to
go back
to "In the news" at River City Hypnosis.com
or simply close this window.Marjorie A. Cameron suggests that you feel better. It's her job -- she's a hypnotherapist.
Hypnotherapy isn't magic-show hypnosis, with its embarrassing stunts and emphasis on control. Instead, hypnotherapists drop polite hints to your subconscious while you're in a trance, suggesting that you change your eating habits to lose weight, or quit smoking, or even get over your fear of public speaking.
"So many of our behaviors are controlled by the subconscious mind," says Cameron, who opened her first hypnotherapy practice in Casper in September. "I don't diagnose, I don't heal. I just give the suggestions to let the body heal itself." "And (the body) loves to do it," she adds.
Hypnotherapy puts the conscious mind "on a little vacation," Cameron says, "and then I am able to introduce healthy, useful, beneficial suggestions to the unconscious mind. It's like when you first learned to drive, (and) now you get in the car and you don't think about it. That's how the body is after a hypnotic session. It's like it's been there forever."
A typical hypnotherapy session begins with induction, the process of putting a patient in a trance. Cameron says she knows 10 to 15 methods of induction, but that most of her patients -- she says 94 to 96 percent -- go into trance within five minutes with her usual method.
"You first say, 'Let's pretend,'" says Cameron, "and then you have them open their eyes. You ask, 'How was that? Okay? Go deeper.'" After a few repetitions, "within three or four minutes they're in a trance."
Once her patient is in a trance, Cameron implements "mental amnesia."
"I want your conscious mind totally on vacation," she says. "I don't want it fighting me at all. I tell you to say the alphabet backward very slowly ... the letters become dim and distant until they totally fade away."
"Mental amnesia" doesn't mean you'll necessarily forget everything, though. The amount you remember will depend on the depth of your trance.
"In a lighter trance you can talk to me, walk around and see," Cameron says.
In fact, she says, people enter a state of hypnosis every 90 to 120 minutes each day. Getting engrossed in a good book or movie is a form of hypnosis, for example, because for a short time you lose your sense of time and place.
"Hypnosis is a very natural state," she says. "We're in and out of it all day long and don't even know it."
Cameron uses hypnotherapy to treat a variety of maladies, from test anxiety to irritable bowel syndrome, and she says many can be cured in just one session.
Bill Magee of Bar Nunn visited Cameron to seek help for his sagebrush allergy, and found that she was able to get rid of it in two sessions.
"I haven't had to use my inhaler since I had those two sessions," he says. "She's a very nice lady and she's very good at what she does. She could put me under in about three minutes."
Still, the medical and psychological communities are wary of hypnotherapy as a sole treatment for health problems.
"There is a large scientific literature showing that hypnosis can be a moderately helpful treatment for some problems, but that it works via the placebo effect," Brett Deacon, an associate professor of psychology at University of Wyoming, said via email. "There is a near-total absence of controlled clinical trials that support the effectiveness of hypnosis for anything other than pain."(a RiverCityHypnosis.com news item)
Cameron is quick to point out that she won't treat patients for serious or physical or psychological issues without a referral from a doctor.
"It's a guild standard," says Cameron, a member in good standing of the National Guild of Hypnotists. "It's just the rules of the game."
A typical hypnotherapy session with Cameron costs $175, but she offers "package deals" for problems that require more than one session. For instance, smoking cessation, which Cameron says usually takes five sessions to cure, costs $600 for all five sessions.
"It's a tough one," she says.
A key to effective hypnotherapy is the desire on the patient's part to have to problem fixed, says Cameron.
"You have to want to lose weight, you have to want to stop smoking, you have to want to be full of confidence," she says.
"The less time I'm spending on getting you relaxed is more time I spend on getting your mind healthy. I would love to see the clients that doctors have given up on. Send them to me, I'll take them."
to
go back
to "In the news" at River City Hypnosis.com
or simply close this window.