Hypnotherapy Helped Me Recover From An Abusive Relationship

After my last breakup, I knew something had to change. From talk therapy to acupuncture, I was willing to try anything. So far, hypnotherapy has been the most effective tool for healing my broken heart—here’s why it’s such a game-changer.

1. It helps you detox. When you’re in a toxic relationship, you end up internalizing many of the negative things your former partner said to and about you, even if you don’t realize it. My ex’s unkind words often haunted me. This added a lot of negativity to my daily life while also preventing me from reaching my career and relationship goals. I tried traditional counseling, but talking about my experiences over and over again just wasn’t helping me feel any better. Through hypnotherapy, I was able to confront these negative thoughts on a deeper level and finally detox them from my system.
2. It’s so relaxing. When you’re working full time, it’s hard to make time for relaxation and self-care. After my breakup, I actually used work and the stress it brought as a way to distract myself from my pain. Hypnotherapy is so deeply relaxing that I’m usually floating on a cloud for at least a few hours after every session. Whether I’m going through a breakup or a hard week at work, hypnotherapy is now one of my favorite ways to destress and show myself some love.
3. It’s a safe space. In traditional therapy, I never went as deep into my feelings or patterns as I could have because the emotions were so uncomfortable. Sometimes I even left therapy feeling re-traumatized but then had to wait another week before my next session. Although you explore your psyche deeply in hypnotherapy, you do so in a relaxed state. This prevents you from feeling the same emotional pain you might in your waking life. Without the fear of pain that limited me in the past, I was able to go deeper into my healing than ever before.
4. It helps to heal parent wounds. According to my hypnotherapist, our relationship patterns begin when we are children interacting with our parents. When you treat toxic relationships through hypnotherapy, you go straight to the root of the problem. Usually, you’ll find that your patterns began in your childhood. The wounds you hold from your childhood are deep-seated, so they’ll curse you to repeat the same pattern over and over until you heal them. Often, childhood wounds are healed through regression therapy. In regression therapy, you’ll regress back to the childhood memory that is causing you pain. Many of these memories you won’t consciously remember so they can be hard to heal through talk therapy.
5. It can correct low self-esteem. Two of the main things that might be keeping you in an unhealthy relationship is low self-esteem and feelings of unworthiness. These feelings tend to create a snowball effect. You end up in toxic relationships because you don’t think you deserve better, then the abuse makes you feel even more unworthy. In one of my first hypnotherapy sessions, we addressed unworthiness head-on. In a hypnotized state, I spoke directly to my feelings of unworthiness as if it was another person. I learned about where these feelings had come from and discovered what I needed to heal them. It’s safe to say that alone has been pretty effing life changing.
6. It helps you break patterns. Virtually all of my romantic relationships looked the same before I started hypnotherapy. Rather than thinking, “Hey, maybe there’s a pattern here,” I just thought all men are terrible. Sure, there are plenty of terrible men, but ultimately the problem was patterns set throughout my life, especially in my childhood. While hypnotized, I was able to identify these patterns and correct them on a deep level. Don’t believe me? Shortly after I started hypnotherapy, a guy I had been seeing started doing the “I’m going to treat you like my girlfriend but refuse to commit” thing. This had been a classic pattern in most of my relationships. Rather than torturing myself by feeding into the dynamic, I ended things so fast it literally made his jaw drop.
7. It’s more efficient. Since hypnotherapy takes you so deep into your psyche to eliminate patterns, it’s by far the more efficient therapy. After I finished school, I didn’t have the time or money for weekly therapy. What I accomplished in a few hours of hypnotherapy would have taken months, plus hundreds of dollars, in traditional therapy.
8. It helps to release shame. If you’re like me, you might be blaming yourself for your unhealthy, abusive, or toxic relationship(s). This blame can lead to shame, which is one of the most destructive emotions you can experience. Shame will keep you trapped in your patterns and prevent you from healing. By uncovering the root of my behaviors in hypnotherapy, I realized that my patterns were ingrained from a young age and not my fault. This realization helped me to retire shame and move into greater love for myself, which was the first step towards radically changing my love life.
9. It can show you unconditional love. When I started hypnotherapy, I’d been in toxic relationships for so long that I literally didn’t even know what unconditional love was. I actually kind of thought unconditional love was a myth. While in the hypnotized state, I experienced deep and profound unconditional love from within myself. Not only am I now clear on what love should feel like in a relationship, but I also know that I can always connect to the feelings of love within myself.