The psyche of a child is absolutely different from that of an adult. It is formed through the acquisition of a mass of new knowledge. Information cannot always be correctly analyzed and assessed due to its age. At the same time, there is increased impressionability and a vivid imagination, which contributes to the emergence of various phobias or neuroses. Hypnosis for children allows you to relieve them of fears, normalize the internal state of the body, avoiding serious complications.
Recommendations for use
Therapy using suggestion shows good results in the treatment of behavioral, mental, and emotional disorders. This allows you to use it to get rid of many ailments.
Indications for the use of child hypnosis:
- manifestations of a neurotic nature (hair pulling, nail biting);
- restlessness, excessive activity;
- difficulties in establishing relationships with peers in an educational institution;
- the emergence of conflict situations with parents;
- lack of adequate self-esteem;
- various fears that develop into phobias (fear of the dark, public, animals);
- severe excitability;
- addiction to the Internet or games.
After a course of hypnotherapy, there is a decrease in the level of inflated sensitivity, the level of self-awareness increases, and neurotic disorders are leveled out.
Using hypnotherapy
Parents need to understand that hypnosis for children is not a solution to every problem. The efforts made by the hypnotist will not replace treatment with medications for acute somatic diseases. Hypnotherapy should not be used if the child has mental problems.
The hypnotic method of treatment is distinguished from other psychological methods by its obvious advantages.
He has proven himself excellent in resolving problems of the psychological, psycho-emotional and behavioral spectrum. Experts recommend child hypnosis in cases of:
- with negative habits, for example, a child bites his nails;
- to solve problems that affect concentration, attentiveness, and memory;
- with difficulties in communicating with other children;
- for fears associated with educational activity: anxiety before exams;
- with obvious phobias: fear of heights, darkness;
- after traumatic events: parental divorce, death of a pet;
- for daytime activity disorders: unjustified manifestation of aggression;
- when addicted to games.
Treatment
Hypnosis for children involves the use of special techniques. Patients aged from 3 to 9 years require a special approach. Here there is a difficulty with the clarity of the formation of the child’s thoughts and their logical presentation to the interlocutor. Children cannot specifically describe the situation that worries them. The interaction between the young patient and the hypnologist becomes difficult. Hypnosis for children 10 years old and younger requires a specialist to have a lot of experience, patience, skill, and the desire to achieve the desired result.
Another important condition is the establishment of a trusting relationship and mutual understanding between the doctor and the child. The child should feel the therapist’s sincere concern about the problem being solved, the sharing of fears, and the desire to provide all possible help.
Eliminating disorders in childhood using suggestion has objective advantages over other methods:
- getting rid of phobias in difficult cases;
- no side effects or harm to the growing body;
- safety for the psyche.
Parents should not worry that children will suffer under hypnosis. This method is relevant for patients who are afraid of any medical care, including injections and taking pills. During sessions, children usually behave calmly, sometimes with interest.
Hypnotherapy guarantees stable results, unlike the use of traditional medications. To eliminate the symptoms of children's fears, tranquilizers are used, which are characterized by obtaining a quick effect that soon goes away. The suggestion is aimed at working through the patient’s subconscious, gently leveling the existing problem.
The main advantage of child hypnosis is the absence of side effects. Taking this nuance into account, many parents choose it as a safe way to treat their child.
Preparing for the session
The preparation of the doctor and parents for the session will directly determine the result of the entire therapy. To achieve the maximum effect, it is necessary to ensure that parents bring the child’s favorite toys to the first session - they will become an area where the baby’s attention will be focused and will provide an opportunity to put him into a state of rest.
Parents should understand that hypnosis does not solve problems, but only effectively helps to cope with them. A hypnologist cannot simply put a child into a hypnotic state and tell him to become smart.
Efficiency and real help
After a course of hypnotherapy, school-age children get used to the team more easily, become more actively involved in the learning process, and develop creative abilities and other talents. Children with an aggressive disposition become calmer and react more adequately to difficult situations. Unbalanced patients find a common language with relatives and become more confident in their own abilities.
Simple hypnosis for children demonstrates a high rate of effectiveness in getting rid of somatic disorders and treating stuttering. It is appropriate to schedule sessions in the following cases:
- neurotic headaches;
- sensitivity to meteorological changes;
- disruption of the endocrine system;
- metabolic diseases (diabetes, excess weight);
- vegetative-vascular dystonia;
- skin problems;
- enuresis;
- speech mutations;
- insomnia.
Hypnosis for children 8 years of age and older helps reduce the manifestations of pain in the body and normalize metabolic processes. In patients with neurotic disorders, a course of suggestion allows them to forget their fears and phobias forever.
Another area of hypnosis for a child is the stimulation of small athletes. Suggestion sessions allow you to strengthen emotional and volitional indicators and strengthen faith in your own victory. At the same time, concentration on the goal is activated, and the desire for adequate competition increases.
We recommend you the famous psychologist-hypnologist Nikita Valervich Baturin, who not only relieves various psychosomatic disorders, but also practices sports hypnotherapy.
A child hypnologist will help creative individuals develop existing abilities, find new ideas in the depths of the subconscious, and the potential for their implementation. For teenagers, a course of indoctrination will provide a path to determining their future profession, revealing their aspiration and desire for something they haven’t even thought about.
Causes of neurasthenia
The development of the disease is usually preceded by a traumatic factor.
Mental trauma is a sensory reflection of some event in the child’s mind, which has a depressing effect on him, worries him and lasts for quite a long time. The most common reason for the development of neuroses in childhood and school age is, oddly enough, overly “caring” parents. Their desire to give their child what they did not have, overprotection and constant control overload the child not only physically, but also psychologically.
From birth, children have individual temperament, capabilities and limitations. Not all parents understand this. Wishing only the best for the child, they burden him with additional activities, often without even considering his interests. A student’s day can be scheduled minute by minute: after school – sports training, music or art school, swimming pool, English, tutor, homework, etc.
Afraid of upsetting his parents and realizing that they are trying for his good, the baby tries to do everything: study diligently, attend clubs. However, somewhere inside, fatigue and protest accumulate. This is a classic development of neurasthenia. At some point, the child breaks down, becomes irritable and aggressive, or, conversely, whiny and inhibited.
If there are several children in the family, then problems may begin due to jealousy towards the youngest family member. In teenagers this is more pronounced; it seems to them that their parents no longer love them, they don’t need them, since a “new” baby has appeared.
The situation is especially aggravated when the elder is often told that he is already an adult and has a special responsibility, and he himself missed the moment when he grew up. He is still small at heart and still needs parental love and support. Trying to meet the expectations of adults, the child experiences nervous overstrain, leading to frustration.
Triggers for the development of neurasthenia are also:
- negative family environment - scandals, fights, divorce of parents;
- social and everyday problems;
- mistakes in education;
- parental use of alcohol or drugs;
- emotional psychological trauma;
- severe fear;
- hereditary diseases;
- lack of sleep;
- reduced immunity;
- frequent respiratory tract infections;
- acquired physical injuries;
- digestive system disorders.
Most often there is not one, but several reasons. Due to this, diagnosis and treatment are delayed.
Parental Involvement
The success of hypnotherapy largely depends on the willingness of parents to be absent from the sessions. This is not a doctor’s whim, but a logical necessity. Often the behavior or individual characteristics of parents are the root cause of mental disorders and fears of children. The worldview of adults sometimes simply prevents their offspring from understanding what is happening and correctly comprehending the situation that has arisen.
Many fathers and mothers instill in a child from an early age information about his incompetence, laziness or stupidity. Such attitudes are laid down in the children's subconscious, provoking further phobias and disorders. The second prohibition for hypnotic sessions with children is video recording. This process will distract the young patient, preventing him from listening to the hypnologist’s information, which will negatively affect the final result.
Manifestations of the disease
With any type of neurosis, there is no damage to the brain centers, but only a functional disorder. The first signs become noticeable already in early childhood, but only a few parents pay attention to them and take appropriate measures.
The most important sign of increasing neurasthenia is a decrease in performance, as far as it would be appropriate to say about children. If we are talking about schoolchildren, then the teacher must make a lot of effort to attract attention, not to mention any return.
It is common for a child who is a carrier of the disorder to blame himself for all troubles. His self-esteem is low or at zero.
It has been observed that boys are more susceptible to the disease than girls.
Symptoms of neurasthenia in children:
- increased nervous exhaustion;
- absent-mindedness;
- diffidence;
- impaired concentration, attention;
- dissatisfaction, moodiness;
- fussiness;
- excited state;
- attacks of aggression;
- weakness;
- fast fatiguability;
- sleep disturbance.
When transitioning to a chronic form, apathy or depressive symptoms may be present. From the autonomic nervous system, jumps in heart rate and wandering pain in the abdomen or chest are observed. Excessive sweating often occurs. Appetite with neurasthenia is practically absent.
Since the manifestations of neurasthenia in children vary, its symptoms can be mistaken for some other mental disorder.
Hypnotization techniques
How to hypnotize a child 7 years old and older? There are several methods for this. The first of them is fascination (fascination with the gaze). The method can be used in combination with conversational suggestion. The technique is effective for group classes; monotonous stimuli are not used here, since they only distract children, complicating the procedure for inducing trance.
The non-directive method of suggestion, which involves the introduction of imagination, ideas, playful and fairy-tale elements, is becoming increasingly popular. Before starting treatment, contact should be established between the child and the hypnologist. Alternatively, the small patient answers questions by raising a specific finger. Next, they proceed directly to hypnosis.
Visual representations
This type of hypnosis for a child is implemented in several ways:
- Instilling thoughts about a favorite place where he wants to come at any time.
- Animal counting. Use the image of a favorite puppy or other animal, imagining that the child is in a cozy place.
- Associations with a long road, the beginning of which symbolizes the start of life, and the length of which symbolizes the future.
- Television fantasies on the theme of your favorite show or cartoon that does not contain scenes of violence and aggressiveness.
The information required for suggestion is inserted directly into parts of the conversation (depending on the problem being solved).
Auditory impact
In hypnosis with an auditory example, fragments of recordings of the child’s favorite songs or music are used. While listening to them, a suggestion session is conducted. At the beginning of the procedure, they simply turn on the piece and listen to it in silence with the little patient. Then they pronounce soft and soothing words that plunge the client into a trance.
Combined technique
Developing ideas about favorite sports, such as cycling, also works well. The hypnologist suggests to the child that he is on a picnic with his loved ones in a well-known place. They have delicious food and drinks with them.
Further installation is based on the fact that the patient imagines playing with friends, he is surrounded by beautiful things. One option is to add fairytale fantasy. Let it be a flying carpet spread on the ground. It is very comfortable and soft, allows you to travel anywhere in the world, and the child is its pilot. It can fly high into the clouds or soar low to the ground.
Fairy tale therapy and ideomotor technology
Child hypnotists at the initial stage of developing their capabilities can put patients into a trance (under the supervision of a specialist) using the magical world of fairy tales. To do this, you need to combine the story itself, the client’s problem and the required hypnotic phrase. This version of suggestion is aimed at children 4–12 years old, who will change their understanding of the environment in their sleep. Fairytale therapy allows you to finely tune a child’s consciousness to responsiveness, affection, and receptivity to the grief of others.
Hypnotherapy for children is not a panacea for solving all problems and illnesses. However, this procedure allows you to most loyally penetrate the subconscious of a small patient and resolve the situation gently and painlessly.
Hypnosis process
It is necessary to have a conversation in advance with a hypnologist, where the possibility of suggestibility and preparedness of the psyche for the session will be determined.
After this, you can begin hypnosis, which lasts about 20 minutes. and consists of several stages:
- relaxation: the child sits in a chair, the hypnologist asks him to close his eyes and introduces him to a state of complete relaxation using certain phrases to the sounds of a meditative melody, after which the patient falls into a light trance;
- eliminating the problem: the hypnotherapist pronounces special phrases with the help of which he instills in the patient the necessary thoughts or ideas aimed at combating the problem;
- withdrawal from a trance state: the specialist uses a countdown from 10; when the number 1 is announced, the patient comes to his senses rested and cheerful.
By resorting to this technique, you can painlessly rid your child of a number of problems: fears, depression, bad habits.
Lullaby, or Ericksonian hypnosis for children
Once, on a dare, I put a crowd of five raging children aged from one to seven to bed and “fell asleep” in 10 minutes.
At that time I discovered and vigorously studied Ericksonian hypnosis and tried it on various harmlessly useful examples. We were at a birthday party then, all family, all with children. The adults are having fun, so they don’t lag behind, and sometimes even outpace their children in the next room. Time flies - it’s already late evening. The situation is familiar to everyone - if “youth go too far,” there will be a sea of tears and nerves. And I suggested (without revealing secrets) to put the children to bed, all of them at once. They looked at me like I was crazy, to put it mildly, with surprise. The arguments that I am well over twenty and have a lot of experience did not add to my optimism. Then I offered to bet... and I won!
This “secret” procedure consists of three parts: preparation, relieving physical tension, and most importantly - the story itself, built according to the three rules of the storyteller-Erickson-hypnotist (hint: you will need a lot of words about warmth and peace, repetitions, special breathing and pauses) .
Of course, maybe this is an accident and I was just lucky. Therefore, I hope that you will check it personally and tell me - “does it work?”
I'll start right away with the most interesting.
The third part. She is, in fact, the key. It starts with choosing a fairy tale or song. For us, it doesn’t matter what kind of fairy tale it will be. It is important for you to remember that no matter what your fairy tale-song is called, you can change its content during the story as you wish. And we will need it.
Start with yourself. Take a deep breath and exhale and calm down, relax, otherwise all this will be passed on to the child listeners. Make at least a minimal “adjustment”: take the same or similar pose as the children, talk for a couple of minutes about their topics, sympathize with something.
Start telling. Add a large amount of relaxing text to the plot of the fairy tale about warmth in the body, peace, fatigue, pleasantness. Relaxation is one of the important moments, generally speaking, of any hypnosis. For example:
... Kolobok ran away from Grandma and Grandpa. Kolobok walked and walked along the path and got tired. Kolobok lay down in a warm clearing to rest. The grass is so soft and warm. The sun is shining so warm. Kolobok's legs are tired. Kolobok's hands are tired. Kolobok lay down on the warm and soft grass. He pulled out his hands. He stretched out his legs. Kolobok began to warm up. His legs became warm, heavy, pleasant. His arms became... his tummy became...
I hope that while reading this text, you yourself also felt warmth in your hands and feet. If not, then re-read it again.
This text can and should be repeated. For example, after meeting with each subsequent character, Kolobok again “lay down and got tired,” now together. Repetition is one of the key aspects of Ericksonian hypnosis. In addition, to strengthen the association with the tired Kolobok, you can weave links with the child himself into the text. For example:
Then he met Volchok. Volchyok says: “Kolobok, you’ve come such a long way. Are you tired?". And Kolobok replies: “I’m tired, of course.” Seryozha (Kolya, Natasha, Olya, Sveta, Yura - insert yours) and I played with cars all day and got soooo tired.
The last and most important point is breathing. Please note that at the moment of the story, the listeners themselves “join” the narrator. Rapport is established, an invisible connection. And the children begin to repeat the narrator’s breathing. If the narrator speaks (or sings a lullaby) quickly, without interruptions, is in a hurry, and holds his breath, then the listeners will hold their breath and remain tense.
This often happens when we are in a hurry to “fulfill the duties” of putting the kids to bed and try to quickly sing a lullaby, nervously hoping for a quick result. “Fast”, “nervously” - I think you can guess “what” the result will be. Therefore, you and I will do everything deliberately slowly, confidently and calmly.
Forget about the white monkey, the quality of performance, the melody, the correct tempo in a song or a fairy tale. No one cares about quality and technology and no one will notice or appreciate it. And even if he notices, then say that you are doing this on purpose, because it’s such a fairy tale.
Take long pauses in time with your normal slow breathing. Breathe at an average pace, approximately the same as during sleep. Slow, calm, noisy and loud inhale so that the children can easily hear and distinguish your breathing, then as you exhale you say something, then inhale noisily again.
If you feel the urge to yawn, that’s very good: yawn heartily too, slowly, loudly, with pleasure, so that all the children can hear well and join in on time.
Ericksonian hypnosis teaches us that holding the breath by the hypnotist helps to abruptly bring the patient to sleep. Therefore, already somewhere in the middle of the fairy tale, when hopefully rapport has been established - about once every 3-4 minutes, start doing short breath-holds. And accordingly, pauses in the story, 5-10 seconds, are no longer. (In Sinton the courses are intensive and regular).
If there are several children, then the first one to fall asleep literally “drags” everyone else into sleep. This is the same effect when a fallen passenger in a car “drags” the driver into sleep, so it’s better for the passenger to hold on and stay awake. You can easily determine the result of your work by the children’s breathing: having fallen asleep, they begin to breathe noisily and frequently. You will always recognize this happy sound!
If you are interested, then here's a continuation. It is not necessary for a specific case, but for the healthy psyche of your child it is even more important than the beginning.
Second part. Relieving physical stress. It is not mandatory, and I did not do it that evening, but I am writing because, in my experience, it is extremely important for the child in general and is often necessary at a specific moment of going to bed. Relaxing games for children See→
The signal that this part is required is that the child is tossing and turning a lot and will not settle down. Although even without signals, I would recommend doing this every day. Namely, tactile contact with parents. The essence of this part is that the baby needs to be kneaded, massaged and stroked.
I'm not a massage specialist. What I did was play something like “Here came a bear and an elephant,” I pressed some part of my body to the crib, let go, pressed, let go. Very simple. Starting from the head, towards the feet. First, walk several times “with moderate force.” Then weaker, even weaker. Then just stroke it. Do you pet your child at least half an hour a day? Then this is a great opportunity to catch up.
Kinesthetic addition to the story
Johannes Brahms. Lullaby
During the story itself, it is possible and advisable to stroke the child or simply put your hand on him, this will enhance the “joining” effect. A hand “under the head” or on the head, or stroking the head - enhances emotional relaxation.
If the child is still active - trying to talk, then try lightly, gently, pleasantly clapping and tapping him to the beat of some simple rhythm. Taa-ta-taa-ta-taa-pause-taa-ta-taa... It is important to maintain the rhythm. It is very difficult to tell a fairy tale, but you can sing a lullaby. (Music: Johannes Brahms. Lullaby).
Simple, methodical rhythms inhibit brain activity. For example, it is almost impossible to tap a rhythm and think about something at the same time. This is probably why, in order to switch off, we plug headphones with loud and rhythmic music into our ears, and so often they send soldiers on different marches: “One! Once! One two Three!". Both techniques effectively block the brain.
And finally, the part I suggest starting with.
Preparation. I call it “three warnings”.
First, half an hour before bedtime, you enter the children’s room and say in a firmly confident voice that it’s already late and it’s time to go to bed. Naturally you meet resistance. Mood is a flow, it is difficult to stop suddenly. Therefore, after listening to the “resistance of flow”, you tell them that they have another 30 minutes to play. Children perceive what will happen in 30 minutes as if it will happen in the next life. They agree to everything - the main thing now is, don’t interfere.
But the “anchor” has already been installed and it has begun to work.
The second visit, this is very important, in a firmly confident tone - that there are 15 minutes left. The thought of an imminent finale is gaining momentum. And on your third reminder in 5 minutes, some people already jump up to go to bed - they say that’s it?
You can even sit with them for a few minutes. This will strengthen your “connection”, which will be so necessary in the next part. You can even play with them a little.
The very moment that it’s time to finish, you need to get up and go to the bedroom - I highly recommend doing it personally to your parents or the closest people who are here now. This is always a difficult moment, a kind of small, small “death,” and this moment is always easier to accept from a loved one. You need to be kind, loving, but firm. Every time.
Let's summarize. In this article, I proposed and described one of the interesting examples of using Ericksonian hypnosis to put your child to sleep. The main thing in it was telling a fairy tale with special slow breathing and including relaxing phrases in the text. And additionally - about physical contact with the child and about the “three warnings” for bedtime.
That's all. Sweet dreams to you and your children!
