Smoking yourself to death

Smoking yourself to Death

Today I found yet another reason for smoking: Smoking yourself to death. This client could not stop smoking. She tried, and it worked for a few days, and she just had to start again. It is a very common smoking pattern. It is always because of some underlying psychological problem.
Normally, I can talk to the client, dig into the childhood, and find out what is so threatening that she needs to smoke to escape from it.

In this case, when I started digging, the most horrific story of family violence and abuse emerged. My client grew up in an ethnic minority household. Everything was deeply religious, and secretive, and closed to outsiders. She described growing up in a family where her mother was mentally unstable. Nothing and nobody was ever good enough for her mother. Her mother was totally wrapped up in herself. She had no interest in the children. As a little girl my client felt rejected and worthless, and was constantly told "Shut up and be quiet. Stop making it all about you!"

Overcoming inter-generational abuse

Eventually, my client learned why there was always a cloud of secrecy around the family. Her mother was the result of incest. Because of the huge taboo, her mother married the first man who would have her. He turned out to be a wife beater and drunkard.

So she grew up in this dysfunctional household, emotionally abused by both her mother and her father, and ended up convinced that she was worthless and stupid, and constantly told she was no use to anybody.

And yet, somehow, she overcame all this. She got married and had children. Her children were loved and cherished and gradually she began again. Through heroic efforts she got an education, went to university, and became a schoolteacher. "If I am a teacher, I can't be dumb!"

Reason for Smoking yourself to Death

She was doing well in her family life and her work life when a catastrophe happened. She learned that her own husband had been sexually abusing two of her daughters for many years. My client had no idea it was going on. Nobody believed her. "You must have known something was going on." She was devastated.

They immediately divorced and she began again as a solo mother. Her daughters grew up, married, moved away and started their own families.

And then to her horror, the whole cycle started again. It turned out that one of the relatives of her daughter's husband had started sexually abusing one of the granddaughters. This caused the whole extended family to split into factions. The whole issue of sexual abuse and incest was brought up again and again, fingers were pointed, wild accusations made. And now nobody is comfortable talking to anyone. Most of my client's daughters will not talk to her at all. And to top it off, my client has now been forced economically to move in and share a house with her mother.

Nothing to live for, might as well keep smoking.

She feels her life was ruined. A wonderful family that gave her fulfillment and happiness has been torn apart by sexual abuse. She now blames herself for not seeing her own daughter's abuse, and her granddaughters abuse. Nobody loves her, or wants her. Now she has no role to play, she is barred from seeing her own grandchildren. Her daughters are alienated and won't talk to her.

The outcome is that she feels she has nothing to live for. She is consumed with guilt, and regret, and can see no way out of it. So she actually said "I'm smoking because I don't want to be here any more". I couldn't believe my ears. I said, "You are smoking yourself to death?". "Yes, that's right. I don't deserve to live".

Hypnotherapy Response

She wasn't suicidal, but she saw smoking as an acceptable way to kill herself slowly and get out of this bind. Well, I wasn't about to allow that to happen. The basic problem appeared to be displaced guilt. So I started on therapy to allow her to see her situation for what it was, and clear away any blame. The session went very well and I think I have been able to get rid of that feeling that "is crushing my heart ".

Secret Drinking Causes Fixes

Secret Drinking

My client today was a tiny Spanish woman who runs a day spa. She was beautifully made up, well dressed and clearly looks after herself. Anyone looking at her would say that she was totally in control. In fact, she is a secret drinker.

Her problem is that she has gradually got into the habit of drinking too much. She drinks a bottle of wine every night, sometimes two bottles of wine. She believes it's because she has stress from her business.

It started two years ago when she had particular issue at business. But later on she said "it's been much longer than that". She has actually been secretly drinking for many years.

Her husband is now noticing the drinking and disapproves of it. "I have tried to give up. Usually I am able to stop for three to four days. But then something just makes me start again."

Finding the real cause of secret drinking

This "something" suggested to me that she is not dealing with her feelings. I suspected that she is drinking as a way of medicating herself. My first step was to test for any basic psychological issues.

I asked "Would you say your mind is always busy?"

"Yes".

"Do you keep going over and over the same things in your mind?"

"Yes."

These strongly suggested that she might have some form of depression.

So I then showed her my diagram of the symptoms of dysthymia. She was quiet for a long time. Then she pointed to the top part, and said "I have both of these!"

She was pointing to the Circular Thinking part, and the Fixed Thinking part. On further discussion she realized that she also was in the part with the Social Withdrawal symptoms.

A plan to stop secret drinking

I then briefly went through some basic dysthymia counselling. I emphasized that she had to get exercise. It was ironic that someone who was in the health business actually did virtually no exercise.

She also needed to learn how to deal with her thinking patterns. I got her to do a simple NLP thinking exercise to show how she could control her own thoughts. This was very successful. But I noticed while doing it, that her eye lids were obviously flickering. From this I deduced that she would be easy to hypnotize. It turned out to be the case.

I took her into trance and did a Metaphor Parts Therapy. This involved letting her experience her need to drink as a defective part. I then gave her a visualization where she was able to repair the defective part and turn it into a source of strength to deal with stress.

Outcome

Previously, a psychologist in London had told her to go back to Spain. She did that and moving back to Spain took her away from the stress. She felt much better. But going back to running her business brought it all on again.

This was another case where bad news is good news. It was bad news that she had depression. The good news was that she now understood why she drank, and why she kept starting again. She seemed really relieved to know the origin of her problems. And that at last she could see a way out of her secret drinking.

Porn Addiction is it real?

Porn Addiction

I received the following message “I’m not sure if my problem would be in your areas of treatment. I am very addicted to masturbation/porn/adultery. I don’t have control of myself. I try to stop but whenever I am left alone at home or in my day off I am just wasting my time into such. I have positive approaches to life and I have many skills, but due to this addiction and feeling guilty about the energy wasted and leading to a waste of my day and weeks and months leaving the unproductive. I’m not sure that my problem is something you can deal with, but maybe you can help me come out and live life in a more productive way.”

Porn addiction has been in the news ever since the Internet made porn available to everyone. I have never been happy with the explanations I have read for porn addiction.

Is porn addictive? Most of the writing about porn addiction assumes that it is real. But can you actually be addicted to porn? And if so, how?

Theories of Porn Addiction

This is an important question, because the type of treatment to offer depends on your theory of why people watch porn. Most assume that because watching porn and masturbating is enjoyable, then it must be like substance abuse. This is a behavioral model. You enjoy porn, and therefore do it more, and build pleasure pathways in your brain. The more you do it, the more want to do it. And that is what your addiction is.

However, there are several models of addiction. I wanted to meet this man and find out why he felt addicted. He turned out to be a young married man with a good job and no obvious reasons to do this. I asked him about his life and quite quickly realized that he was showing signs of depression. He had low self esteem, lack of motivation, no goals, and felt no emotional connection to anyone.

Cause of addiction to porn

He had recently left university so was too young to recognize the cycles in his own behavior. But going over the symptoms showed clearly that he did have depression.

This actually explained his ‘porn addiction’. He wasn’t attracted to porn particularly. He was doing it because it was enjoyable, and took his mind off the depressive thoughts he was having. He was doing porn because he felt he was worthless, and empty and he had no goals in life. So why not? But then his critical voice started up for doing it, and made him feel bad again. Until he did more porn to get away from it.

So it wasn’t so much that he was attracted to porn. It more that he was self medicating with porn. He was trying to use porn to get temporary relief from his negative feelings.

In the session, I helped him see what was really going on. Then I gave him some guidance on how to manage his condition, and how hypnotize himself to reduce his anxiety. Once has learned to manage his depressive tendencies, he won't need the porn to feel better.

Automatic Depression Detection

Depression is probably the most widespread mental illness in the world. It affects millions of people and is a huge burden on the health services. Any sort of automatic depression detection would be a wonderful breakthrough.

The way that people speak can suggest whether they are in depression or not. But as long as therapists were just taking notes this knowledge was not very useful. Today, there are millions of people on the Internet, on social media, and in chat rooms. They are all exchanging ideas in text. This means that there is a vast body of text, millions upon millions of words, on every possible subject. Scientists are analysing these texts to try to identify depression. The results are quite surprising.

Machine learning for depression

Language has two parts: content and style. Content is what you talk about, style is how you say it. Analyzing content shows that depressed people use a higher proportion of negative words. These are words such as "sad, lonely, unhappy, miserable, can't cope". Depressed people also have a different focus. Automatic depression detection software shows that depressed people talk much more about "I, me, myself" than they do about "they, them, people". It seems that depressed people are more inward focused, on themselves.

Of course, it is not possible to tell which comes first. Does depression cause you to focus inwards, and use the 'I' word. Or does focusing inwards cause depression?

Depressed people also have a different style of speaking. They tend to speak in absolutes. "Everything, nothing, everybody, never". Research is showing that these 'absolutes' are a better indicator of depression than words about negative emotions.

These results are very encouraging. Automatic depression detection is fast, cheap, and appears to be effective. In fact, in many areas of mental health, automatic analysis is proving faster and more accurate than experts in those fields. As more and more text becomes available for analysing, the results will get even more accurate.

Are you just avoiding thoughts?

Avoiding thoughts

In hypnotherapy, I see many different types of behavior. People often tell me stories about why they behave the way they do. The reasons are usually something that was done to them. They offer this as the excuse for why they behave the way they do, and why they are unable to change their own behavior.

It is a very human tendency to try to find explanations and excuses for your behavior. This is perfectly understandable. However, most people do not really understand what is driving their own behavior.

Rationalizing behavior

I was reminded of this today. I had a client come to see me who felt that she was always thinking of all the worst things that could happen. For example, if her husband was late coming home she would think "I know he's not dead, he's just a bit late, isn't he? I would have heard of that had been an accident". She would catastrophize endlessly about almost anything. Her explanation was because she was the third child of four. She had an elaborate theory of how the first child acted a certain way, and the second child acted a different way, and the third child acted in yet another way. And that was why she was behaving the way she was. In fact, she had an undiagnosed case of depression.

It is not uncommon for people to totally miss the real reason for why they do what they do. In therapy, I am more often interested in what people are not doing, than in what they are doing. I often tell my clients, "every coin has two sides".

Doing something to avoid doing something else

People will tell you for example that there are workaholics, that they have to be at work all the time, that they can't let go of the details. When I hear a story like this I always think to myself "and what are you trying to get away from?" A person who is a workaholic is not attracted to work. There are not simply trying to get a job done. What they are trying to do is to get away from emotional problems they have with their family. Being at work and gives them a reason for not dealing with their own emotional inadequacies. They are avoiding thoughts.

Many years ago I had a client who was a motorcycle racing champion. He told me that when he was a teenager, he would go for long rides on his motorbike. He said that when he was riding, and was coming up to a corner at speed, he had to focus totally on getting round the corner. There was no space in his mind for any other thought. He used the dangers of motorcycling to get his mind clear. It was not that he was attracted to motorcycling, it was the only way he knew to stop the constant nagging in his mind.

Marathon Mind

I also spoke to someone who had been a marathon runner. He told me that one of the attractions of marathon running was that at some point you get so tired that you have to focus totally on just getting through the next mile and the next mile. This forces you to concentrate on just getting one foot in front of the other. And it drives out any unwanted thoughts. The attraction is not the running or the winning. The attraction is having a break from the relentless feeling of emptiness, or doubt, or self-hatred.

I know a bridge player who has something similar. When she is sitting down to play bridge, she has to focus totally on the cards. Every hand is challenging, every hand is difficult and intricate. When she is playing in a tournament there is no space in her head for any other thoughts. That is why people become bridge addicts.

So think about what you do. Think about your own behaviors. And then think about the other side of the coin. Are you doing something not because you like it, but because it lets you avoid something else?

Reasons for smoking

Reasons for Smoking

My client yesterday was a middle aged woman who just could not give up smoking. She could not give any reasons for smoking.

I asked if she had ever stopped smoking. She said "I stopped when I got pregnant". I then asked her why she started again. "About a year ago. A friend offered me a cigarette, and said it might help, so I took it. And then it was a case of another one, and then two, and then very quickly I was back smoking again."

I asked what else was going on in her life at that time. She said "I discovered that my husband was having an affair with my best friend."

The real reasons for smoking

It seems strange to me that someone would blame starting smoking again because a friend suggested that it might help them, and totally ignoring the fact that their life had fallen apart around them. It is a peculiar kind of blindness that seems to affect people who start smoking again. They will blame the smallest thing, and completely ignore overwhelming emotional changes.

It is also strange that even after years of not smoking, people can believe that smoking will help them. I have had many clients who told me "I took the first cigarette. It tasted horrible. I felt sick and dizzy. But I kept on with it, until I had started again."

I asked "how did you feel when you stop smoking when you were pregnant?" She said, "I felt that I had to quit, and I resented it. Even though I stopped for 11 years I still resented being made to stop. Especially at the beginning of the pregnancy when my husband did not stop smoking but I had to. I hate it when I cannot do what I want and other people make me do things."

And there was the real reason for smoking. It was also the best indicator of how to go about helping her stop smoking again.

Past Life Regression Hypnotherapy

A client booked in with me writing "I would like to have a past life regression hypnosis. I feel a bit unhappy, like I am not fulfilling my purpose. I feel a bit lost." Past life regression hypnotherapy requests are fairly common but I always wonder what prompts the client to ask for one.

The client was a young primary teacher. She told me "I feel totally confused about my feelings, and my own life. I was going to resign my job because I couldn't really understand how I was feeling. My friends tell me it must be something I did in a past life."

Different assumptions

It became obvious fairly quickly that she really was not in touch with their own feelings. I gave her the dysthymia questionnaire. She identified with most of the areas, particularly with circular thinking. We discussed how rumination was affecting her. On looking at the the other aspects of dysthymia, it became clear that she also has black and white thinking. This is defined by high expectations and distress at not achieving them. The rumination and failed expectations were driving her lack of feeling, of disconnection.

It had never occurred to her that she had depression, despite the fact that her sister has depression, and her mother shows every sign of it as well.

I outlined what she has to do to fix her own depression, emphasizing exercise, but not going into detail or suggesting that she should come back.

We agreed that all of her symptoms were consistent with depression, and there was no point in doing past life regression.

There was not a lot of time left, so I had to do something fairly quick to end the session.

Metaphor therapy

She came to my office convinced there was something hidden inside that was making her act and feel this way. So I decided to use metaphor therapy to clear that thing. I did a short induction. I suggested there was something lodged in her unconscious mind. Her own mind searched for it, found it, and ripped it out. Then it turned to liquid and drained out through her feet.

She was one of those clients who do a lot of moving in trance. I was concerned that she was not deep enough, so I deepened her by going down some steps into a garden. I didn't know what to do next. So I just let my unconscious mind take over. I noticed a potted plant on my windowsill. So I took her to a large glass house. The glasshouse was hot and steamy and everything was growing. I led her to a bench where there was a flower pot with rich earth in it.

Grow your answer Therapy

There was a packet with her name on it. She felt it, and it appeared to have a seed inside. There was a sign that said 'open me'. I got her to plant the seed. Then someone appeared and said "I have been waiting for you to plant that seed. Now I will look after it for you. The seed will grow into a plant with many beneficial properties. It will continue to grow throughout your life. Who who knows what it will produce?".

I then got her to go outside and had her sit on a bench. She fell asleep on the bench and began to dream of a woman sitting on a bench. She dreamed of a woman sitting on a bench dreaming about a woman sitting on a bench and hearing these words. I continued with the multiple levels of dissociation until even I got lost in it. This could be a good way of doing multiple embedded metaphors?

Feedback on this Past Life Regression Hypnotherapy

I was a little concerned that she had not really been in trance, due to the amount of wriggling around that she did. So I asked her what she remembered about the hidden object. She said it was that one of those things that suck blood, a leech. So, I was happy that she actually had been utilizing her own unconscious mind.

At then, at the end, saying goodbye, she said "and I really liked the whole plant thing, and this thing growing".

What I learned from this is that it is quite amazing how people can misinterpret their own symptoms. This woman was being encouraged to go down the path of New Age spirituality, and who knows where it might have led her. She just did not recognize the source of her own problems.

Hypnoanalysis Hypnotherapy

Hypnoanalysis and Hypnotherapy

As part of my professional self-development I am reading books based on other therapies. I am interested in what I might learn about my assumptions in how I do therapy, and about hypnoanalysis. I chose to read The Examined Life because I wanted a perspective from psychoanalytical therapy. The book is a collection of stories about patients by a well-known American psychoanalyst based in London.

Differences in approach

One of the most striking things to me is the basic psychoanalysis approach to therapy. I see most of my clients for one hour and never see them again. His clients see him five times a week, and continue seeing him every day for years and years. There is no expectation of making any immediate change.

The type of client he treats is also very different. Only seriously wealthy people can afford to pay for therapy five hours a week for years. Therefore, his approach to them is quite different. It is an approach of almost diffidence, doing nothing to upset or alienate the client, and the income stream.

Another curious aspect of psychoanalysis practice arises out of the limitless number of hours available. Grosz recounts several patients where neither he nor the patient said anything for an hour. They both sat there in total silence, waiting for something to happen. I doubt any hypnotherapist has ever done that.

Applying psychoanalytic principles to hypnoanalysis

It seems to me that psychoanalysis is basically a form of Reframing. The object is to get the patient to recognize some key element of their behavior, and understand that behavior as representing something else. That last sentence is actually the definition of 'metaphor'. It seems to me that he was constantly seeking a metaphor to explain his clients' behavior. And just like reframing, the theory is that realizing that you can see things in different way, to have different explanation, is all you need to cure you.

For me, the strangest part concerns the relationship between the Analyst and the Patient. For Grosz, the analysis can not make progress until a proper relationship is established. It is not friendship, it is not advisory, it is something unique to psychoanalytic training. There is nothing like that in hypnotherapy.

Freud and hypnoanalysis

Grosz is a Freudian psychoanalyst. His therapeutic approach is therefore based on Freudian theory and thinking. It only comes up incidentally in the stories about his patients, but I found the Freudian worldview both startling and alien. Nothing is ever accepted for what it is. Everything is interpreted through the lens of Freudian theory. Everything is a hidden message about your mother or father.

And I found a very different approach to therapy. In the stories about his patients Grosz seems to give very little value to non-psychological causes. He often mentions in passing that his patients have an alcoholic father, or a brother in psychiatric care, or a history of depression in the family, but never seems to give any weight to the possibility that his patient's behavior may have a genetic basis. There seems to be no role for physiology.

He does not use anything from behavioral psychology, or CBT, or guided visualization, or any other direct intervention. Everything is about getting the patient to speak aloud, and then helping the patient to interpret what they just said. It is a passive approach to therapy. In some aspects psychoanalysis seems very close to non-interventionist counseling.

Overall impression

There is a lot in this book that is good. There is a lot I disagree with. It is challenging and interesting. But it is actually a very bleak book. I felt quite disturbed by the time I had reached the end of it. His underlying theme is about change and loss. He says there can be no change without loss. Whether this reflects his own personality, or the result of a lifetime spent talking to unhappy people, is impossible to say.

There are many thought provoking phrases used in the book.

"Behavior is the language we use when we have no words to express how we feel".

"My job is not to find a solution. My job is to find a useful question".

Some of his patients were deeply disturbed. And disturbing. I found it very hard to get one story out of my mind. He described working with a woman whose husband had a terminal illness. She could not cope with living with someone who is dying. In particular she was horrified by what she felt was having to have sex with a corpse.

Reflections on Hypnoanalysis

The main reason for reading this book was to challenge my own assumptions about how I do therapy. When questioning why other people do therapy the way they do, it challenges you to justify why you do therapy the way you do.

It seems to me that the principles of psychoanalysis do not transfer well to hypnoanalysis. I will not be using Freudian principles in my daily work.

However, this book has made me question my assumptions. If psychoanalysis believes that telling your story is how you make sense of your life, why don't I believe that? And what do I believe? How do I know what I am doing is right?

The examined life
How we lose and find ourselves
by Stephen Grosz
London: Chatto and Windus. 2013
ISBN 978-070–18535–0

Clearing Childhood Anxiety

I saw a client last week who was always nervous and frightened. It clearly has something to do with her childhood anxiety. She could not identify anything in particular that she might feel anxious about. In fact she really couldn't remember much about her childhood at all. I hypnotized her and used a metaphor designed to help remove generalized anxiety. I told her to let me know how she felt in a week or so.

One morning this week she woke up suddenly with a great fear. She had no idea what was causing this, and began to go into a panic. Then she recognized it. It was something she has had all her life. But it was only after last week's session that she could isolate it from all the other things going on in her life.

She came to see me, still a little disturbed by the memory. I got her to relax and breathe deeply. She went into trance easily. In trance I encouraged her to be open to that feeling of 'great fear'. It was a feeling she now recognized, that she had had many times, so she quickly recalled it.

Transforming Childhood anxiety

When I was sure that she was experiencing the fear, I began the process to get her to transform the feeling into a object. I asked her "where are you feeling it?" This is the first stage of establishing the feeling as a 'thing' separate from herself. "What shape is it?" to get her to think about the nature of her 'thing'. Then I asked, "what object does this 'thing' most resemble? What is it like?". Once the client can think of it as an object, she can begin to make changes to it.

She told me that the feeling was "In my chest. like a black jelly fish". I got her to describe her jelly fish in more and more detail. It was " Sticky. And filled with terror". Now that the fear was transformed into something else, she could think about the something else as something that could go away. If the feeling is part of you, you can't fix it. But if the feeling is separate from you, you can think of fixing it.

I asked her, " What do you want to have happen to that jelly fish?" She told me she "Want it to go away". I asked "And can it go away?" "I don't think so". When the client cannot do what they want to do with the object, you need to help them. I asked "Can you imagine holding that jelly fish in your hands?" "No, it just slips through my fingers". So to help her get it out of her body I suggested that she could put in a box. That worked. Then I suggested she might put the box with the jelly fish in chair in front of her. This suggestion is designed to make her externalize the object completely.

Externalizing her Childhood Anxiety

She put the box in the chair. I asked "What do you think will happen to that jelly fish in the box?" This was to get her to think about ways to change the feeling. She said "I can't get it to do anything. It won't die". I asked "What might you use to kill it?" She said "I can stab it with knitting needles". She tried that, but said "it ate them". Then I asked "what happens to things that eat knitting needles?"

By thinking about what would be different she triggered a resource in her mind. She said it had turned into a paua (abalone) stuck to the side of the box. Paua are large shellfish that stick immovably to rocks. In this kind of therapy, the client represents aspects of themselves as the metaphor objects. So the paua was her. It has a strong shell, and cannot be budged from where it is anchored. I asked her "what do you think that shellfish is thinking?" This was to get her to say what the paua represented for her. "It is for death". I told her "Ask the paua what it wants to do". "It is trying to run away".

Regression for her Childhood anxiety

I felt that if the paua was about her sheltering, hiding from something, then probably I shouldn't mess with it. This suggested that it might a job for regression. I asked her to think about what the paua might be feeling. She said it was fear. I developed the feeling of fear. "Think of the first time you ever had that fear". She came out with a memory where she was a little child running away from people trying to kill her. She had to hide away from the light.

I did INNER CHILD work with her. We found that frightened little girl and comforted her. Eventually I got her back to adult. She said that she felt the little girl merging with her, but just before that happened she and the girl, called Grace, smashed the paua with hammers.

Afterwards, we discussed what it all meant. She thought it was all about hiding in fear in a wardrobe when her dad was on a rampage.

She realized that it was real memory. Things at home changed. But she never let go of that fear. That was the basis of her lifetime anxiety.

How to use Havening in hypnotherapy

How to do Havening

The whole havening process is simple and takes only a few minutes.

Set up for Havening

Get your client to think of their problem, the issue that they want to deal with. Get them to say aloud a word or phrase that represents that problem. Ask the client to put a number on the feeling, with ten being the most distressing.
Tell your client to clear their mind, or imagine something pleasant.

Havening tapping

3. Ask your client to start tapping lightly on their own collarbones with both hands, and while they are tapping and keeping their head still,

a. open and close their eyes twice.

b. with their eyes open, look to the right, then left

c. look down to their left, then down to their right.

d. rotate their eyes once clockwise, and once anticlockwise.

e. tell the client to stop tapping.

Havening Stroking

4. Tell them to close their eyes. Get your client to fold their arms across their chest.

5. Ask your client to imagine [first visualization: going up a flight of stairs].

a. With each step they [first audio: count out loud from one to 20].

b. As they are counting, you count along with them, and you gently stroke the sides of their upper arms 20 times.

Repeat the Havening Stroking

6. Ask your client to rate their feeling now on the 1 -10 scale.

If it has not reduced enough, repeat step 5a and 5b as many times as you need to.

But replace the [visualization] with another visualization such as [skipping twenty times].

Replace the [auditory] with something else such as [humming Happy Birthday aloud]

Final Havening Release

When there is no further change to your client's rating number

7. Tell your client to open their eyes, drop their arms, and relax.

8. Ask your client to rotate their eyes clockwise and anticlockwise, then close their eyes.

9. As the final step, you stroke the side of your clients arms again five times, and on the fifth stroke say "Let it go now".

10. Check with your client how they think about their problem now.

Source: http://www.hsj.gr/medicine/impact-of-a-singlesession-of-havening.php?aid=7273 accessed: 21 Sep 2018

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