Our first newsletter is here

Bringing you up to date with Within Sight' training courses for 2012.

Hypnotherapy Training: If you are thinking about training as a hypnotherapist or want to increase your knowledge of managing people and their problems. Check out the dates for our Hypnotherapy weekend and Hypnotherapy/Psychotherapy Diploma.

CPD modules: Or if you are already a qualified therapist we have a host of training days which will advance your skills and make you more effective.

NLP and EFT with our sister company Happiness Events. Top class training that Within Sight likes - they have a great team that is similar to our own. Friendly, down to earth experienced trainers that offer top quality workshops.

The success of our 'Conscious Medicine' weekend last October has made us decide to run it several times this year. The next available Conscious Medicine workshop is June 9th and 10th.

Call us on 01273 738663 to chat through any question you have - no question to small.

Will you create the life you want or will 2012 just fly by again?

Firstly Happy New Year to you and how is 2012 looking like for you? Far from the world ending at the end of 2012 as some predict. I think that the world wide unprecedented changes we have experienced only herald an opportunity for each of us to create the life that makes us happy. Easy for me to say eh but there is a personal reason for doing so.

My lovely Mum Betty died unexpectedly in November and just a few days before when she was given her prognosis she simply smiled, looked at the doctor and said ‘oh that’s ok, don’t worry. I have such a good life and been so happy.' Then smiling at my Dad she added ‘and I have been so very lucky.’ Awesome eh? Betty was told she was going to die in a very short while and her response was gratitude for her blessings. Not for a second did she show any bitterness, sadness or fear.

I guess what I am trying to pass on is this – if life is not as you would like it, take action now so you don’t have any regrets later in life.

Sometimes it might be hard to change the actual situation you are in but you can shift your perspective. Where you place your attention and what you think is always a choice, even if most of us might need a little help to do it.

So I wish you all strength and resilience in these challenging times. Oh and a bucket of courage to make the most of life and step up to be the best you can be.

The Rewind Technique – summary of steps

1. Relaxation and anchoring. Deeply relax your client using a special place or counting them down, as in the staircase induction. Build a multi-layered sense of relaxation.
2. TV screen and video. Ask the person to notice a TV and video screen in that special place and a remote control
3. Double dissociation. Suggest that they can have the dream-like relaxing experience of floating out of their body and stand to the side of themselves, so that they can see themselves watching the TV, but not see the screen itself.
4. Dissociated viewing. Then ask them to watch themselves watching the TV while relaxing very deeply. Get them to nod their head when they know intuitively that the self watching the screen has finished watching the ‘video’ of that old memory. If during this process you see them tensing up, then relax them back in to their special place, speak in a calm reassuring and confident voice. Carry on when you see they are comfortable.
5. Rewind through the experience. Then get them to drift through time and space and go into the end of that old video to a time when everything had calmed and settled right down, way after the event. You can suggest that the unconscious mind can do this so that they don’t have to remember it. Suggest that once they notice this they can nod their head. Suggest they recall what it would be like to see a film that is being rewound very quickly from the very end to the very beginning. Then suggest that when you count to 3 your client presses the remote and experience going backwards in the video; whizzing very quickly from the end to the beginning, way before anything had happened. You can speed up your voice as you take them through this
6. Watch the experience in fast forward. Ask your client to drift out of the beginning of the video and relax in the special place, and then ask them to watch the video in fast forward while relaxing very deeply to a time way after the event when everything had calmed right down.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 suggesting that they can begin to notice what it is like to have that memory while becoming even more relaxed. They can nod when they have done this, so that you know when they are experiencing the memory calmly. At this stage, the memory is de-conditioned. You can then ask them notice the differences when thinking about that memory from a different part of their brain; and what they find most reassuring or easy about that?
8. Future pace if appropriate. Rehearsing how life will be without the phobic response is a vital part of the rewind. However, it is inappropriate to ask someone who has been attacked to rehearse being calm when attacked! Instead, you can ask them to take a look at the future and see how different life will be when they are more relaxed and able to live a more full life (here you will use the information gathered during the interview), feed back how your client wants life to be without the PTSD or phobia, building up a multi sensory induction is an important step.
Reorientation and demonstration of change. After the future pace, gradually re-orientate your client back to the room and scale how they feel when they thinking about that ‘old’ memory.

We strongly recommend that unless you have been trained in how to use the rewind technique that you do not take these steps to practice on someone with PTSD or a phobia. People with PTSD need to be treated with skill as their anxiety levels can escalate quickly.

This is the forth in a series of video’s helping you understand PTSD. Watch this video to see how you can lift PTSD with the rewind.

Here is a written summary.

You have learnt about the broad range of anxiety based symptoms that PTSD creates. Those symptoms are generated by the memory of a difficult time getting locked into the amygdale and never make it through to the neo cortex and long term memory where the mind can think about the event and feel calm.

To get the memory passed the amygdale and into the neo cortex we use the rewind technique, sometimes called the fast phobia cure. It is a safe and proven technique of lifting trauma. The effectiveness of the rewind is due to it help a sufferer’s brain do what it has been trying to do, that is to get the memory away from the amygdale into long term storage where it does not create anxiety and panic.

The steps to the rewind are in the next blog post and when you read the blog you will see that there are a series of steps that we take the client through. Within these steps are the two keys for the success of the technique. The first is asking the person with PTSD to imagine watching themselves watching themselves on a TV screen. this known as double dissociation. For the first time that person will have recalled the event as an observer and that event will loose some of those anxiety tags.

The second and key to its success is that the person recalls the memory whilst feeling very calm, and we achieve this by a relaxing visualization or hypnosis before we do the actual steps to the rewind.

When you enable someone with PTSD to think about the event in this dissociated way –and whilst feeling calm this teaches the amygdale that this thought is safe enough to release the anxiety tags the event has been given. What follows is the hippocampus recognises the thought has no chemical stress tags attached to it and lets it go into long-term storage to the neo cortex where it will not activate the fight and flight when recalled. This is the reason for the often ‘miraculous’ change in the way a person can feel, the trauma can be formed over a few seconds and for many those symptoms can be lifted in just one session as the memory finds a different place to reside.

In the case of multiple traumas the rewind may have to be done several times over a few sessions but usually if the traumas were of a similar nature, once is enough to help the person feel so much better.

If you would like to train in the rewind technique there are two main options
Face to face with Within Sight’s trainers: we hold a one-day course Check it out here

If you want to find a therapist who has been professionally trained to use the rewind in a client session, email us on info@within-sight.com let us know where you live and we will do our best to help you find someone to help you.

This is the third in a series of short blogs and video's about post traumatic stress disorder. Today we are looking at what happens in the brain to cause PTSD. Watch the youtube demonstration about the three main parts of the brain that are involved in causing PTSD. 9.30 minutes, Here is a quick overview of the information in the video.

In a nutshell, PTSD occurs when your brain over remembers an unpleasant event and keeps reminding you of it. How does it do that? Ok so we humans have evolved brains that have a special capacity for learning, remembering and reminding us - so that we don’t spend all of our lives having to re think how to make a cup of tea, swim or recognize words. Now this is a great thing but in our modern world when it comes to remembering things that have caused anxiety, this process can go off track and cause problems.

Lets look at the three parts of your brain that are involved in this remembering and reminding process and can go on to cause PTSD.

Neo cortex is the newest part of the brain and yet it is about 60 million years old. The neo cortex is the large part of your brain mass just behind your forehead and is responsible for the higher level functions in human beings like empathy and strategic thinking.
Its polar opposite is the Amygdale which is one of the oldest parts of the brain, its main function is to prepare us for fight or flight in the face of any potential threat. So when an event, a thought or a person becomes a perceived threat, the sense of fear alerts the amygdale which orders your adrenals to flood you with cortisol and adrenalin, making you really strong in case you need to fight something or run fast to escape the situation.
The Hippocampus is the memory gate for the brain, for anything to reach long term memory like new ideas and new learning it has to go through the hippocampus.

So how do these three things operate to cause and maintain PTSD? Lets look at the amygdale first.

The amygdale tags events with emotions and has a brilliant memory. The amygdale will try to store information that has caused anxiety to be produced, now that can be anything from a person who has been a bit of a bully at work to a major accident or physical attack. The amygdale stores this information in the form of our sensory perception, so that is sight, sound, scent, hearing and touch.

That information can lay pretty dormant until a future time when the amygdale senses that there is potentially something similar in your environment to the things that it has remembered - then it goes on red alert and makes your adrenals fire of the chemicals to take you into the fight or flight so that you can run fast or fight hard.

This is a brilliant reaction in the face of real danger but if that happens on the way to taking the kids to school in the morning, or the middle of a shopping mall when everything is fine - it causes a person to be suddenly thrown in to a high state of panic. An example of this might be a person who had been beaten up badly, they might be at a party when someone they are talking to raises their arm to wave to a friend and that person could feel a wave of panic. That’s the amygdale mistaking the persons arm above their head as a potential threat.

The same goes for the soldiers with battle trauma, which is another word for PTSD caused during military action. Once a pattern is in the amygdale any sight sound etc that is reminiscent of the traumatic event can spark off massive anxiety. An example here would be a solider walking down the street and then being flooded with panic after hearing a car backfiring, seeing blood from a child’s grazed knee or hearing a helicopter overhead. This can happen at any time even at night as the brain tries to resolve these messages of high alert through dreaming. This is the cause of many distressing symptoms of PTSD.

All of these reactions precede rational thought and happen at a level way below consciousness and that is why it is almost impossible to think your way out of the panic. Anyone who believes you just need to get a grip is just not understanding that old and instinctive part of your brain is causing this and will bypass rational thought.

PTSD can happen to anyone; about twenty percent of people who are exposed to trauma will go on to develop PTSD. For those who don’t develop it the trauma will be remembered by the amygdale but over a period of days or weeks will gradually loose its anxiety tags and the hippocampus will let it through to the neo-cortext where it can be accessed as a memory but will not activate anxiety.

In our forth podcast and blog we let you know the two important element in the rewind that make this technique so safe, quick and effective in lifting PTSD

If you would like to train in the rewind technique there are two main options

1. Face to face with Within Sight’s trainers: we hold a one-day course and the next one is Friday 9th September in Hove/Brighton. Check it out here Learn the rewind
2. Along with Uncommon Knowledge trainer Mark Tyrrell, Jill delivers an on line course which starts on September 8th. Learn the rewind

If you want to find a therapist who has been professionally trained to use the rewind in a client session, email us on info@within-sight.com let us know where you live and we will do our best to help you find someone to help you.