My Blog. .

20.03.24 One of the most interesting things about smoking is that if one looks at it from a process point of view. i.e. what is it? then it's nothing more than drawing the fumes and poisonous toxins from burning leaves into the mouth and then concluding that somehow that results in pleasure, relaxation of mind or stress relief of some kind. When I speak to smokers they are suprised that the act of sucking on fumes can create these relief feelings, but agree they are there. To qualify this, smokers are only too aware of the feelings or cravings they witness if they don't have a cigarette. Often the cravings can be strong and only subside when they light up. If you ask the question, when would you in any other circumstance, actively put fumes and toxins in your mouth, derive pleasure form it and look forward to doing it again. The answer is always the same. Never. No-one would ever suck the fumes out of an exhaust pipe but from a process point of view is smoking really that different? Part of the stop smoking therapy I offer, addresses this anaomaly and suggests to the smoker an explanation for why the connection between smoking and craving release occurs. 

26.10.23 I am only currently practising at the well respected Parkhouse centre in Gorseinon Swansea SA44NW

24.10.23 One of the ever increasing requests I receive is regarding help to stop vaping, rather than smoking per se, and whether Hypnotherapy can help with it. Because the main focus of the help to stop smoking package that I offer addresses the behavioural, associative and habitaual aspects of smoking and what significant health benefits that stopping can offer, then there is naturally much common ground between the two forms of obstensibly the same habit. 

21.01.22 Covid-19 update. I am currently fuly open for business. My office hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm. (Later appointments can be made on request). Client's are asked to fill out a Covid-19 questionnaire and vaccination status form. If any client is experiencing published symtoms of the virus, or they are awaiting results of a test, or have been asked to self isolate they should inform me immediately. This includes members of their immediate family.

04.02.21 There are many examples in my work in NLP and Hypnotherapy that illustrate how the unconscious mind can formulate habitual behaviours, that on the surface appear consciously questionable or irrational. Take for example Smoking as a habit. When one looks at it in its pure form, it is nothing more than inhaling toxic chemicals and fumes into the body. If I were to ask my client's where else in life would they actively do that act, they answer would inevitably be nowhere, or of course not. But if the mind thought that it was doing something good and the feelings associated with the act were strong enough then the nature of the unconscious would be to repeat the process over and over again.. It is like the unconscious only focusses on one aspect of the act and bases its response based on the association or feeling from that one aspect. It appears not to consider the wider aspects of long term health. A deadly habit could be formed based on a false logic. In these circumstances, trying to stop using conscious intervention becomes a tug of war. People who go cold Turkey, often report they get withdrawal symptoms, which makes it very difficult for them to stop the habit. The urges to continue can feel overpowering to the point where a person can feel irritable or anxious if they are without cigarettes too long. NLP can be useful in habit breaking and to help people change limiting beliefs about smoking into empowering beliefs. Hypnotherapy can be used to address the unconscious processes that appear inaccessible by conscious intervention. I believe everyone has the ability to stop via their own internal resources, they just need to find a way to exercise or tap into those internal resources, so that the unconscious has new information to work with. After all its primary function is to look after us, so logic says it would be open to change if it had the right information to work with and not something based on a false logic.

02.01.20 It has been a constant source of wonder to me if our world is created from what we see, hear, smell, taste or touch or do we create our own world from our internal representations within. Are we moved by what we see or when we are seen or both. The way we perceive our world can have a significant impact on the way we feel. Our world can be largely dictated by how we believe people perceive us or how confident we feel in different situations. I think the difficulty for many of my Hypnotherapy / NLP client's is the realisation that we don't just have one self image, but many self images. That is why a person can feel confident in one situation yet feel completely intimidated in another. Very often people will be hard on themselves for not being able to do something, or at least perceive that they can't do it. So that reality for them, feels permanent and through generalisation their self image can be projected onto other scenarios causing states of (projected) anxiousness. However, as simple as it sounds people have many self images and in many cases it's just that they need to develop skills rather than feel a level of helplessness. If we were to say "I can't do that yet" rather than "I can't do that" one is able to see that the addition of the word "yet" opens up a channel of possibility, which in itself can be uplifting. Compare that to "I can't do that" and it can be seen that there is an element of permanence about it. The mind might process that as "Can't do, won't do it" So, the way we think about things can have an important impact on how we feel about things and our confidence about our selves, our potential and the way people perceive us.

20.03.19 Metaphors can be used effectively in the context of Hypnotherapy and NLP to change a persons perception or to add new ways of looking at a problem. There is something about the way the mind responds to stories that can open up new perspectives and choice of outcome. If a person is to overcome limiting beliefs then having different perspectives on what they find limiting can be very helpful. The interesting thing about stories is that they are open to interpretation by the individual and therefore will have different meanings to different people in the context of the problem. Sometimes it can be just a few words that helps a person overcome their limitations. Metaphors can be a powerful indirect means of appealing to the mind in ways that direct suggestions may not.

25.02.19 Hypnotherapy can be used to help people Stop Smoking. However as a general rule, it is important that the client themselves wants to stop and is not doing it simply because they have been told too or is doing it for someone else. Having the right frame of mind in my experience creates the conditions necessary for change. No-one ordinarily can be made to do something against their will, whether the person is in a conscious state or Hypnotic state. There is an old saying, 'Where there is a will there is a way' and this applies to Hypnotherapy just as much as it does to any form of intervention. The 'want' opens up the channel of possibility and desire, which if not present can lead to roadblocks in the change process.

21.01.18 I have been helping a number of clients recently alleviate the symptoms of stress associated with divorce or relationship breakup. People will often express the feeling as turning their world upside down or inside out. One client said it was like they had been building a jigsaw and then suddenly all the pieces were on the floor and some of them were upside down, so it wasn't even clear where they fitted anymore. Working as a Hypnotherapist, it is often the case that client's cannot pinpoint how they feel or know what to do with the feelings, instead they express how they feel in the form of Metaphor. For example "I'm under a cloud" or "up against a brick wall" or "in a rut". These are just a small sample of the multitude of ways people will describe where they are stuck or how they are feeling. That is what I believe the unique benefit of using hypnotherapy. That it is possible to work positively with forms of metaphoric thinking and design sessions to change way a person perceives their personal metaphor into something empowering rather than limiting. In other words the sessions can be done to a large extent, content free. It is only necessary to discover what the person's metaphor for their problem is rather than the details of the specifics of the problem itself. This opens up a whole unique dimension of possibilities for helping the client solve the problem. When asked, most client's can formulate some form of metaphor for how they feel or are behaving. I nearly always use some form of metaphor approach in my Hypnosis sessions because of the natural curative effect changing the metaphor can produce. In my 10 years of experience I have seen the powerful effects of metaphor on healing and in some cases produce almost magical effects.

14.11.17 There is undoubtedly a rise in the number of requests received for Gambling and gambling addiction. It may be that the rise in advertising in recent years has popularised the urge for people to give it a try. It could be that the odds are positioned in such a way to encourage an early win with the promise of free bets for on-going accounts. The problem is of course that with winning there is a accompanying raise in status, a feeling of euphoria that can become a unconscious learned response. The logic being if it's happened once, it can happen again. The unconscious can be very logical or literal in it's response. This means that if a person has a good feeling about something they have tried, they may well have the urge to repeat that behaviour, even if the person fails the second time around, they may find themselves chasing the feeling they had first time around (because the first try became the learned response). It is possible using NLP and Hypnotherapy techniques to collapse the feelings associated with gambling and recode the unconscious response to steer a person away from the often strong urges. I have lost count of the number of people I have helped to overcome the desire to gamble in recent years. Some people find that the urge to gamble grows over time and have found themselves losing marriages, houses, and often a large part of their income before they make contact with me for help. The one thing they all seem to say is that they wished they had looked for help sooner.

28.09.17 October is approaching so this blog has two themes. Stoptober and Spider Phobias. October has become the month when more people make the effort to Stop Smoking. Smoking is such a deadly habit that can cause sickness, poor health and even premature death. Yet on the surface Smoking seems such a strange habit to form. i.e. to inhale the fumes from a burning leaf and put nicotine poison (one of the deadliest poisons known to man) inside a persons system. All of this at considerable expense to a persons pocket and health. The problem with Smoking is that the process is largely built on false beliefs. The mind has been tricked into thinking it is doing something good and therefore repeats the process over and over again. Dangerous links can be made between internal feelings and the cigarette itself to the extent where a person is convinced the cigarette is giving them a form of relief or release from cravings. Yet how can putting fumes and poison into a persons mouth whilst their heart rate and blood pressure are increasing be a form of relief? The truth it is the bodies reaction to being poisoned that creates the feelings of release or relief, but the illusion is that it is the cigarette that is generating the feelings. It's not. The cigarette is just responsible for the poisoning aspect and it is the bodies response to the poisoning that creates the illusion of feelings of release. Hypnotherapy is useful for habit breaking and behavioural change. Habits can be broken as can the association with times and places that people smoke. Also this coming month is Spider season. Many people have a such a fear of Spiders that it leads to a Phobic reaction. At the point where the stimulus is seen it can set off a chain reaction in the body where there is no choice of response other than to freeze or panic. People can become frozen to the spot even when the Spider is dead. Hypnotherapy and NLP can help a person recode their learned response at an unconscious level so that the response to the stimulus is positive rather than negative. This is achieved by attaching the person to positive resources they hold internally. Everyone has positive resources inside them, yet when it comes to Spiders or Snakes or the like the positive resources have not yet been connected internally via neural pathways in order to create a positive response. Under Hypnosis these changes can be made quickly and naturally.

04.09.17 The quality of the questions we ask ourselves can have a significant impact on the way a person thinks, feels and behaves. Often, when a client comes in for a consultation it can be that the fear, anxiety, worry or stress that they express they are feeling, can be down to the limits or boundaries a person will create for themselves and their relationship to their environment. People will often find themselves using 'Why?' type questions, which in my years of experience can be one of most limiting words in the English language. For example Why is xxxxx happening to me?, or Why am I feeling this way? are typical questions of the many and varied 'Why' type questions I regularly hear. The problem is not the question itself, it is how the mind answers the question that can create the limits or boundaries to empowered thinking. Why questions nearly always result in 'because' answers. In other words, the 'because' answer could be considered as a means of justification for the way the person is feeling. But what if the 'because' answer is something negative e.g. 'Because you are not good enough' or 'Because you deserve to feel that way' how does that response further reinforce a persons beliefs about themselves or their environment? The good news is that Why? is not the only question a person can ask of themselves. Using a system of Cartesian questions a person can expand their responses into many more perspectives. In my experience it is the clients ability to learn what options exist to asking empowering questions and how to use the questions effectively that can be the catalyst for positive change. It is a person own thinking that can create the boundaries or limits to the way they think, and so it follows that learning to ask the right questions can help remove them. New perspectives bring new meaning. The more perspectives there are the more choice to see things in different ways a person has, leading to new empowered patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

07.08.17 It may be indicative of the world we live in today but the amount of requests I am now receiving for anxiety and fear based emotion has been steadily rising for quite some time. For those people who suffer from anxiousness, fear and/or depression, the world can seem an intimidating and uncompromising place to be. There is an important question or distinction to be asked. Does a person feel the way they do because of the environment or circumstances they find themselves in or does a person create their own reality from the feelings or thoughts they generate internally? To help someone overcome their internal conflicts, It is important to help them distinguish what is real and what is not. Something said or seen which is initially considered just a passing thought may escalate into a belief pattern that can become extremely limiting to person. If the belief is strong enough, it can feel very real, even though there may be little or no evidence to back it up. Humans have the capacity to make their own reality. "The prover proves what the thinker thinks" syndrome. In my nine and a half years of experience and over two thousand sessions, it is helping people to create choices in their ways of thinking that can have the most curative effect. It is when a person limits their choice of response to only one outcome or truth that their beliefs can become very self limiting and in turn affect their feeling of happiness, health and wellbeing.

01.09.16 One of the biggest requests I receive, is help with weight loss hypnotherapy. The clients who contact me very often have all experienced a similar trend. They have tried just about everything from weight loss clubs, to heart diets and the latest internet revelations on how to lose weight quickly. Yet they find themselves in a spiral of losing and regaining weight on a cyclic basis. Very often the weight gain is more than they originally started with. Many are frustrated by their inability to stay in control over a sustained period.. My approach to weight control is that it shouldn't be about "losing" something. Who ever set out to "lose" something. Such an approach could lead to internal, self defeating conflicts. Ask yourself the question, do you really want to "Give up, quit, or deprive yourself" of things you enjoy. I would doubt that very much. In this sense, dieting always seems to be such a chore, an up hill struggle. It's no wonder that after a while people give up and go back to indulging themselves. The focus of my NLP and Hypnotherapy based Weight control sessions, is to help client's have a different relationship with food, to develop winning strategies and new ways of thinking about what it is they are trying to achieve. It's not about emptying your cupboards of everything you like or about counting things or having rewards or treats. It is about well defined outcomes, refocusing attention onto what is important, using a persons own resources (In other words, what they are good at) to help them win at what they are setting out to achieve. Which is significantly different from setting out to "lose" something or deprive themselves. If a person feels like they are winning whilst doing something then it is far more feasible to have long term sustainability. The weight control packages are designed to re-frame what a person is trying to achieve, and using Hypnosis to appeal to the unconscious to change the patterns of uncontrolled eating. Also included is aversion therapy and habit breaking strategies, which can be a powerful ally in helping a person avoid the foods that are holding them back or damaging to health. It all seems obvious, yet without professional help to re-align goals and use of unconscious habit breaking techniques, people can find the urge to return to old ways of eating irresistible.

14.04.16 Trichotillomania or TTM is a disorder characterised by the urge for a person to pull out their hair, leading to hair loss and baldness. A sister habit is eating the hair, which can lead to the formation of hair balls in the gut. In extreme case this can be very dangerous if left unattended. If a person is prone to eating their hair, they should seek medical advice. For the lay observer pulling ones own hair out might seem a strange thing to do, to the extent that it would affect a persons appearance and then followed up by eating it. However to me as Hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner it is another category of unconscious habit, like nail biting, skin picking or teeth grinding. Whenever I speak to clients about the habit there is most often some underlying cause behind the need to hair pull, such as, (but not limited to) emotional feelings e.g. uncertainty, anxiousness, fear or worry, where the client will often be projecting their thoughts into the past or future. During this period of thinking, the habit can manifest itself, mainly because the feeling of doing it provides some form of comfort or release for a person from their thought projections. The client will often report they know they are pulling their hair but the underlying or background urges are so strong that they find themselves unable to stop themselves doing it. After the event there often follows a period of regret, guilt, shame, embarrassment or anger even. The difficulty for the person is, the source of the problem can be difficult to access with conscious intervention. This is because the pattern of repeating probably resides within the unconscious, generating the need to feel a feeling of release or some form of comfort. Habits can be broken or changed with the use of Hypnotherapy, so it may be possible to help a person change their pattern of behaviour into something more resourceful using hypnosis and/or NLP which aims to resolve the pattern at an unconscious level.

10.02.16 One of the things I have noticed over recent years is rise in client requests for help with Fears and Phobias, The ones I most often deal with are fear of flying, fear of spiders, driving phobias and social phobias. Maybe the rise in the requests is reflective of the world we live in and how access to media sources has dramatically increased the opportunities to expand our knowledge and unwittingly fuel our fears. The imagination is a very powerful tool and it is a unique human attribute for us to project our thoughts anywhere we wish, be it past present or future. The ability for us to project thoughts in this way is vital to the development of human race. Every new product, building, discovery, medical breakthrough, lunar adventure, etc etc, has at one time been no more than an idea in someone's imagination. That idea has been nurtured and grown and developed to become a reality. Enstein was renowned for his ability to use his vivid imagination as a problem solving tool. However the same imagination that has been so powerful in our existence can also imagine negative outcomes. If the imagined event becomes compelling enough, that event can seem very realistic to a person, even though the event hasn't actually happened. The imagined thoughts, feelings, sounds, smells and tastes associated with the event can appear very real to the individual. In this way even the suggestion of the event, can have a big emotional impact on the person. i.e. Mention flying to a person who is scared of it and you can immediately witness a change in emotional state as they play out the event in their mind. Even though their feet are still firmly planted on the ground, the imagined event is enough to change their emotional state. This is where Hypnotherapy and NLP can help. By exploring positive resources a person has available to them (and there are many) it can be possible to recode the emotional response at an unconscious level, such that the person responds in a resourceful way when faced with the imagined or real event. E.g. Significantly reducing or completely collapsing the fear. The unconscious is where the fear/phobia resides. When a person is frightened, there is no time for conscious rationalisation, the response is automatic. Recoding the automatic response(s) at an unconscious level using a persons own resources is the key to lasting effective change.

21.12.15 Clients regularly come to see me for help with stop smoking. One of the things they find most difficult to make sense of, is that although they know smoking is extremely hazardous to health, it isn't enough to get them to stop doing it. My clients tell me they feel strong urges to have a cigarette even though intuitively they know it not good for them. This can be confusing to a person and contradictory in some ways because one part of them is telling them to light up, whilst the another part of them is telling them, I really have to stop doing this for the sake of my health and wellbeing. Yet the habit persists. Why is that? This is where I believe my training as a Smoking Cessation therapist and NLP master practitioner come in to play. I know that it is not necessarily what a person is doing is the root of the problem, it is the way they perceive a benefit from what they are doing is the difficult thing to overcome. (i.e. smoking in this case). That perceived benefit may manifest itself as a feeling of relief or a release of anxiousness, it may be that the person feels that smoking helps them think or relieves boredom or even is a reward because of circumstances in work or life in general. In processing thoughts in this way, a person can begin to value cigarettes because they provide an instant solution to the way they are feeling, "The instant fix". But I think most people realise that pumping poison into their mouth on a regular basis can never be a good thing. Hypnotherapy and NLP can be helpful in changing a clients perception of what they are doing, to break the habitual pattern and to change the values a person puts on the habit. To create new patterns of thinking at a deep unconscious level where the habit resides and to help them to act in a more resourceful way when faced with the urge, or temptation. In my experience of working with hundreds of smoking clients, It is most often this change of perception or value a person puts on the act of smoking that is the catalyst for lasting success. Think differently, act differently. That's the challenge that a smoker faces. It is my job to help clients discover their own powerful resources (and there are many) via Hypnotherapy and NLP that can create a change of thinking and behaviour. Ultimately those changes could one day be a life saver. How good is that.

11.11.2015. Henry Ford famously once said. "Whether a person thinks they can, or whether a person thinks they can't, they'll probably be right." This tells us that it's not necessarily whether a person has the ability to do something that stops them taking action, it's whether they believe they have the ability is the crucial factor in determining the outcome. I have been practising Hypnotherapy and NLP for close on eight years now. One of the things I have noticed during that time, working with hundreds of clients, is the power self limiting belief has on a persons confidence and ultimately what they are able to achieve in life or accept as life's hand.

Beliefs are in everything we do, beliefs can be both empowering or limiting to a persons feelings of confidence, overall wellbeing or behaviour. Stop and think about it for a minute. Whenever you have had a lack of confidence about something or feeling uncertain, are your beliefs about that subject creating doubt in some way? Is that doubt creating a feeling of uncertainty? Is that uncertainty stopping you from taking action? What physical symptoms does that uncertainty or insecurity bring? I.e. churning stomach, tightness in neck or chest, dryness in mouth, sweaty palms, increased heart rate, overthinking etc etc. and yet if we were to change the belief about ourselves, our situation, our ability, about other people's perception of us, what difference would that make to the level of confidence you had about that situation or your ability to act? In a word 'Everything.' Although my profession is classed as Hypnotherapy, it is in reality far more than that. It is largely about helping people to change from limiting to empowering beliefs about themselves, others and their environment that makes all the difference to the outcome. There is a famous saying by Henry Ford. "Whether a person thinks they can, or whether a person thinks they can't, they'll probably be right." This tells us that it is not a matter of whether a person can or can't do something, it's whether they believe they can or can't do something that determines whether they feel confident to take action or not. The combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy techniques I use with my clients are designed to help clients shift their beliefs and in turn shift their confidence levels.

19.10.2015 Hi everyone welcome to the NEW Hypnotherapy Swansea news blog page. Spider season is back!! Hypnotherapy and NLP can help you overcome your Spider phobia. So don't sit there petrified. Help is just a phone call away. I've had quite a number of clients coming into the Horizon centre Gorseinon for help with fear of spiders lately. Hypnotherapy can help you collapse those unwanted fears and help you respond in a much more resourceful way. Even people with the most abject fears have noticed a big shift in the way they feel after a session of targeted Hypnosis.

Gary Pugh
GQHP GHR Register GHSC
validated practitioner

Address

The Parhouse Centre
12A Alexandra Road
Gorseinon
SWANSEA
SA4 4NW

Tel: 01792 676893
2nd line: 01792 791968
Mobile: 07873 599261