THE YIN AND YANG OF THERAPY AND WHY I LOVE MY JOB.

It’s true; I do love my job and gain great satisfaction in seeing transformations occur before me on a daily basis.

Some clients come to me with seemingly unsolvable issues and it can be like unravelling a puzzle to comprehend their complexity and how to resolve them. Sometimes, however, it’s a real breeze and I have a feeling that I simply observe the process of change without too much effort on my part – that’s what I like to tell myself but I do prepare each session quite thoroughly to encourage that effortless feeling.

One of the images that comes to me, when a client starts to clear psychological blockages, is that of an unseen energy beginning to flow once again. The renowned hypnotherapist Peter Field has written in detail about the Chinese concept of Chi and how its flow, or stagnation, influences our psychological make up and how he redirects the flow with targeted hypnotherapy (1).

I particularly love to see those recovering from trauma open their eyes and report that a particular image or memory no longer has the same emotive quality to it. That’s when I sense that something that was once fixed and seemingly solid has now changed form and flows once more. Joe Griffin, from The Human Givens Institute, speculates that, “This is achieved by manipulating the interplay between the amygdala, the hippocampus and the neocortex. The amygdala is the organ in the brain that alerts us to possible danger and triggers the fear response; the hippocampus gives an event context and codes it in a form that can be stored as a memory in the neocortex.” (2)

So to get back to the title of this piece. I love this job because it feels like bringing water to the desert and because neurological changes take place. The yin and yang descriptions of the work I love.

(1) The Chi of Change, Peter Field. (2) http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/PTSD_Trauma_Treatments.htm#VMyqw9KsVAg