You Don't Need Drugs to Become a Knight to Remember

Every time I check my e-mail I get a bunch of adverts advising me that I would be a Knight to Remember if only I would send off to some dodgy dealer somewhere for Viagra, or Cialis, or Levitra, or some natural equivalent that probably consists of bicarbonate of soda - or something much nastier.

It probably happens to you, too (actually, Emily gets them addressed to her personally, which has to make you wonder whether somebody somewhere might not be quite up to speed) because literally billions of these e-mails go whizzing through cyberspace every year for the very good reason that they're aimed at a huge market.

Erectile disfunction is a very common problem for a lot of men - all of whom take it very seriously, and many of whom will go to any lengths to make the problem go away.

I say 'go to any lengths', but quite often 'any lengths' doesn't include the most sensible option - which is a visit to a doctor to find out whether there's some underlying organic cause for the fact that Willy won't come out to play any more.  And there are a lot of potential underlying organic causes, some of which are major causes for concern - like impending heart disease.

The moral here is, of course, that it really isn't a good idea to respond to spam - and resort to drugs! - before you've had somebody professionally qualified confirm that you don't have a problem apart from the one you already know about. 

And once you've had that welcome confirmation, there are cheaper, safer, and better options than drugs.

Erectile disfunction is often psychological.  In other words one failure leads to another because people come to expect failure, to anticipate it, visualise it - and make it happen.

Hypnosis can alter expections, change responses, and make it possible for people to anticipate and achieve success in this and host of other areas.  It isn't the only way to go - but it's a good option because it's relatively fast-acting.  Positive thinking and creative visualisation are slower - but they can be the building blocks of success, too.

If you've got this problem, see your doctor and put your mind at rest.  Then you can think about what you want to do next.

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Thoughts Become Things That Happen

Winston Churchill once said: "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

I spend a lot of time trying to enable people to see that there is an opportunity in every difficulty - and even more time trying to help pessimists to climb out of the difficulties they have created for themselves simply by thinking negatively.

Let's cut to the chase here.  Your unconscious mind is a very powerful entity, and it can do great things for you. The big BUT is that your unconscious mind - like a perfect servant - wants to give you what it believes that you want, and takes its cue from your conscious mind.

Want to fail at something?  Want to be afraid of something?  Want your relationships to fall apart one after another?  No problem!  Just imagine those things hard enough and often enough, and your unconscious mind - like a perfect servant - will do it's best to make them all happen for you.

Use your unconscious mind carefully.  Think positively.  Imagine good outcomes.  See the opportunities that really do exist in every difficulty.

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/    

Positive Thinkers - a Group With the Right Idea

I was cruising around on LinkedIn yesterday, and found an entire Group devoted to positive thinking. The Group description stated that it was for optimistic people who believed in the power of positive thinking, and who concentrated on the good rather than the bad.

I was absolutely enchanted!  Bill and I are hypnotherapists.  We don't push that fact down people's throats - but we are.  And hypnotherapists have to spend an awful lot of time convincing people to be positive and confident before they can even begin to deal with all the other problems those people want to address.

Levels of positivity and confidence determine how well people deal with life - how they react to what happens to them.  And no-one needs a therapist to learn how to use positive thinking to become more positive and enhance their confidence.  Anyone with a library ticket, or access to a bookshop or the internet can do it by themselves.

Look up positive thinking!  You'll find you can do yourself a power of good, change your whole attitude, and be a healthier happier person by learning to take some very simple steps.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Nearly Spring - Time to Get Into the Swim

If you're often tempted to wander about in your garden or the park looking for shoots and leaves, are tempted to ask flowering bulbs in markets and shops about the health and whereabouts of their invisible relatives, and have an obsessive-compulsive desire to clean the windows or turn out the attic, then you have Spring Fever.

If can't get interested in the sale of winter clothing (however cheap), and keep telling yourself that it really is a lot warmer today despite the fact that the news, the weather forecast and the thermometer in the shed all tell you that isn't so, then you have it badly.

This is not, alas, something that be cured by chocolate. But you can take action.

Slow, dark, rainy January days pass more quickly if you are busy anticipating better days - and this is a good time to keep yourself busy anticipating better days by getting some exercise.  As no one really wants to go out running or cycling - or even walking - in the weather we've all been having, swimming is your best option.

Quite apart from the fact that swimming is great heart-lung exercise and makes you feel really good (to say nothing of extremely clean!), doing it will enable you to find out whether your swimming gear still fits well.  And that's quite important, because if it doesn't fit well now, it isn't likely that it's going to fit well in June, is it?

If you begin to get some gentle, toning, exercise now, you won't need to bother about whether things are going to fit you come June.  And you can meet some new people, feel a lot more positive, and pass some useful, healthy, time.  And the daffoldils will be out before you know it.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/ 

You Don't Need to Handle Rape or Abuse All By Yourself

Rape or abuse isn't a self-help issue.  Anyone who has been raped or abused needs immediate help - and perhaps long term support. 

There are help and support centres all over Britain - and you can find many of them online by typing 'rape crisis centres' into your search engine - but if you can't find a support centre near you online, the easiest place to find help quickly is to get in touch with The Samaritans . You can call the Samaritans 24 hours a day. In the UK dial 08457 90 90 90. In the Republic of Ireland dial 1850 60 90 90.

Most support centres or agencies will advise you to contact the police, but most - like The Haven Sexual Assault & Referral Centre at King's College Hospital will also advise you that if you have not informed the police about your sexual assault/rape and are uncertain about whether to do so there are many options to consider, and that whilst you can discuss those possibilities confidentially with them, your choices and wishes will be respected.

The important thing is that you do get help and discuss your options.  This really is not a self-help issue.

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Don't Shop While You're Hungry!

When you want to lose a few - or even more than a few! - pounds, snacking is something to avoid.  The goal is to eat real meals at real mealtimes and concentrate on eating them properly and enjoying them. Snacks are not real meals, people don't eat them at real mealtimes or concentrate on eating them properly - so most of the time they don't enjoy them either.

Avoiding snacking isn't difficult, but it sometimes takes guile, ingenuity and forethought.

Don't shop when you're hungry!  I know that a lot of people use up their lunch hour shopping.  I also know that they gobble down a lot of junk food - one or two sandwiches, a packet of cakes, and a fizzy drink - very fast whilst they push the trolley.  That isn't eating, it's fuelling up with snack foods that contain a lot of calories and have no nutritional value.

If you have to shop for food in your lunch hour, try to arrange to eat before you go so that you aren't tempted to snack your way round the supermarket.  Most people have a quarter of an hour break mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Take a couple of sandwiches from home, and eat them in break times.  Slowly.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/      

Migraine - Let's Make it a Headache for Everyone

Over the past thirty years or so there have been a number of studies as to whether hypnotherapy (and particularly self-hypnosis) can help people who suffer from migraine headaches - and over and over again researchers have concluded that those techniques can greatly reduce the incidence and severity of migraine headaches.

Back in the 1970's, for example, a study by Anderson, Basker and Dalton compared the treatment of migraine by hypnosis and self-hypnosis with the treatment of migraine by use of the drug prochlorperazine - 'Stemetil'.  The trial revealed that the number of attacks - and the number of people who suffered blinding attacks - were significantly lower for the group receiving hypnotherapy than for the group receiving the drug.  In fact ten out of the twenty-three people in the hypnotherapy group achieved complete remission during the last three months of the trial, compared to only three people out of the twenty-four in the group using the drug.

Admittedly, the number of studies into using hypnotherapy to deal with migraine headaches is much smaller than those concentrating on, for example, asthma, but there have been enough of them that have been consistently encouraging to suggest that many migraine sufferers could benefit from hypnotherapy and learning to use hypnosis themselves.

So why aren't they?

Primarily it's because very few doctors in general practice learn to use hypnosis - and those that do don't have the time to use it - so it isn't widely available on the NHS.  Some doctors will certainly recommend hypnosis under private health schemes - but not everybody has a private health scheme.  Secondly, of course, hypnotherapy doesn't have access to the sort of funding that is available to pharmaceutical companies - to say nothing of the effort that is put into promoting pharmaceutical products and selling them.

So in general medication is what most people who suffer from migraine headaches are offered - and that's what they are going to continue to be offered unless they demand something else.

If you or someone close to you suffers from migraine headaches, ask about hypnosis  - and show that you know about it.  Quote Anderson, Basker and Dalton.  Or Olness, Karen & McDonald, who proved (as long ago as 1960!) that self-hypnosis could help children who were not responding well to medication.

Ordinary people can change things!

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

It's Really Very Difficult to 'Steal' Something...

When you're trying hard to lose weight, the whole world is full of temptation  - and that's particularly true if you're living in a house full of people who don't need to lose any weight, and actually need the biscuits and snacks you're trying to avoid eating yourself.

Obviously, you can't just stop buying snack food because you don't want to eat it yourself.  That isn't just unfair, it's a bad idea.  And the usual ploy of putting snack foods away of sight or storing it in relatively inaccessible places won't work well either if people have become used to coming home from school or work and helping themselves to something to 'tide them over' until the real food lands on the table.

The easiest way around this problem - and it really is a problem for a lot of people - is to fall back on one of the  inhibitions that was dinned into your head when you were a child, and use it. 

It's wrong to steal.  You get into trouble if you become a thief.  People don't like or trust thieves. 

You know that, and I know it, and everybody else knows it, and in fact very few people can bring themselves to overcome that inhibition and take something that belongs to someone else - particular if that someone else is a child.

So if a tin of biscuits is labelled 'David's Biscuits', or 'Elaine's Cakes', you can't eat them without asking permission can you?  Because they aren't yours, are they? And you aren't a thief, are you?

Some inhibitions are very good for you.  They can make shedding a few pounds a lot easier.  Use them!

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/
      

Therapy is Snow Joke in Arctic Conditions!

Once I'd looked out of the window last Friday morning, I wasn't expecting to see too many people that day. Like the surrounding roads, our semi-circular driveway and six plus parking spaces were buried (again!) under something like two feet of fresh snow. It looked super. It also looked like a lot of hard work.

"Deeper and deeper, Bill", intoned my wife, who has taken to using hypnotic phrases in regular conversation, and who was then on her way to spend the morning in a nice warm kitchen. "Not funny, love", I said.

In the end I compromised with the snow, and dug out two parking spaces, one entrance to the driveway, and a path to the front door. Then I went indoors to find out which of the days' clients fancied a day out in the Winter Wonderland that is now rural Berkshire.

Surprisingly, somebody did. My six o'clock client wouldn't hear of putting off his appointment - and my description of the horrendous conditions outside didn't cut any ice, if you'll excuse the pun. He was determined to go ahead.

On one level I was pleased, because a motivated client makes for very good therapy, but when I thought about the unploughed, ungritted roads outside; the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned earlier in the week and only recently retrieved, and the fact that my client would be driving in bad conditions on unfamiliar roads in the dark, I was really less than happy.

By 6:30 p.m. that evening I was very definitely unhappy. There was no sign of the client - and the thought that he might just have had second thoughts wasn't as comforting as it should have been. Thankfully, the 'phone rang at quarter to seven. The client was fifty or sixty yards away, in a road almost opposite - and he'd been stuck in a snow drift for forty minutes.

Off with the house shoes, on with the green wellies, and out with a long-handled shovel in one hand and a wide headed shovel in the other to provide a bit of hands-on therapy.

By the time I got there, there was another car stuck behind my clients' car, and it took the combined efforts of all three of us and nearly twenty minutes to dig everyone out.

Afterwards - fortified by tea - my client and I finally got down to business. He relaxed, and I began another kind of therapeutic digging to try get to the root of his problem.

It was a great session. Two blokes with shovels can develop a lot of vital empathy very quickly - and he was really a very motivated person...

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Not What You Eat - More The Way You Eat It

Every once in a while somebody comes up with a new diet, and lots of people buy the book, follow the instructions for week or so, and then give up - often because the diet is too restricted, and/or they don't like the food they're supposed to live on.

Obviously, if your Doctor puts you on a diet then you need to be on a diet, but if it's just a case of dropping a few pounds to fit comfortably into your clothes then all you need to do is to eat correctly.

Diet books never tell you this, but sadly the 'telephone line' between your stomach and your brain isn't on speed dial - which means that it takes a while for the message to get through that you've actually had enough to eat.

If you 'bolt' your food rather than eating it properly then you have lots of time to eat too much - and when the message finally arrives (via that uncomfortable, bloated feeling!) you've already eaten too much.  And, of course, it really doesn't matter then whether the food in question was 'low calorie' or not, because you've still eaten too much of it.

If you chew your food thoroughly before swallowing, put down your knife and fork (or your sandwich) between mouthfuls, and concentrate on eating rather than trying to do some else at the same time (like watching television or reading a book, for example) then the message will get through in good time. 

Always assuming that you listen to the message, and stop eating immediately you get it, you will never eat too much - and, over a period, you'll lose your extra pounds.  I say 'over a period', because it took some time to put those pounds on, and it's going to take some time to get rid of them.

Losing weight shouldn't be a 'no pain, no gain' activity.  Eating is pleasurable - something to be savoured and enjoyed.  And if you eat correctly, and stop eating immediately your body says 'Enough!' then you can enjoy the food you like without worrying about gaining weight - or dieting.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Don't Let Embarrassment Ruin Your Life

A couple of years ago now Emily and I had a 'clutch' of people who turned up within a few days of each other with the same problem.  That was unusual in itself,  because - in an average month - at least sixty per cent of the people we see have 'no-two-alike problems'. But the problem itself was even more unusual - at least to us, then - because we had never dealt with it before, and had never had any occasion to think seriously about it.

Our 'clutch' was made up of adult men who wet the bed - not occasionally, or because they had had too much to drink, but on a regular basis, and sometimes every night.  And they had been wetting the bed regularly all their lives.

We did a lot of research and listened to a lot of stories over quite a period - and it wasn't a happy picture.  Our 'clutch' - in common with a lot of people just like them - lived very constricted lives.  They didn't stay with friends, have friends to stay with them, invite people into their homes, take what we would think of as ordinary holidays, or have what we would think of as being ordinary and natural sexual relationships with other people.  They socialised very little, and worried about the smell of urine in their homes, on their clothes and on them quite a lot.  Their whole lives revolved about keeping a secret that they would have been better off never to have kept in the first place.
 
Adult bedwetting isn't rare, and it certainly isn't incurable, but - like a lot of other things - it's something that people are often too embarrassed to talk about.  Sadly, many adult bedwetters are only discovered and treated when they are hospitalised or incarcerated.

Whatever problems you have, you should never be too embarassed to talk, explain, and ask for help. Embarrassment isn't something that you should allow to ruin your life.

- Bill

It's Hard to Give up Smoking Because...

It's hard to give up smoking - even with aids like Nicorette - for two reasons.

Firstly, cigarettes contain additives that are themselves addictive.  Those additives are the source of 'brand loyalty' - the reason why a particular person prefers a particular brand of cigarette and will buy that brand rather than any other regardless of price.

Secondly, smoking is a habit that attaches itself readily to other habits or daily rituals - mid-morning coffee, a drink in the evening, the regular Friday telephone call home to parents, the weekly manicure, all become associated with smoking, and seem incomplete or unsatisfactory without a cigarette.

Both of these factors can be made to work in favour of the person who really wants to stop smoking.

• Cigarettes that are not the right' brand are unsatisfactory to a smoker, because whilst all cigarettes have additives, they don't have the same additives in every case.  Changing brands every day - even if means throwing away unsmoked cigarettes - means that smoking itself becomes unsatisfactory, so that the desire to smoke tapers off.
• Changing the habits or weekly rituals that have become 'cigarette vehicles' - or designating various rooms of the house no smoking zones - eventually detaches the habit from the habit, as it were, so that smoking ceases to be part of that particular activity.

It helps, too, to make sure that its impossible to 'light up' unconsciously by keeping cigarettes in less easily accessible places and removing and washing ashtrays immediately ONE cigarette has been smoked so that smoking becomes a conscious decision - and a bit of a chore.

Nicorette works well - but it will work a whole lot better if it gets some help from you!

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/
   

Boost Your Resolution With Positive Affirmations!

'Positive thinking' can help you keep those New Years Resolutions - and please don't tell me it went out with the ark. It didn't. It just got re-labelled and reincarnated as various new, fashionable (and very expensive!) therapautic systems. You don't need new, fashionable or expensive. You can DIY with something tried, trusted and free. Here's how:

Positive affirmations can take several forms, but right now you should concentrate on the on the three types of ‘I’ statement that are statements of self-belief:

• ‘I am’ statements are statements of who you are; positive affirmations of real traits or abilities that exist in you. For example: I am competent, I am strong, I am intelligent, I am talented, I am energetic, I am a good person, I am caring.
• I can’ statements are statements of your belief in your potential to change, grow and help yourself. For example: I can gain self-confidence, I can be strong, I can be assertive, I can be positive, I can change, I can heal, I can be a problem solver.
• 'I will’ statements are statements of positive change - ‘success prophesies’ or positive affirmations of things you want to achieve. For example: I will smile more today, I will take care of me today, I will feel good about me today, I will like myself better each day, I will take on only what I can handle today.

Choose a statement that fits one of the things you have resolved to achieve this year - 'I will succeed', for example - and work with it for at least a week. Make it your first thought when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you think before you go to sleep. Think of it when you sit down to eat, when you take a shower, when you go for a walk, and when you sit down to relax. Repeat it as often as possible during the day. When you're done with that statement start on another one that's relevant to what you want to achieve.

Don't think of positive thinking as being 'silly' or a waste of time! It works - and if you work with it, it will work for you.

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/