How Hypnotherapy Can Help with Healing Post-Pandemic Effects
There’s no sugarcoating it: the world has been completely turned on its head since 2020. The pandemic has taken its toll on many people; loved ones and jobs have been lost, and we’ve all gone through anxiety, grief, and various other mental health conditions; most of which were either not previously experienced before, or they were amplified and made more noticeable.
To date, the recent pandemic has severely impacted our physical and emotional health. The panic shopping that happened in many communities made it difficult for vulnerable people to find the most basic supplies. The global stock market took a tumble. The uncertainty was intense.
Even as some things return to normal, many of us are still feeling uneasy and uncertain and even angry about life post-pandemic. After experiencing this worldwide trauma, many of us continue to experience bad dreams, worries, fears, addictive behaviours, unwanted intrusive thoughts, lasting resentments, and anxiety attacks. The aversion to reminders or news stories about the events has also increased exponentially.
Looking at this experience from an energy perspective gives us a greater understanding of where we are at today while we still deal with the aftermath. According to David R. Hawkins, MD., Ph.D. in the book, ‘Power vs. Force’, people in different emotional states calibrate at different energy levels. Grief calibrates at 75, Fear at 100, Anger at 150, Courage at 200, while 250 is neutrality. “The collective consciousness of mankind remained at 190 for centuries and, curiously , only jumped to 204 in the decade prior to 1995.”
When we consider the vast amount of humanity that were living in a state of fear, grief, anger for years one can only deduce that where we once calibrated at 204 that number must have drastically dropped during the covid pandemic. All levels below 200 are destructive to life while above 200 is where we begin to feel the constructive expressions of power. Even those in a state of courage such as many of our freedom advocates were still under the threshold of the 200 mark.
There’s a silver lining: many of us are more in tune with our need for greater mental healing and its connection to our physical health and spiritual well-being than ever before. And we have greater access to tools that will help with our minds post-pandemic, hypnotherapy being one of the big ones. It can help you heal from many of the aftereffects the pandemic has left behind.
Together, we can overcome our financial worries, fears, worries, anxieties, toxic behaviours, and even rediscover pleasant parts of our lives before the pandemic happened. Healing this wound within ourselves has a ripple effect through time and space and assists all of humanity to cross that threshold of the calibration at 200 moving us into more positive and constructive energy.
What Pandemic After Effects Can Hypnotherapy Help with?
There are many things you may have experienced because of the pandemic, and I’m going to tell you right now, your feelings are valid. Everything you feel, experience, and suffer from is valid. And you can heal from all these things.
Hypnotherapy can help with many emotions and mental disorders as well as physical symptoms you’ve experienced due to the pandemic, including:
- Mysophobia (fear of germs)
- Compulsive cleaning
- Coping with mask wearing
- Anger and resentment
- Agoraphobia (worry of being in public)
- Isolation
- Grief and Loss
- Job loss
- Relationship breakdowns
- General social anxiety and health anxiety
- Addiction
- Low mood/depression
- Regret
- Vaccine injuries
Let’s look at each of these and see how exactly hypnosis can help.
Mysophobia (Fear of Germs)
Even before the pandemic, there were many who suffered from a fear of germs, commonly known as mysophobia or germophobia. Since the pandemic hit, this fear has become far more common. Your body has an over-response of anxiety to potential contamination or sickness. This can result in OCD behaviours such as cleaning rituals for not only the home, but also bathing and showering. Those with the fear of germs become highly focused on who or what they’re touching and need to excessively clean their hands via sanitizing or handwashing.
While hypnotherapy cannot remove the germs themselves, it can help with the fears and anxieties the body’s “over-response” produces.
Compulsive Cleaning
Many of us love a tidy, clean home, and enjoy the feeling of fresh bed sheets after a relaxing shower or bath. However, for some, since the pandemic, cleaning has become a compulsion or even an addiction.
Whether it’s using anti-bacterial wipes for door handles after each touch, or cleaning items after buying before putting them away for fear of catching the virus, these new cleaning rituals become more expressive and disruptive. Along with cleaning items, many compulsively clean their hands, using hand sanitizers and sprays after each time they touch something or feel they’ve gone too long without sanitizing, which leads to dry, sore, cracked, and damaged hands, which can lead to other physical health problems.
Since cleaning and sanitizing can easily become a habit, it can then become a compulsion, which is quite an exhausting ritual for some. Hypnotherapy can help you to overcome these compulsive behaviours and re-learn appropriate and safe behaviours, while using mindfulness and other techniques.
Anger and Resentment
Many of us had experiences during the pandemic days where we didn’t agree with what was going on but were forced against our free will to succumb to mandates that violated our unalienable rights. Freedom advocates were called names such as fringe minority, bigots, racist, homophobes, flat earthers, and anti-vaxxers just to name a few. Other people felt anger towards those who chose not to vaccinate, wear masks or follow other “health mandates.” Even our own ‘leaders’ encouraged a great division of people, pitting each group against the other. All this with an end result of causing an increase in anger and resentment towards friends, family and more often than not government.
Hypnotherapy can help to release these feelings and re-frame memories and experiences to permanently let go of this low vibration negative energy, moving into more constructive and positive energies.
Coping with Mask Wearing
For many, wearing a mask was something completely new and foreign, and something we didn’t think we’d need to do, especially during day-to-day tasks, like grocery shopping. Many people feared and disliked wearing a mask for sometimes 8 hours or more in their workplace.
In a lot of cases, wearing a mask causes some people to feel psychological elements, like the feeling of being trapped (for those who suffer from claustrophobia, severe anxiety, and other issues) or physical issues, such as feeling like they’re unable to properly breathe (especially those with pre-existing conditions). Many people simply didn’t agree with the mandates or had medical reasons to avoid masking up. Whichever the case was, they had to endure abuse and intolerance for walking around with a smile on their face.
For many people, especially adolescents that already feel awkward and insecure, the use of a daily mask helped them to ‘hide’ and having to emerge from ‘hiding’ became quite a daunting task.
Babies born during the pandemic missed knowing smiles of strangers and seeing the micro facial movements of masked people, missing out on opportunities to develop the ability to assess even the most common emotions. The lasting effect of this still remains to be seen.
Hypnotherapy can help overcome these feelings by using different coping strategies, such as behavioural techniques like hypno-desensitization, or regression work to release the symptoms that were created or exacerbated during mask wearing.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia, or the fear of being in public, can be immobilizing for those who have it, let alone the added demands of the pandemic and other concerns.
From simple tasks like grocery shopping to meeting friends in a coffee shop or restaurant, this fear completely isolates the person who has it, especially if it’s something they’re not used to dealing with and stems from the world’s recent events.
When we repeat the same pattern consistently over a period of more than 30 days, new habits are formed. Being in lockdown for 2 months or even longer for some, created a new habit of ‘staying at home.’ Even some of the most extroverted people who once enjoyed and even thrived in the company of others felt the discord between what they used to love and what now feels very uncomfortable to them.
Hypnotherapy techniques, which address unwanted and unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviours can be used by your hypnotherapist to help address these issues and help to make steps toward achieving the simplest of tasks and beyond.
Isolation
Some people experienced complete isolation. Staying at home, working from home and missing out on our much needed human connection. Being part of a community promotes health and well being while the effects on a person’s brain who is isolated are as damaging as if they were beaten, starved or deprived of sleep.
Social isolation affects organic brain development and the human body, length of life, cardiovascular health and much more. Some studies show it is safer to smoke 15 cigarettes a day or be an alcoholic than to be socially isolated.
There is a reason why they put prisoners in solitary confinement…because it’s a punishment and it makes people go crazy. This plays a huge factor in why many people in isolation experienced feeling like they were coming unglued.
Hypnotherapy can help to heal from the experience of feeling alone and allow people to once more feel the benefits of much needed human connection.
Grief & Loss
During the last few years, many of us have lost close friends and loved ones, both quite unexpectedly in many cases, and for some, in a dreadfully isolated and unfair way. When there was no means to say goodbye in person or any kind of contact whatsoever, letting go of these loved ones was painful, with some not being able to hold funeral or memorial services to properly say goodbye.
These experiences are something that sticks with people for the rest of their lives. Not only were they already experiencing suffering loss, the restrictions throughout the pandemic further heightened the feelings of anger, sadness, blame, resentment, and depression.
There is no quick fix when it comes to navigating loss, and grief has no time limit. Hypnotherapy for grief is best suited for multiple sessions.
Job Loss
No matter if you’re self-employed or you work for a company, there have been so many places of employment that have “gone under” because of the pandemic or have had to make a considerable number of cutbacks. Some people have had their hours restricted, while others have completely lost everything they worked so hard to keep for many years. In many cases, this has left people needing help financially, and for many, it’s a new situation they never expected to be in. There are some who have not been coping well with this change, and the stress of losing their job and stability along with other factors has led to many suffering from this aftermath.
Hypnotherapy may not be able to magically provide a job for you, however it can be used to aid in your ability to focus and stay motivated while finding the best opportunity available, and help you shift your emotional state from intrusive thoughts to forward thinking.
Relationship Breakdowns
When you’re stuck at home 24/7, in a house, apartment, or even a mansion with the same person or people, every day for a lengthy and undefinable period of time, can be enough for “cracks to form” in a relationship. Even if you’re a loving and caring family, this much time spent together can take its toll.
With nothing new to talk about and no way to escape, tensions can run high. With restrictions not allowing us to meet our friends and relatives even outdoors for many months at a time, we were unable to take time for ourselves. Even with technology to help us, we were missing that real, raw connection you get from in-person communication such as a much-needed hug when you’re sad and need comfort.
For many relationships, this pandemic had a significant impact, and relationships from the long and strong, to the new and fragile, became broken during the lockdown’s restrictions. The pandemic saw a significant increase in separations and divorce costing many their once stable relationships, homes, and even children.
During the holiday season of 2021 families had to choose between seeing their whole families together or go against the government request to ostracize unvaccinated members. Additional requests from government officials included encouraging neighbours to report gatherings and all of these factors played a significant role in causing pain and the deterioration of once healthy relationships.
I can help you with assertiveness, anger management, forgiveness and dealing with unhealthy and unhelpful “cognitive distortions.” Hypnosis will allow us to look at the big picture and have compassion for the point of view of others, while developing your sense of flexibility and resilience, and find what you need to preserve your most treasured relationships while simultaneously caring for your own mental health.
General Social Anxiety and Health Anxiety
Over the last few years, the world has been unpredictable and felt unsafe outside of our homes. Exacerbated by the fear mongering media, it’s no wonder many people are now suffering from general social and health anxiety. Some of us would rather stay in the safety of our home environment we have tried creating for ourselves.
Anxiety appears in many forms and affects people in many ways, so no two people will experience it the same way. There is good news though: hypnotherapy is not only helpful for social anxiety but also for other areas in your life where anxiety has infiltrated it.
Addiction
“It helps me sleep.” “I take it for my chronic pain.” “It’s not affecting my life.” These are some of the things that people say about the ways they “become numb” (from using substances) to seek temporary escape from reality.
According to Canada.ca, in 2020, between March and September, the total number of substance-related deaths increased in emergency departments (12%) and hospitals (13%) compared to the same time in 2019.
The pandemic is no longer at the forefront, however uncertainty and anxiety are not letting up and the opioid crisis is still going strong. Many people saw an increase in their consumption of alcohol, marijuana and other substances during the pandemic that still remain as a habit today.
The addictive impulse tends to be locked within the subconscious mind, even with the addict consciously knowing that they’re causing harm, they are unable to stop, even with devastating consequences to their loved ones and their own lives.
Many have heard about hypnotherapy to help stop smoking or to help control food intake, in which aversions may be created to certain associations, or help you discover a pleasant state of mind that can only be possible when the urge to use the substance is under control. Hypnotherapy can also go deeper than that, helping you discover the emotions that you experience when these cravings appear for you. For example, someone who is worried about the state of the world may feel fear, sadness, and/or anger.
Low Mood/Depression
We’re aware that our mental health services are barely able to keep up with the demand, which results in many people not receiving the help they need. During such times of uncertainty and extremely heightened stress, many are still experiencing low moods and even severe depression. In many instances, this is something new people have not experienced before. This means many therapy practices are seeing more people coming to them for low mood and depression.
Hypnotherapy is a great tool for helping to change behaviours, thoughts, and gain understanding into the cause of the low mood. If you’re suffering from any of these aftereffects from the pandemic, take the first step toward healing, and seek out help.
Regret
Many of us experience a whole range of regrets that might include how we treated others, not being more courageous, missing celebrations or life milestones like graduations, funerals or weddings and many experience having ‘buyers remorse’ from getting the vaccines among just a few.
Hypnotherapy can help you to move past these experiences allowing you to move forward in life without the burden of revisiting choices over and over again.
Vaccine Injuries
Many people are still experiencing a decline in health after receiving the mRNA injections. Issues that range anywhere from heart conditions, autoimmune disorders, turbo cancers and sudden death. Sadly, there is no way to go back and change the past but you can move forward with compassion, understanding, clarity and acceptance.
Hypnotherapy is highly effective in releasing negative associations with an experience, it can help manage pain and change unwanted emotional patterns. Let hypnotherapy help you move into a place of acceptance and move forward in your life.
Are You Ready to Take The Next Step?
If so, the first thing I’m going to ask of you is to book a free consultation with me, with no obligation. This allows me to speak to you about what your needs are and how I can tailor an individual hypnotherapy plan to help you. When you’re ready to try hypnotherapy, I will guide you through the calm and relaxing process.
The pandemic may have taken priceless people, places, and time away from us, but you don’t have to let your fears, emotions, and anxieties take even more time away from you. Take your first step toward living and loving your best life.
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