There are many instances when people come to my practice who are unhappy in life. Sometimes it has to do with their problems getting the better of them. However, there are other times when their lousy feelings about themselves is coming from a different place, mainly from their spouses, or partners in life. With clients who are fighting chronic health issues, this added stress makes their conditions worse.
A while back I was treating a professional woman who was in the midst of doing her studies for an MBA. About a decade before we worked together she had met her husband. He became very entwined in her inability to take care of herself because of her bulimic behavior. She was very young at the time they met and lacked any self-esteem. She felt secure with this strong man beside her who was always there to help her through her hard times by telling her what she needed to do.The only problem was that over the ten years they were together, as she was growing up, she no longer felt that his manner of caring was working for her. She felt like she was being treated as a child to be cared for instead of the purposeful adult that she had become. It became obvious to her that she needed to leave this man for it was he who was infantilizing her and keeping her sick by his disrespectful and angry treatment of her whenever she asserted herself.
I have another client of mine who is in a very dismal place regarding the relationship that she is in with her husband. Her husband is never willing to emotionally support her in their relationship be it regarding his ex, his kids from the previous marriage disrespecting her, or even the sexual harassment from the neighbor next door, apologizing to him for his wife’s behavior. In all these cases he has found her to be in the “wrong” while still telling her how much he loves her. The net result of the stress that this situation is putting on my client who suffers with the chronic condition of fibromyalgia is finding herself in more pain then before this relationship soured increasing her feelings depression and overwhelm.
If you find yourself in this sort of situation hypnosis may be a way for you to get clear whether or not you can heal the relationship or if it is time to move on. This is especially true if you are feeling disrespected and hurt as a result of the damage that is being done in that relationship. Because there are times when the issues are not based on the partner. Sometimes it is the client or the relatives of the client that have to be contended with to put the relationship back on track. This happened for a client of mine a few years ago whose husband was very disrespectful of her whenever there was some other adult around, either in person or on the phone with him. When we got down to the cause of the problem it had everything to do with her parents being very controlling of the couple in respect to visits with their grandchildren and their condescending attitude toward my client, their daughter. The husband felt that he was competing with his in-laws for his wife’s attention and could not win. In this case my client let her parents know that they were not welcome to just drop in whenever they chose and to curb the manner in which they interacted with the kids, stopping the preferential treatment of the oldest while demeaning the younger kids. As soon as this issue was resolved my client no longer felt depressed and stuck in her own vocation and her relationship with her husband became healthy again.
I would like to make it clear here that when one is in a relationship with another and the feelings that you are getting are not loving and positive it would be in your best interest to figure out if this is something that is coming from you, something that is coming as a result of the person that you are with or another individual who has placed themselves in the middle of your primary relationship as happened in the last case. Your body’s response to the stress involved in these uncomfortable situations is very strong indicator that perhaps one of these relationships is toxic to you.
My question to you is simply this: What sort of life would you be able to create if you were to let go of that noose around your neck that is the cause for your self-esteem to degrade and any illnesses to worsen? Would you be able to serve yourself better without all the drama and negative feelings and commentary aimed at you by this person or people? Be willing to get the help that you need to discern who is creating the problems so that you can have a better quality of life for yourself.
Hypnosis is a wonderful way to deal with these issues because the answers may be lurking in your unconscious mind, unavailable to you. In the last two cases above, we needed to get to the truth of what was really causing the problem because it was not obvious to them. In both those cases the women involved thought that there was something wrong with them based on the harsh treatment they were receiving from the people in their lives. They made themselves “at fault” for the problems. The reality was that they were just being victimized by people who were able to control them until they learned how to create better boundaries with those who were in their lives. In this way each woman was able to regain her self-confidence and reduce symptoms of the chronic health conditions that created so much difficulty for them.
