What is psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is the process of therapeutic exploration of unconscious issues and negative feelings experienced by an individual with a therapist trained in psychotherapy. These may include feelings of depression, anxiety, trauma or the general loss of meaning to one’s life. The process of exploring psychological disorders or maladjustments and helping one look objectively at behaviours, thoughts, feelings and problematic situations stimulates cognitve, conscious understanding for the client and thus the client increases his capacity for choice, bringing autonomy back to their life.

   Why use psychotherapy and how does it work?
Sometimes when we experience negative emotions there’s an obvious, logical explanation for them. Sometimes, however, our emotions, behaviours, perceptions or thoughts seem illogical or irrational, causing us pain or disturbance. The less consciously aware we are of the motivations behind such negative feelings, thoughts and behaviours, the more they seem to control us and we feel “stuck”. The psychotherapy process helps an individual understand that irrationality, bringing the underlying, unconscious cause for the symptom to the attention of the conscious, rational mind. From this understanding of the psychological issue involved it is possible to change attitudes, thoughts and behaviours. So, the key focus of psychotherapy is awareness.

   What is the difference between psychotherapy
 and hypnotherapy?

Psychotherapy in and of itself is a useful tool to self-discovery and raising self-awareness around unresolved issues or underlying causes for negative behaviours and emotions. Realisation of such causes can sometimes be enough to generate behavioural change and exploring cognitve avenues of alternative behaviours and perceptions accelerates such change. Psychotherapy, therefore, is a conscious process.

Hypnotherapy is the process of communicating unconsciously with oneself and gives speedy access to underlying causes and insights stimulating alternative behaviours using unconscious resources of the client. Angela’s wide experience has shown that hypnotherapy and psychotherapy is a powerful combination in the field of personal change, bringing together one’s conscious, cognitive realisation with unconscious, creative resources.

It is not always necessary to induce the hypnotic state for a client to achieve the desired change in their life. Equally it is not always necessary to explore underlying issues using cognitive psychotherapeutic skills with clients but rather the hypnotic state to achieve quick and lasting change.

  For a comprehensive list of symptoms benefited by  hypnotherapy and how it can help you, see Conditions Treated.