remind them to breathe. They fall into it quickly and fall out of their tantrum within seconds.

Breathing is a godsend. Teach it to yourself then teach it to everyone you know, whatever their age!!

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She felt this slandered NCT. Needless to say, I feel I AM an alternative to NCT! And if Oatly can run the campaign ‘alternative to milk’ and ‘alternative medicine’ doesn’t mean don’t take medicine…well, she’s just going to have to be angry with me.

But the truth is, I did have a dreadful experience of NCT. The teacher would not only not talk about hypnobirthing (‘it’s not something we teach’), but she wouldn’t even offer an opinion. Ina May, my goddess midwife wasn’t on the reading list, and role playing a C-section only put the possibility more in my head.

What’s more, I failed to make any friends which was probably why I went. Just because someone is going to also have a baby, doesn’t meant they’re your ‘tribe’.

We took the financial plunge and went on a hypnobirthing retreat in Glastonbury. My partner and I loved the visualisation, the meditations and the pondering on who we wanted to be as parents. I found a paper recently on which I’d written down my visualisations; no drugs, the baby weight, the length of time in stage 1 and 2 labour and everything turned out exactly as I’d visualised.

After doing a module on hypnobirthing for my qualifications, I offered to teach my sister and decided I could offer even more to expectant couples with my experience of parenting and my therapy training.

So what I can now offer couples is not just a hypnobirthing course, but personalised tapes, a unique information pack and a therapy element to ‘clear out the baggage’ so to speak so couples can enter this new phase in a healthy, happy place mentally. I myself spent a week alone in a Tipi in Wales when I was 8 months pregnant, reading and working out what the role of a ‘Mother’ is and how I would bring up a child.

So I now offer hypnobirthing to couples which is a mix of experience, hypno-tools and therapy. The NCT might not like it, but it really is an alternative to the other classes on offer, simply because it is totally unique and individually tailored to the people who attend.

For more information, please visit The Barefoot Hypno.

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Types of anxiety:

• Social anxiety: excessive worry and concern about how others are perceiving or evaluating you.
• Generalised anxiety: a habit of worry. We use ‘worry’ as a way to distract ourselves from the emotions associated with whatever it is we’re worried about. It works but only short-term. Long term, we form a habit of worry that leads to high levels of anxiety and stress.
• Panic disorder: attacks are intense moments of fear or anxiety; sweating, rapid heart rate, lightheadedness. Fear of consequence of panic (going crazy, dying).
• Specific phobia: irrationally afraid that a specific thing/situation will lead to panic, not that the specific thing/situation itself is dangerous.
• OCD: obsessions are recurrent and intrusive thoughts, urges, images that cause anxiety and distress.
• PTSD: is like a phobia of memory. The person tries avoiding any kind of trigger for their past trauma which leads to isolation, depression, anxiety.
• Separation anxiety: an age-inappropriate distress that can occur in adults and children in regards to an attachment figure.

Emotions around ‘anxiety’

• Stress caused by stressors (rapid breathing, muscle tension, numbness).
• Fear: it’s temporary, based on an evaluation of danger/ a realistic threat.
• Anxiety: response to an unrealistic threat.
• Panic: burst of intense anxiety. It’s anxiety about anxiety (‘I’m going to die because my heart is beating so fast’)
• Terror, dread, angst, nervousness: are all emotional variations of fear/anxiety.
• Worry: a form of problem-solving: repetitive, fast, negative, self-evaluative but generally unproductive, unhelpful. It sustains anxiety and stress. Similar but distinct from problem solving or planning.
• You can’t have an emotion without having a ‘thought’ first – GOOD NEWS! Coz we can train ourselves into new thought habits.

Key to dealing with anxiety is:

• Building emotional strength
• Being in control of your situation
• Having a good social network
• Adopting a positive outlook

What to do:

• Be active: reduces emotional intensity.
• Take control; make lists, make plans, make goals, prioritise.
• Socialise: have a laugh, talk things through, connect to others.
• Take ‘me time’ and do things you really enjoy.
• Set goals and challenges; being curious and learning new things builds emotional resilience and confidence.
• Avoid alcohol, smoking and caffeine, they don’t help you cope.
• Help others: helping people in any way, boosts your sense of self-worth, usefulness and capability as it often puts your problems in perspective. Try anything from going out of your way to help others to volunteering.
• Worker smarter not harder and leave least important tasks to last
• Be positive: look for positives in life and things that make you grateful. Make a concerted effort to tackle negative, hopeless thoughts by analysing them and re-writing them into something positive and more useful.
• Accept things you can’t change: if there’s nothing you can do about it, forget it and focus on the things you can control and be proactive.
• Re-wire your Amygdala; this is the bit that is in ‘high alert’. It has learnt FEAR so everything is a danger or threat and it must exhaustively stay on high alert to keep you safe. By avoiding, you keep up this fear learning. By confronting, being curious, observing calmly, teaching the amygdala it’s okay, the threat isn’t real, you will get it to relax. This is Safety Learning.
• Worry-busting: we tell ourselves that worry is problem-solving (gives you the illusion of control and you can make things better) but in fact it isn’t serving this purpose at all – it’s distraction. Worry keeps the mind off the horrible feelings of anxiety. It lets us avoid them by thinking about the (perceived) problem. By avoiding feelings of anxiety we are teaching our flight/flight response that these feelings are a threat to our survival.
• Exposure therapy: deliberately and progressively more difficult confronting an irrationally feared stimuli. The idea is the feared outcome will not in fact take place. Painful for the client but often works for e.g. if you’re scared of spiders, watch videos of them, go out find them. Confront DON”T avoid.
• Thought-review: noticing and altering chronic irrational beliefs and self-talk. BOOK RECOMMENDATION: David Burns’ Feeling Good
• Mindfulness: train the mind away from analysing the problem and trying to solve it, to being observant and in the present moment. It trains us to take control over our attention.
• Relaxation: muscle relaxation; progressively tighten then relaxing core muscle groups in a bottom to top fashion.
• Deep breathing: on a 7/11 ratio (7 in and 11 out) increased oxygen to the lungs slows down breathing and counteracts the fight or flight response.
• Worksheets and exercises that re-train your brain, for e.g. Feelings are not Facts. Negative thoughts lead to negative emotions which lead to negative behaviours. Record your thoughts, write down the feelings that come with them. Reality test them. IF YOU CREATED A NEGATIVE THOUGHT, YOU CAN UNCREATE IT. Gratitude journals. Affirmations pinned to your fridge…if you’d like worksheets or more guides, please ask me.
• Tapping/havening: bring down your ‘units of distress’ with these simple tapping exercises (ask me if I haven’t taught you already)

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