In my experience as a therapist the main reason for relationship breakdown is the lack of communication within the relationship, a healthy relationship is built on communication. Usually when two people meet who are attracted to each other they can spend a lot of time just sitting up talking all night. How many times have you heard maybe a friend or a member of your family say “we just sat up all night talking” maybe you’ve even done it? This seems to be common in the early part of relationship building, the early stage of ‘finding all about each other’.

How many couples a few years down the line together just sit up talking to each other all night? As time goes by there are two things that can happen in a relationship, the couple can grow apart or they can grow together. Most couples who grow together still communicate, they may not stay up all night talking but they still communicate with one another. They are still supportive and genuinely care about each other, they will listen to each other, remember, there’s a difference between listening and hearing. They may even tell each other what is going on for them and how they are feeling instead of keeping it all to themselves, they communicate and work as a team instead of growing apart as individuals.

The comedian Lee Evans does a hilarious take on couple relationships in his shows which is all about the lack of communication after a time together. What makes it so funny is that the audience identifies with what he is talking about.

Although there are many other issues that couples need to work on if they want to grow together, communication is the key to a healthy relationship.

I have been working with a very interesting client this week who suffered from emetophobia (fear of being sick). Now you would think that emetophobia would be a very uncommon fear or phobia, however, according to various health websites, emetophobia is actually quite common.

Emetophobia can be a very debilitating condition and can even rule your life. Some people who suffer with this fear of being sick isolate themselves from others because of the possibility of catching a virus from them, especially staying away from children which can often prevent sufferers from becoming parents.

Others have wanted to work within the health service as nurses or care assistants but couldn’t because of the high risk factor of being in close contact with physically ill patients.

Other sufferers are very choosy about what they eat and they always check their food to make sure that it is well cooked.

Emetophobia is not something that you are born with it is usually caused by a negative experience that you’ve had.

Hypnotherapy is a very effective way to deal with emetophobia as it works with the subconscious mind where our fears and phobias are created.

After only one hypnotherapy session and with listening to an mp3 self hypnosis download that I recorded  my client noticed various changes in themselves and their fear of being sick was drastically reduced.

I used an ‘eye movement therapy’ in the second session, followed by another hypnotherapy session just to reinforce the treatment.

Using clinical hypnotherapy alongside mp3 self hypnosis downloads can be a very quick form of treatment when working with fears and phobias and can help people to quickly change their lifelong problems easily.

Although the addiction client group can be difficult and challenging at times (that’s an understatement) ‘addicts’ and their addiction need to be understood. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I read about the Chinese ‘boot camps’ that are attempting to treat Chinese ‘clients’ for ‘internet addiction’.

Brutal is how I would describe it. The residents appear to be subjected to boot camp tactics of heavy handed army style discipline.

Resistance to treatment is a common factor which can sometimes play a major part in any addiction and this inappropriate kind of treatment only encourages enormous amounts of resistance. When treating addiction, you need to roll with the resistance, not increase it.

I laughed out loud when I read that in one of these boot camps the clients tied up a member of staff and escaped. I didn’t laugh when I read that staff at a different boot camp had been sentenced to imprisonment last year for beating a 15 year old to death.

Addiction cannot be beaten out of someone it can only be beaten with modern methods, patience and understanding.

Although the Chinese realise that they have an internet addiction problem and that there is a need for a treatment centre to deal with this, there is obviously a learning need in the treatment of addiction (another understatement).

See they’re at it again; they’ve managed to recruit a new sports member to encourage gambling. I’m talking about of course a certain gambling agency that has a new commercial that is allowed to encourage gambling through the power of television and what better time to do so with the World Cup about to kick off.

Yes, the World Cup is just around the corner and Ian Wright and new recruit Chris Kamara are helping to promote misery into the lives of gamblers. This is the second blog I’ve written about our sporting heroes advertising gambling; you’d think they’d have enough money, wouldn’t you.

I’m likening gambling promoters to heroin dealers; they offer a free bet to new punters, just like heroin dealers offer a free bag of heroin to future addicts.

Now you may be thinking that I’m a bit over the top with this but gambling addiction is a very, very serious matter and advertising it needs to be controlled.

Would our sporting heroes help to advertise or promote heroin or crack cocaine addiction, I don’t think so, then again the government wouldn’t allow that to happen, would they?

Please read my previous blog entitled ‘Sporting Heroes’.

Well, it’s nearly upon us, that football frenzied fanatical extravaganza called the ‘World Cup’ and it’s really starting to build up. Love it or loath it, it’s a fascinating subject. I had a very interesting chat with my brother- in-law yesterday about the world cup and football in general where we exchanged our opinions like football pundits and not as therapists (He’s a Doctor) We didn’t talk about footballer’s egos, wages,  attitudes or addictions we just chatted about football and the abilities and skills of some of the world’s best footballers, past and present.

I always find that any sport whether taking part or spectating can be very hypnotic. It appears to induce a zone something similar to hypnosis where everything around you exists but at the same time, it doesn’t. When you are engrossed in the ‘game’ all of our worries and problems just seem to disappear, along with time.

Some people spend an awful lot of money on drugs attempting to create the same effect as hypnosis whereas your mind can do this freely by using self hypnosis.

Self hypnosis is a very powerful phenomenon which we are easily capable of achieving. The mind is an amazing creation and using self hypnosis to help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve can be a very easy and natural thing to do.

I really believe that we all have the internal resources that we need to succeed and that we have the means to acquire all the resources that may be needed to achieve our outcome, I have experienced this many times throughout my life.

Footballers like any other athletes or sportspeople can certainly reach their full potential by using self hypnosis or self hypnosis downloads.

I shall be increasing my mp3 hypnosis downloads in the very near future, one of which is geared towards reaching your full sports performance potential.

Plus, my free ‘recession busting’ hypnosis download is still available from this site along with a free hypnosis ebook which explains much more about self hypnosis.

There’s a very interesting debate going on just now regarding heroin addicts in prison and what the treatment costs are to treat those suffering from this debilitating and often deadly disease.

It is very interesting how it is viewed in a Daily Mail article entitled ‘Cost of maintaining the heroin addiction of convicts to cost us £110 MILLION a Year’ mmm…interesting, to say the least.

This stems from a human rights ruling that heroin addicts should not be allowed to go without medication while detoxing from heroin whilst in prison, commonly known as going ‘cold turkey’ hear, hear.

Heroin is one of the most powerful if not, thee most powerful pain killers known to man or woman and to detox from this drug without medication is totally and completely horrendous.

Some of the barbaric comments and opinions about the human rights ruling towards heroin addicts are unbelievable and bordering on laughable. Too many members of the public have no understanding of what addiction is and how it affects people, real people who are caught up in a nightmare.

Addiction is not self inflicted, it is an illness, a disease that needs treated not punished. Punish the crime but don’t punish the addiction, treat it regardless of the cost. Authorities wouldn’t dream of not giving insulin to prisoners who are suffering with diabetes, would they?

This blog is part 2 of the conscious and subconscious mind. This blog looks breifly at the subconscious mind. Please click on the link below to find more information on the conscious and subconscious.

The functions and events that transpire in the human brain or mind, that have no place in the boundaries of the phenomenal or access consciousness (which deal with the feelings, sensations, emotions, control, rationalization) can be termed as the Subconscious events which take place in the subconscious part of the mind. There are many scientists like Freud and Jung who have tried to explain what the subconscious mind really is but of course their theories are not verified.

According to Freud, there are three states of the human mind which include the conscious mind, the subconscious mind and the unconscious mind. He explains that the unconscious mind is where some repressed memories are hidden that were too traumatic to be in the conscious part of the brain. These might be ‘awaken’ or ‘brought to consciousness’ in order to treat a person of a psychotic disorder through techniques like hypnosis.

The Subconscious mind however, is an entirely different level of the mind that neither represses the information that is retains and nor does it bring that information to the realm of the conscious mind. That retained information could be the phone number of a friend or the name of television show. All of the things in the subconscious mind can be brought to the conscious mind pretty easily.

The memories in the subconscious mind can be retrieved through paying attention to the subconscious in some way. For someone to have a better and enhanced consciousness then, they could find some way to direct their energy to bringing into light what they have in the subconscious part of the brain.

There have been a number of scientific theories from a number of psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who have attempted to explain the different levels of consciousness of the human mind. According to Freud’s theory there are three levels of the mind that include Conscious, Unconscious and the Subconscious, all of which serve varied purposes. The conscious mind is something that we all know about – it is our awareness, our emotions and feelings and even the way we control our emotions and rationalize various situations through logic.

Then there is the Unconscious which is a completely repressed part of our brain which has some traumatic events that we do not wish to retrieve – these memories have now been buried too deep to ever retrieve it easily. The Subconscious on the other hand, is the part of the brain which has some memories which are not completely repressed and which could come into the conscious mind any time we try to direct our thoughts towards it.

This is the difference between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind – where the conscious mind has what the ‘rational’ world believes in, the subconscious mind retains things that might have nothing to do with rationality. For instance you may believe in your subconscious that if you bet on a particular horse at the racecourse, you will win, while your conscious mind might be looking at the statistics and facts and voting for a completely different horse. This is when the person feels uneasy and while some people will be able to listen to their consciousness and simply go with the facts, another person will read their subconscious feeling and bet on a different animal.

This happens to all of us at some point because we all have that subconscious mind lurking in the shadows, trying to tell us something. Most experts believe that it is this subconscious mind that is responsible for mind reading abilities and future insight. There are a number of spiritual theories that claim they can enhance the subconscious mind to help us tap into all that important information.

The differences between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind also include the fact while the conscious mind will only believe facts, the subconscious will tell us to know how things and people feel and what kind of vibes they give out. The concept of right and wrong is also something completely different for both these aspects of the brain – the conscious mind will try to rationalize looking at the facts at hand while the unconscious mind will simply ‘feel’ a certain way about a person or an act for it to be right or wrong.

The conscious mind will also always work with the help of verbal attributes, while the subconscious will have non verbal feelings in any given situation. There is another very interesting concept that differs between the conscious and the subconscious. When it comes to religion and spirituality, the conscious brain will ask questions while the subconscious brain will simply have faith.

This is part 1 of a 2 part blog looking at the conscious and the subconscious mind. This blog briefly looks at the conscious mind, for more information on the conscious and the subconscious please click on the link below.

Freud’s theory of personality is a psychoanalytic theory that describes the realm of our conscious mind. This part of our personality is associated with what we can term as ‘rational’ items – behaviors, feelings, memories, fantasies and the sensations we perceive are all part of the conscious mind which follows the rules of reasoning and logic. This basically means that from a simple mathematical problem to the moving of our limbs, it is our conscious mind that is taking care of these things.

The phenomenon of the conscious mind has always been under much experimentation and debate because no one knows how this consciousness works. While scientific research has so far come up with many theories to explain the small processes that work to make us sad and happy, there is no explanation about a number of other things related to the conscious mind. Religious and spiritual theories on the other hand have always referred to the conscious mind to be the human soul.

Science explains the conscious mind in terms of neurological basis. There are two divisions of consciousness in the human mind; the first is Phenomenal Consciousness and the other is Access Consciousness. Phenomenal Consciousness is the experience part of the consciousness like sounds, feelings, emotions and sensations.  The Access Consciousness is what gives us our rationality and control behaviors.

From cognitive psychology to cognitive neuroscience there have been a number of theories regarding the conscious mind and some scientists are still contradicting one another over many parts of the conscious mind like language development and descriptions of phenomenal consciousness. Freud, Nietzsche and Marx all came up with a number of very unique theories pertaining to the conscious mind all of which attempt to explain its workings somehow.

There is no better self help technique or book that is gaining more popularity these days than the one by author Rhonda Byrne who also produced a movie earlier in 2006 with the title “The Secret”. The movie was actually a documentary style review about a few people’s lives that had been touched by the law of attraction towards some miraculous changes. Today the law of attraction is seen more as a New Thought writer phenomenon than just something attributed to one writer.

The idea behind the theory is simple – your thoughts can influence the course of fate and opportunities can be ‘attracted’ towards you simply by making use of positive beliefs. It is actually much similar to the teachings of Jose Silva who is the founder of “The Silva Method” and claims that simply by making a picture in your head of a more positive trait, you can actually add that quality to your self. In fact positive thinking has always been the basis of a number of self help books and videos and the law of attraction is one more book that makes people behave in a constructive way to believe that they can achieve things.

There are three steps required to initiate the law of attraction and make it work:

Ask: The step where you make a visual image of the thing you desire and ask the universe for it.

Believe: After asking you have to act like the item is already on its way or the process has begun.

Receive: This is when you are supposed to take heed of potential signs and messages the universe might have sent you in order to receive the item you desire.

The self help book titled “The Secret” has received a number of positive reviews on such programs like Larry King, Oprah Winfrey and even Ellen DeGeneres – so it is definitely worth a try!