Counselling provides a safe place where, within the relationship with the therapist, you can explore and make changes. The essential factor is that relationship.
You need to feel that the therapist you are seeing is
someone you can trust.
Being listened to by someone who really hears you, consulting someone who really sees you, feeling that the therapist truly recognises, accepts and does not judge you is in itself an immensely powerful and healing process. Having acknowledged you in your current situation, the therapist can introduce tools to enable and assist you to move on or make changes.
Hypnosis, visualisation, imagery, relaxation, self hypnosis and NLP (neuro linguistic programming) techniques are wonderful tools in psychotherapy or counselling. Alone, they are not magic wands; to use them in isolation is to use such techniques more in the service of entertainment, as in stage hypnosis. Hypnotherapy uses these tools very differently and far more naturalistically.
Hypnosis, or trance, feels wonderful. It is completely
natural and will feel very familiar.
Think of times when you have been half awake/half asleep before you fully wake to start the day. You may be dreaming, but at the same time aware that you are dreaming; simply more interested in focusing on the dream rather than on any external sounds or impressions.
Then there is that sometimes alarming experience when you have realised that you have been entirely unaware of the last stretch of motorway you have driven along. Incidentally - be reassured - if anything happens when you are in such a trance that requires your attention, you will instantly switch from your inner landscape to whatever it is that needs your full attention.
You can also recall times of apparently aimless daydreaming. Yet it has often been at those times that you've had great ideas or have found solutions.
A combination of the three above examples of naturally occurring trance illustrates many of the benefits of working on this level. We have so many more resources, qualities and abilities than we consciously realise. As in the examples above, we are so much more creative, inventive and imaginative than we think we are and we are able to think far more laterally, logically and rationally than we had thought we could. Also, as in the above examples, you will be ‘in control' at all times and able to snap out of your trance, should you so chose, whenever you want to. In this way, you can see that no-one can hypnotise you - it is always your choice.
What will happen is that you will be enabled to make that choice and to use all these lovely facilities more easily for yourself.
Within a counselling framework, hypnotherapy uses hypnosis, visualisation, imagery, relaxation, self hypnosis and NLP as some of the routes to allow you access to your full self.