Michael Wheatley

I’ve just come back from vacation, and this is a quick update…

I’ve added sections on my website for two specialist areas: smoking cessation and Men’s Psychosexual Issues.

I’m also setting up up a new program for the 6% of women and 5.8% of men with “Shopping Compulsion”, which used to be refered to as “Shopping Addiction”. I’ll let you all know, once it has been reviewed.

‘Just’ Anxiety? 

Mental Health Awareness Week takes place from Monday 15 – Sunday 21 May 2023. The official theme for this year, as set by the Mental Health Foundation, is ‘anxiety’.

The “Mental Health UK” organisation (https://mentalhealth-uk.org/mental-health-awareness-week/) has the specific theme of ” ‘Just’ anxiety? ” which I summarise here:

In addition, here are some excellent tools you can learn, to help you get back in control of your mind:

All credit to the MentalHealth-UK Organisation !
Go read their site https://mentalhealth-uk.org/mental-health-awareness-week/ its full of great things.

Going to the Dentist… is something that probably ranks pretty low on everyone’s lists of tasks, but for some people, it can fill them with dread.

But where does this feeling come from? It could be from a personal experience, but we can also learn emotional reactions from the stories and reactions of others, especially whilst we were young, and especially from important figures in our lives.

Or it could be by association, the image of someone put their hands, tools, and especially needles, in their mouth.

Hypnotherapy can be incredibly useful here, because it is one of the quickest and least invasive techniques to get rid of phobias of any description. Typical progressive relaxation inductions are all about feeling relaxed, and you can’t be anxious and relaxed at the same time, can you?

But hypnosis is also an excellent tool for pain control, which can be relevant for some dental procedures & situations. It can also help with other types of nervous reaction, e.g.

• Gagging
• Tongue defence
• Calming TMJD (Temporal mandibular joint dysfunction)
• Behavioural issues e.g. bruxism (jaw clenching, grinding of teeth)

If you are a dental practitioner interested in finding out more, please contact me for a free 45 minute zoom call or in-person presentation, for yourself and/or your team.

If you are a dental patient, please contact me for a free Discovery Call, to discuss how I can help you.

The Tarahumara Natives

“The Tarahumara Natives of southwestern Chihuahua are the ones who can run a hundered miles – their blood pressure doesn’t go up and their heartbeat doesn’t change. Some entrepreneur took some hundred-mile runers to the Olympics (1928, Amsterdam). They didn’t even place. Because, they thought twenty-five miles was when you warmed up! It hadn’t been explained to them that their run was twenty-five miles long.”

(Milton H. Erickson)

Having just finished this book, I’m making a quick post about it, as much for my own reference as anything.

(1) The human need for “inclusion” or “attention” is profound and omnipresent. (~p115)

It’s better to be the pantomime villain, the political radical, the disruptive student, the class fool, or (to use an example from Milton Erickson) the inconsolable melancholy relative – all of these are better than being ignored, forgotten. In the ancestral stone age, social exclusion meant death. (And a lot of the social, political, and religious views of people – specifically, the views where the person has no personal expertise or direct interest – these get imported from whomever is paying attention to them.)

(2) The “autistic spectrum” is more usefully thought of as “Caetextia” – context blindness. (~p218)

• Asperger’s is a type of this
• left- and right- brained caetextia have different symptoms
• right-brain caetextia is often co-morbid with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, 

(3) Three vital principles: (p242)

• The brain is primarily a pattern matching process.
• Emotion comes before thought – all perceptions and all thoughts are ‘tagged’ with emotion. (Emotion is what prioritises a course of action or thought.)
• The higher the emotional arousal, the more primitive the emotional/mental pattern that is engaged. 

(4) The RIGAAR model for effective therapy: (p307)

• Build rapport
• gather information
• set goals
• access resources (e.g. ‘remember that time they were confident’, to get the ‘confidence’ resource, etc)
• agree  strategy with the client
• rehearse success

(5) The Rewind technique (p336)

• EMDR, EFT, and the Rewind technique may all have the same underlying mechanism. (p335)

Hello everyone, I hope you are all well.

At the end of September I gave a presentation to 2nd-year Psychology students at Paris Nanterre University, specifically their Psychology and Education department: https://ufr-spse.parisnanterre.fr/

Whilst the premise was teaching them the English for terms useful in psychology, it became clear to me that I was teaching them about psychotherapy, and eventually, towards the end, some of them were learning things which made them feel empowered over their own phobias and other mental fitness subjects.

And that is what we often find – giving the basic presentation about how the mind works, and how anxiety, depression, and anger come about – this is incredibly empowering. Even on its own, it gives so many people hope, and more control over their lives.

If any of you would like me to give a presentation to your organisation, please do let me know, I’d love to help.

Please feel free to forward this invite to your HR team, or group organisers, as appropriate.

We psychotherapists are, of course, all working with the same reality, but may be coming at the solutions from different directions. A good example of this is the “Polyvagal Theory of stress” – whilst I as a Clinical Hypnotherapist am working from the rational mind down into the limbic system, they are working from the body up through the Vagus nerve.

Sukie Baxter gives a good (if long) explanation here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SukieBaxter

To me, the key points of commonality are:

• Our nervous system, including our brain, has evolved over 100’s of millions of years
• The older parts are still there, doing what they have always done
• Of course these older parts don’t understand rational thoughts, and can’t be changed with rational conversations or thoughts!
• We understand, perfectly calmly, that our visual processing can be fooled by optical illusions, and our hearing can be fooled by e.g. binaural beats, and so likewise, it should be no surprise that our emotional responses can fooled and get things wrong.
• An example of this being, that once our survival instincts think we are in a dangerous situation, it will alter the focus of our perceptions towards potential danger, which leads to a feedback-loop: it is looking for danger, so it notices more danger, so it becomes more and more tricked into thinking that we are in danger. Out mind is working exactly as designed – but falling for an illusion caused by “selection bias”.

The rational thing is not to wish our brains worked differently, but rather, to understand how they actually work, and how to get ourselves out of these states.

Hello all,

Just a quick note that some of my FAQ’s are now answered in brief YouTube videos.

What do you think of this?

Are video blogs more useful for you, or do you prefer the text blogs?

Or perhaps both, the video one to let you know, and text one for you to look up later?

Love to hear your comments!

My FAQ page is linked here:

FAQ’s