HYPNOTHERAPY

The starting point is a holistic view of the person, integrating humanism, natural sciences, depth psychology, medicine, Gestalt concepts, hypnology, and other fields. This integrated knowledge is more than the sum of its parts and goes beyond a mere eclectic combination of various useful aspects and techniques. The person is viewed holistically to find connections between empirical phenomena and research results with the overall image of the individual.

The focus is on the specific internal and external reality of the patient and the therapeutic situation, including the therapist's person. At the center of the therapy is the individual with their unique reality, life history, body, psyche, and spirit. This reality includes not only observable phenomena but also subconscious and hidden parts of the personality. Therapy aims at reality and recovery, not conflicts or symptoms. It helps the patient express and experience themselves in their complexity, integrating repressed parts of their personality. Thus, therapy supports the pursuit of becoming a complete whole, effectively promoting recovery.

Biology, humanities, depth psychology, Gestalt awareness, and hypnosis are naturally interconnected. Therapy consciously captures these natural connections, making diagnosis and therapy easier for the patient to understand regarding their illness and recovery. We also draw on traditional human and worldviews presented in mythologies, sciences, and philosophies throughout human history. Even if these images do not exist in everyday life, they work extraordinarily well within a belief system shaped over centuries.

Integration means a process-oriented towards wholeness. The pursuit of wholeness marks only the direction of continuous approximation. Symptoms are biopsychological expressions of the patient's essence, providing information about illness. It's not about fighting symptoms but reaching healthy initial states and integrating them into the conscious personality. Being ill may also result from ego deficits. Fighting symptoms is thus fighting the patient, not just their illness, which sometimes provides a kind of balance. Symptom shift poses a significant danger and may result from symptom-oriented therapy. The forces suppressed by such "anti" therapy must find another outlet.

Therapy is not based on any specific worldview or religious belief. It assumes that the world and life may have a spiritual dimension and are purposeful and meaningful. On the other hand, it adheres to a secular worldview and a sensory-oriented philosophy of life, making it almost universally applicable. Therapy adapts to the patient's worldview, changing and developing with them. Every person is a unique individual, making each therapy process unique and unrepeatable.

For over a century, we have known about the subconscious, deep layers of the psyche that lie beneath everyday consciousness and often have a decisive influence on our lives, including illness and recovery. Psychotherapy without depth psychology is like conventional medicine without tools like X-rays, ultrasound, blood tests, or surgery. The qualitative leap observed between conventional psychology and depth psychology appears only in various hypnotic states of consciousness, both in diagnosis and therapeutic effect.

The physical layer of a person and the material expression of each specific existence are understood as expressions of Gestalt. Gestalt is something that has been rebuilt and in content and form expresses the idea and soul that existed before its physical manifestation. Gestalt is something that has manifested or been inserted into reality as an objective and subjective existence, accessible to the perceiver by distinguishing it from what it is not. Gestalt thus includes all concrete, expressed, and perceptible phenomena and processes, including disease phenomena and processes – both psychological and physical.

In properly conducted hypnosis, the patient gains access to important, subjective content and processes that are subconscious. Only conscious hypnosis usually opens the spaces closed phylo- and ontogenetically to the oldest or dominated by early childhood content parts of the brain, consciousness, or soul. Childhood proceeds in a natural, hypnotic state of consciousness. All imprints thus occur during this time in relatively deep hypnosis. Conscious hypnosis opens up for the patient both the possibility of discovering their pathogenic constellations and entanglements in life history and the possibilities arising from therapy reaching sufficiently deep into the early emotional layers of the psyche. The patient is led to an area of possibilities where they can find their own individual solutions.

Rituals are used, most often unconsciously, in all medical therapies and psychotherapy. Rituals have an inherent therapeutic value, creating a foundation for further actions. In psychotherapy, especially hypnotherapy, there has been a tendency to use non-directive forms instead of authoritative ones for a long time. Thorough research in depth psychology, including research on symbolism and hypnosis, shows ritual conditions in every form of therapy. Conventional depth psychology/psychoanalysis limits its conscious rituals to basic therapeutic agreements (e.g., abstinence, patient's openness, therapist's discretion, punctuality). However, rituals play a very important therapeutic role. They are a kind of safety rail on the ladder leading from one state to the unknown realms of superconsciousness.

Therapy takes place in an atmosphere of full acceptance. This 100% acceptance must accompany us in the symbiotic phase, forming the first button that in psychogenesis should be properly fastened. This button has a slightly different quality than all subsequent ones, as each subsequent fastening depends on it. It also has a different quality due to the existential experience of unconditional love in the sense of unconditional security. This existential experience should build a stable foundation for development, without doubts, without the need for constant confirmation and redefinition. All steps following the symbiotic phase include content that leaves permanent traces in our subconscious, and deficits are felt throughout life. However, the development of the person and the supplementing of these deficits are constantly ongoing, making maturation and getting rid of deficits more possible.
If, however, the symbiotic phase is deficient, it has far-reaching consequences. Just as when we button a shirt and make a mistake with the first hole, so that the first button goes into the second hole, and the second button into the third, etc. Similarly, in the case of errors in the symbiotic phase, each subsequent phase will not be properly experienced and fulfilled. We then observe that such individuals spend their lives obsessively but never successfully searching for a substitute sense of security, hoping to find it in the content of the oral, narcissistic, anal, or genital phases.
Each such substitute – partner, child, work, wealth, social position, addiction – is associated with insecurity and great fears, as their loss means more than just the real loss of the object, person, position. It is a symbolic loss of existential, fundamental security and can lead to severe mental and psychosomatic illnesses, especially when the patient is not aware of this sense of loss. During therapy, we make repairs, fastening the buttons again. This time properly.