There are 5 basic steps to healing chronic disease such as Parkinson, lupus, arthritis, back pain, and cancer. These are key issues that need to be addressed to ensure success in activating the bodies self-healing and creating lasting health.
Watch Eva M Clark explain to her students how to work with these steps with their clients…
The 5 Basic Steps to Healing Chronic Disease
1. Commitment – Want to change, be persistent and take the responsibility to change the reality you are in.
“Some people say ‘I will heal myself’, but they never go through the process.”
Paula Marie Jackson, Healing Light Guided Imagery
As a practitioner, give your clients the science and the evidence-based research so they understand this can really help them heal their disease. Most times your client will already have gone to many other practitioners and modalities and you are “just one more thing to try…”
Take the time to walk them through the possibilities and get them committed to focusing on the work you will do with them.
2. Understand the mental cause of and the lessons behind the disease.
Without changing the unhealthy mental patterns (click here for example of unhealthy mental patterns of multiple sclerosis), beliefs and behaviors, technically termed psychosocial factors, that created the fertile ground for the illness; substituting the discomfort of symptoms for a temporary sense of well-being, will not be long lasting and the symptoms might return or appear elsewhere in the body.
As a practitioner of hypnotherapy and NLP, you have the skills to discover the particular underlying cause of, not just their disease, but of each individual symptom. They have a subconscious awareness of the cause. Use regression therapy and parts work in hypnosis to find out both the cause and the solution to the disease.
Once you understand the cause and solution to the disease, transform those unhealthy patterns, beliefs, and behaviors and help your clients create lasting change. Remember that the cause and its solution is not obvious to them (using NLP jargon- “you need to help them change their map of the world”. In psychology this is referred to as “integrate the shadow”.).
3. Eliminate the Obstacles to Healing
Remove any reasons and motivations for keeping the disease. If there is a benefit to having it or a belief that you need to have it, that needs to be addressed or the improvements will only be short-lived.
One of the key components to address with your clients are any obstacles to healing. Is there a belief “I deserve it”? Did their doctor tell them “they will have to learn to live with it”? Do they expect to have the disease because it runs in the family? Are they receiving benefit from having it that would be lost if they healed? All these reasons can keep your clients stuck and must be addressed in your sessions with them.
4. Have a personal healing remedy.
We are creatures of habit. Since childhood, we have learned to “take a pill” to heal ourselves. Include a ritual that embodies this pill taking need.
It is telling the mind and body “I am doing this to achieve this result.” This need for ritualization of our healing process is why placebos are 30% effective.
Rituals don’t have to be sugar pills. In the process of working with your clients, establish what daily practice supports them in their journey to health. Some examples are: daily journalling, walking meditations, self-hypnosis, permission to say “no” 5 times a day, supplements or teas, etc.
We are not “fooling” the body, we are setting the intention and triggering its self-healing mechanism. All true healing is self-healing.
5. In order to disconnect from the broken/diseased self, you need to have a healthy, robust, transformed future self to connect to (and you must be willing to disconnect from that old self entirely).
One of the major obstacles to healing chronic disease is a fear of change. Who will your clients be without their disease? They must have a compelling future self they are seeking to become that motivates them to do the work and make the changes in their lives.
In summary, to heal chronic disease, there must be a willingness and commitment to go through the steps necessary, diligently working to resolve the underlying psychosocial causes behind the disease, a daily practice of healing and a compelling future to move towards. To only focus on managing the discomforts of symptoms does not create health.
This is the work that the medical hypnotherapy practitioners of MINDbasedHealing provide their clients. The support to go through the steps and the means to discover and address the underlying psychosocial cause of chronic disease.