When I was working in London, the London Underground started a series of posters which were displayed in the underground trains.Sitting ,or often, standing in airless, overcrowded carriages these poems made the journeys pass by.

The one which stayed with me was ‘Child’ by Sylvia Plath. In that poem she expresses here hopes and fears for her own infant child. She reflects on the perfection of her child and wants only good things to come. The poem ends on a darker note , expressing concern at the more troubling experiences which come into the life of her child.The poem expresses beautifully something that is true. Each in our way, we are born perfect and untainted by the harsher experiences the world is likely to visit upon us over time.

We are all shaped by our experiences from our childhood onwards. Some of the most powerful work I have done as a hypnotherapist is addressing current undesirable habits,thoughts and performance blockages by tracing the source of these patterns back to childhood,to those early occasions where we experienced this ‘troublous  Wring of hands’. Very often the client relates the current pattern back to a similar emotion albeit usually in a very different context. By identifying the source and working with the client to rewire the neural networks associated with the emotion and the undesirable responses. These prior experiences can be significant in themselves but it is often the case that, viewed with hindsight, they are commonplace. Nevertheless, at that time from the perspective  of a child they were significant. Our subconscious wants to keep us safe and stores situations which it perceives as threatening (even mistakenly)  generating a repeating subconscious response which it relates to the earlier experience . And repetition further entrenches the response.

Hypnotherapy allows access to the  root source of these patterns and a shift from the previous unhelpful neural pathways and replacement with good patterns and responses.