Helping Tinnitus with Hypnotherapy
It is very important to note that while hypnotherapy can often help to reduce the volume of tinnitus and can sometimes assist the sufferer in achieving periods of quite and respite from their condition, no guarantees can be made.
If you have had your tinnitus for less than two years, no competent professional therapist will work with until medical checks have been performed. If you have only recently noticed tinnitus in yourself, please take my professional advice and talk to your Medical Doctor. Ask him/her to advise you regarding your tinnitus and ask if you can have the appropriate tests to find out if your problem is being generated in the inner ear, or if there may be any other organic causes. Although rare, it is possible for ringing in the ears to be caused by a tumour. Your GP can arrange for blood tests to see if you have any deficiencies including Zinc and magnesium. Also have your GP determine if you are hyperinsulinemic or diabetic.
There are many different causes for tinnitus and all of these should be investigated by your own GP. Also, if your tinnitus is very loud and causing you real distress, your GP can prescribe medication for you that can often reduce the volume, but this does takes some time to take effect.
What can you expect in a hypnotherapy session?
Learning to relax and use self-hypnosis – is what will fill most of your first session after a fairly in depth questionnaire has been completed. This will be your foundation session and is of vital importance to the ongoing process for you. You will be given a CD to listen to which will help you to learn about self-hypnosis while helping you to relax and de-stress (a very important start point for any therapy).
Your second session will come close on the heels of the first after about 7/8 days. In this session, Regression Therapy will be used. This therapy is one form of hypnotherapy. In regression therapy, the client is regressed to a time before the onset of the tinnitus to discover the trigger of the noise, if it is unknown. Generally from this point, the goal will be to desensitise you from the emotional impact of the onset and there are several ways in which this can be achieved.
The third session usually involves the use of Parts Therapy. Parts therapy is also known as Ego States Therapy and is another form of hypnotherapy that is used for helping tinnitus. In parts therapy, we discover what ‘part’ of the mind (not to be confused with the term ‘brain’) is maintaining the noise of tinnitus, and we negotiate with that part to tell us why the noise is being maintained. Quite often it comes up in therapy that the noise of tinnitus is a message or signal to the conscious mind. Often the message is to begin to listen to the self or others, or to make life changes, and it is frequently work related. When the ‘part’ is satisfied its message has got thought, it will often give up its job to make us listen and rest.
Your fourth session will normally use the techniques of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP). Using this therapeutic strategy you will be taught to reframe the way you think about your tinnitus and to create new neural pathways to be used in your thinking in order to avoid the old pathways on which the tinnitus resides as a residual memory loop.
Further sessions may involve the aforementioned techniques and other techniques as required. During every session some Suggestion Therapy will be used, and this form of hypnotherapy works by focusing on the future and suggesting to the mind that improvements will be made in the direction required by the client.
These vital foundation sessions will get things moving for you and just taking action will make you feel better, as will the use of suggestion therapy as sated above. However, you should realise that although it is entirely possible that by this early stage you may notice some changes in your tinnitus, you may have some time yet to wait for those longed for changes to volume and frequency. This is not a quick therapy, although everything possible will be done to help you that can be done with the use of the various forms of hypnotherapy.
Please see the following suggestions for actions you can take yourself as a part of your total tinnitus therapy:
Suggestions:
Consider joining the British Tinnitus Association. They offer a wealth of information and supporting literature for those with tinnitus together with a quarterly journal ‘quite’. I am a full professional member of this association.
British Tinnitus Association
4th Floor,
S1 24Z
0800 018 0527
Purchase the book ‘Turning Down the Volume’ by respected tinnitus expert and American Hypnotherapist Kevin Hogan Ph.D D.C.H (Alan trained with Kevin and completed the Minnesota Institute of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy's intensive training programme for specialist tinnitus therapy).
ISBN 0-9709321-2-x
'Turning Down the Volume' can be obtained from www.amazon.uk.com and from most good book stores.