Blog: Ask Isa: Can Depth Hypnosis Help Me with My Anxiety?

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

Question: Can Depth Hypnosis help me with my anxiety?

Isa: People often feel their anxiety controls their lives, but in reality, it always has something important to teach you. Depth Hypnosis can help you understand the roots of your anxiety, and when you know where your symptoms began, you can change your relationship to the original situation driving your anxiety.

In the first Depth Hypnosis session, practitioners take an emotional biography. This is a history of your emotional life from the time you were born until your early adulthood. In this biography, practitioners are looking for emotional patterns in the way you relate to yourself and others. This information is like a map that helps you and the practitioner track when the anxiety began, why it began, and what conditions gave rise to it. By doing this, you will learn more about what triggers your anxiety and the role it plays in your current life. Because anxiety can create feelings of overwhelm, having this kind of map can be empowering in and of itself.

In the second session, the practitioner helps you connect to your inner wisdom by using a form of altered state work that draws from both hypnosis and the Shamanic Journey. In Buddhism, this wise part of the self is called your “Buddha Nature.” In Depth Hypnosis, we call this “the part of the self that has only your highest good as its sole intent.” This part of you can appear in many ways— as a light, a sound, an animal, a plant or some other form that has meaning to you.

People commonly become disconnected from this part of the self over time, or they may never have experienced it before. It is the part of you that bears witness to everything you have ever experienced and cannot be broken, regardless of what you have endured in your life. It is an internal resource of wisdom and compassion that every person is capable of accessing. Just connecting with this part of the self can help you feel less anxious and can create a deep sense of connectedness and anchoring inside of you.

Suggestion hypnosis can also be immensely helpful in reducing and transforming symptoms of anxiety. With hypnotherapy, suggestions are usually generated by the hypnotherapist. In Depth Hypnosis, the client generates all of the suggestions. You are asked to reflect on the changes you would like to make, and you choose suggestions that feel both safe and empowering for you. Anxiety tends to be self-perpetuating, and suggestion hypnosis interrupts this process, enabling you to make different choices in the way you meet your anxiety. Suggestion hypnosis can help you to step out of patterns of anxiety.

A great deal of anxiety can be relieved simply by connecting to your inner wisdom and engaging in suggestion hypnosis, but this is only the tip of the iceberg for those who wish to go deeper. A Depth Hypnosis Practitioner can help you follow the feeling of anxiety back to its origin, often through regression, helping you to understand why it occurs and allowing you to transform your relationship to it. The possibilities Depth Hypnosis offers are limitless when it comes to healing your anxiety and understanding the information it is revealing to you.