However, as I mention on my website, eating disorders, whether bingeing, overeating, or anorexic behaviours generally have little to do with food and all to do with a desperate need to numb one’s emotions. The frightening emotions that are buried in the psyche may be just too painful to bring to consciousness so there needs to be some way of avoiding having to think about them. A part of you will then look for a behaviour that helps keep these feelings at bay. Clients can often feel worried that hypnosis will “make” them open up with all sorts of information that they are either not aware of or would rather keep to themselves. But our unconscious mind is there to protect us and is programmed to keep this sort of information safely where it is until we are mentally and emotionally ready to deal with it. What is more, an experienced therapist will only move at the rate a client feels safe and comfortable with.

Letting go of these unresolved feelings is so often key to reprogramming our relationship with food but there are many techniques at the therapist’s disposal that will allow this to be done in a safe and comfortable way, allowing the client to move at their own speed and within their own comfort zone.

If you find yourself forever “yoyo” dieting, repeating the same destructive patterns or eating to make yourself “feel better” then finding out how you can really resolve the issues behind the actions will most likely be the key to turning your life around.

However in a lot of cases taking drugs long term is never going to solve the underlying issues of why a person has feelings or behaviour patterns that they would rather be without. I subscribe to regular newsletters from Dr Mercola in America and they always make very interesting and entertaining reading. This article  from Dr Mercola talks about how he feels that there is an over medicating in America of people suffering from depression and also has a lot of questions concerning statistics and information we are given about certain medications. Since we are often never far behind America this article is well worth a read.

Although there seems still to be a prevalent view that depression is something that one perhaps just has to live with or at best may take years to overcome in my experience that is not always the case and I have first hand experience, as have many of my colleagues, of being able to help clients make significant changes in their emotional wellbeing in as little as just a few sessions.

Also as an update to the above this is a recent article on the BBC (health) website  by Dr Joanna Moncrieff where she talks about how putting patients on medication for psychological issues can be just a case of putting them into a “drug induced state” without ever addressing the real issues behind the problem just as Dr Mercola’s article does.

This also equates to the way I work in the therapy room. I prefer to offer my clients information as succinctly, practically and as clearly as I can. Any “homework” will be powerful techniques that can make lasting and meaningful changes that can be done easily and quickly. These will also be techniques that one can use for a lifetime but techniques that used regularly can make amazingly empowering changes in one’s life. So KISS!

Obviously I empathised with how he was feeling but when I realised that he had no plan or even desire to change how he felt about the situation I suggested that this might be the very best time to readjust how he felt about things. Obviously this would mean some emotional work would need to be done but wasn’t the issue trying to tell him something?

When an issue arises in our lives it often seems easier to try to ignore it, soldier on, pretend it will go away or even use it as a way of letting everyone know how difficult things are for us at the moment. But if there is some area of our lives that needs sorting out it has been brought to our attention for a reason and this is the very time when we should be working on it. Using it as a prop or hoping it will go away means that it is never addressed or resolved. It is easy to become more understanding, more spiritual or more likable when everything is going well. It is when things are tough that we need to put in the effort to move ourselves on positively in our life.

I am a fan of the tv series “The Dog Whisperer” where celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan takes badly behaved dogs and rehabilitates them (but first he has to retraining the owners!). One of his sayings is “a bad moment is a good time to rehabilitate yourself.” That moment really could be telling you that now is the time to make a change.

If you want to help bring stress levels down breathing is the perfect place to start.

“One of my teachers had each one of us bring a clear plastic bag and a sack of potatoes. For every person we’d refuse to forgive in our life, we were told to choose a potato, write on it the name and date, and put it in the plastic bag. Some of our bags, as you can imagine, were quite heavy.

We were then told to carry this bag with us everywhere for one week, putting it beside our bed at night, on the car seat when driving, next to our desk at work.

The hassle of lugging this around with us made it clear what a weight we were carrying spiritually, and how we had to pay attention to it all the time to not forget, and keep leaving it in embarrassing places.

Naturally, the condition of the potatoes deteriorated to a nasty slime. This was a great metaphor for the price we pay for keeping our pain and heavy negativity!

Too often we think of forgiveness as a gift to the other person, and while that’s true, it clearly is also a gift for ourselves!

So the next time you decide you can’t forgive someone, ask yourself… Isn’t MY bag heavy enough?”

- from www.pravsworld.com