Is talk therapy still helping or do you need a new approach?

Many of our clients come to us expressing frustration related to their experience with counseling, psychotherapy, and even pharmacological intervention. After having seen quite a large pool of clients with such similar experiences, I can’t help but wonder why that is.

Why is it common to hear of frustration rather than happiness and progress when describing the practice of traditional methods of talk therapy? Why are traditional psychotherapists failing to address the needs of many of their clients? After giving quite a deal of thought to the subject, here are my observations:

All specialists have tools of trade, and each of these tools has its place. But to a carpenter with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to a surgeon with a scalpel, everything will benefit from an operation. Psychotherapists too have specific ways of solving problems, and those ways aren’t always the right approach to a client’s needs. Clients often speak up when they feel their treatment isn’t working, though it’s easy to see why telling someone to not think in the way they’ve been trained doesn’t work.

What if the vast majority of us just needed some help at different times in life, in order to move forward and learn how think in a resourceful manner? In many ways, we are never really taught how to think about problems in our lives in ways that are productive. It’s certainly not something that we learn in the classroom, so we model what our parents have done. Oftentimes, we find ourselves in life without skills on how to stay in a resourceful state. We are taught through various methods and exposures to focus on the negative.

Did you know

  • A 2001 study published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology found that patients improved most dramatically between their seventh and tenth sessions of talk therapy. However, continued work past 7 to 10 sessions seemed to taper off in client/patient effectiveness.

The kicker is that most talk therapy goes on for weeks, months, and in many cases years without achieving the desired results. So why do people keep going back? Would you keep watching a bad movie over and over again if you knew it wasn’t to your liking? As a business owner, would you persist with the same strategy that was not producing sales until you reach bankruptcy? Of course not! The ability to change our environment and circumstance is a survival instinct that is engrained in humans.

Client/patient testimonials for talk therapy typically describe identification of a problem but not a focus on the solution. The methodology is entirely focused on diagnosis. An interesting phenomenon that follows sometimes is that the client/patient begins to focus or identify with that diagnosed condition. I have this, I am this. This often actually impedes progress.

Knowing is part of the journey, but what do you do with that knowledge? There’s a famous saying from Wayne Dyer: change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.

I wonder how impactful it would be to remove focus from what is wrong and shift it over to what is right — or what a person wants to feel.

The work as a hypnotist is outcome-oriented. There are differences in approaches between talk therapy and hypnosis. Hypnosis focuses on the subconscious mind instead of conscious thoughts and behavior. As a result, hypnosis gets comparatively quicker results (read: fewer sessions) compared to traditional therapies. After all, our memories of events and associated meanings are stored in the subconscious, not the conscious mind.

Many clients have expressed feeling much more satisfied with hypnosis results in a relatively short period of time than when compared to traditional talk therapies which they stated dragged on for weeks, months, and in some cases years with little to no results. Talk therapy sessions cost an average of $250 per hour and sometimes even more! Because hypnosis is often not covered by insurance, many prospective clients are faced with out of pocket expenses to pay for hypnosis services. Seeing psychotherapist every two weeks at $250 per hour comes to an annual cost of $6750. Visiting a therapist for more than a year then treatment can rapidly cost as much as a down payment on a house.

What we do know is that increasingly, research supports the fact that hypnosis, in many cases, can deliver.

  • Faster results (3-10 sessions)
  • Natural (non-pharmaceutical) treatment
  • Relief from the underlying issue (it’s not about the food, nor the cigarettes, nor the alcohol, it’s about the underlying issues).
  • An outcome-oriented approach that is not symptom-focused

In order to ensure that you make an informed decision, we always recommend to connect with as many resources as possible in order to learn about the differences between talk therapy and hypnosis. From our experience, if you are of relatively sound mind and body and just need a slight nudge and maybe a situation reframe, it makes more sense to go with hypnosis, an all-natural behavior change process.

In order to ensure that you make an informed decision, we always recommend to connect with as many resources as possible in order to learn about the differences between talk therapy and hypnosis. From our experience, if you are of relatively sound mind and body and just need a slight nudge and maybe a situation reframe, it makes more sense to go with hypnosis, an all-natural behavior change process.


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