Have you been living with a health problem for some time, and now you’re feeling emotionally and mentally burdened, limited by your condition and physically exhausted?

You want to improve how you think and feel about yourself with this health condition and find ways to escape from its impact on you so that you can live well and feel better.

You want to feel better and get on with living life free of pain and full of energy!

 

You know that your health problem isn’t who you are, and you want to deal with it as just one aspect of your life. But at the moment, it seems all consuming. Your life might look something like this:

 

• You’ve been looking for help for some time, and tried different ways to get help.
• Even though you’ve had problems for a long while, you may only recently have received the label of a diagnosis, and you’re trying to adjust.
• You’re drained by an exhausting mix of feelings – anger, relief about finally having a diagnosis, shock, disbelief, fear, sadness, grief, denial, worry, resignation, frustration…
• You see others able to get on with their lives easily and carefree, and that hurts. You wonder why this happened to you, and if something you did contributed to it.
• You’re debilitated by pain and medication side effects. You’re sick of dealing with symptoms that Interfere with your life.
• You’re worried about people you love, especially the ones who rely on you, and the effect your illness is having on them.
• You still need to function in your personal life and at work, but the cost of doing this is very high and you’re running on empty.

 

You feel out of control of your life, and waiting around at various hospital appointments and treatments doesn’t help. At times you find your interactions with medical stuff pretty impersonal, and wish someone had some time to help you out with how this is for you emotionally.

 

Part of you thinks if you could accept the situation you might feel more at peace, but you also don’t want to give in to it, so it feels like a fight. You don’t want your illness to become the defining thing about how people think of you and relate to you – and at the same time, you wish they’d take it into account a bit more, and try to understand what it’s like for you

 

You feel like you’re grieving for how you thought your life would be, feeling out of control of your body and annoyed that it isn’t doing what you want.

 

You wish someone would appear with a magic wand which would just make all this disappear!

 

These are some of the ways people with an autoimmune condition commonly tell me they feel. But everyone’s different, and you know better than anyone how it affects you.

 

I get it. I’ve been there, and if I have a flare or an injury, I’m reminded of these feelings all too keenly.

 

When I was very unwell, I didn’t want to be stuck feeling that way and being a “patient”. It took me a while to figure out what help actually helped me, and what didn’t. I know from my experience, and from people I work with, that how you think and feel about your situation is central to the way you cope with it and influences how well you feel. I got myself better, off immunosuppressants and with no disease activity, feeling positive, capable of making the right choices for me about my condition, and understanding all the ways I can influence my body and how well I am.

 

I retrained so that I could help myself and help others with what I’ve learned.

Space to deal with the emotional and mental effects of living with autoimmune disease

 

I help you address the emotional and mental effects of living with an autoimmune condition, that aren’t often addressed in hospital treatment. Working together, we will look at your experience and you will have a space to deal with issues like:

 

• How do I feel about what’s happening to me?
• What thoughts do I have about it, and are these helpful?
• What aspects of this are in my control and what could I do to make a difference?
• How can I get the energy to do this?
• Can I do anything about pain?
• What do I think and feel about my body and my health?

 

The work we do together really can make a difference. Yes, the situation might suck and there are things which make you feel legitimately bleak. But by working together, we can make sure you feel like the version of you that you want to be, identify which things upset you and what would make these feel better, learn to improve your pain and energy levels, and feel capable of taking actions that can improve your health.

 

It’s about your relationship with yourself, in a challenging situation.

“I really felt heard”

 

Here’s how one of my lovely clients put it. She wanted to address some feelings about herself, how her life had unfolded and her beliefs about why she had a life- threatening condition:

How cognitive hypnotherapy can benefit you

 

Cognitive hypnotherapy incorporates a wealth of effective, evidence-based techniques and approaches and has been proven in research to be more effective than CBT.

 

Research published in 2015 in Mental Health Review found that 71% of people who used cognitive hypnotherapy for treatment of anxiety and depression improved, compared to 42% after treatment with other talk therapies used within the NHS such as CBT.

Feel Better and Live Well

 

You will benefit from 7 full treatment sessions with me, supported by email check-ins in between those sessions, plus exercises to complete, effective self-help techniques I teach you to use yourself, and recordings tailored to you.

 

The time in between our appointments allows enough space for you to work with any exercises and recordings and to notice changes, and I remain available to you by email for any queries or new developments.

 

I take a full case history, guide you through a series of questions and listen to your story so that I fully understand where you are and what’s happened to get you here. We explore where you’d rather be instead and how you’ll know when you’ve got there.

 

We work together to tackle the aspects of living like this which are most difficult for you. I choose from multiple techniques and therapy approaches the ones which are best suited to how you experience things and the problems which are most pressing. We use the way your mind works and the trance states which are already part of your problem to understand how you feel now so that we can change it.

Ready to feel better?

If you recognise yourself and your experience in what I’ve described on this page, and you’d like my help, all you need to do is book a call so we can make contact and arrange a time to begin.

Once you’re booked in, I send you everything you need to get started before our first session, so we can get to work on the change you’re seeking.