B E Y O N D L I F E T H E R A P Y®
Dr. Gabrielle Fiorentino
After Life Integration Psychologist, Neurolinguist / Hypnopsychologist® / Public Speaker
face your fears and insecurities or explore an inner adventure in a safe and protective space
OUR TREATMENT SESSIONS
Cancer Support
Although skeptics galore deny the use of psychics for anything but entertainment, police departments around the country call on certain psychics when all else fails. They've been doing that for more than a century, and when forbidden to do so, they sometimes use unofficial means. The first official use of "psychic sight" during a trance in a criminal case was in 1845 when a clairvoyant fingered a juvenile suspect, who subsequently confessed. The details of the case aren't documented well enough to decide whether the psychic was making a good guess, perhaps knew the boy, or actually "saw" the crime with her sixth sense.
Regardless of whether intuitive "flashes" of information can best be interpreted in retrospect, they nevertheless have supported searches that yielded evidence and given specific information about crimes, even if they've rarely prevented one. Supposedly Jeanne Dixon tried to warn the White House of a vision she had just before President Kennedy was assassinated, but either she didn't or no one noticed (or cared). Kennedy was assassinated. Psychic Chris Robinson reports that he foresaw a murder, contacted the mother of the soon-to-be victim, was ignored, and the murder took place. Yet Dorothy Nickerson called a store in Arizona in 1982, certain they would be robbed the next night, and police who acted on this did arrest an armed man loitering nearby. Whether he had planned to rob the store is anyone's guess (she actually envisioned two men doing it), because once a crime is foiled, who can say what would have happened?
Belief in "seers" continued through the ages” the 16th-century mystic Nostradamus for example and Victorians produced spiritualists (many of them bogus) who invited people into seances to communicate with the dead. In 1888, psychics got involved to some degree in the case known as the Whitechapel murders, or the crimes of the man known as Jack the Ripper. In 10 weeks, from the end of August into November, someone killed five prostitutes (two of them on a single night), slitting their throats and removing pieces of them to carry off. The murders stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Jack's identity was never conclusively resolved. There were a handful of suspects, but no one was ever charged or convicted of any of these brutal crimes. To try to discover who this killer might be or when he might strike again, spiritualists all over England held sittings, the details of which were sometimes revealed to the press. From his scars to his residence to his accomplices, spiritualists provided what information they could about the killer from their impressions. One man said that he was wearing a tweed suit, and he took the police to the home of a doctor, who was subsequently hospitalized for mental illness, but no psychic provided information that conclusively solved the crimes.
Over a century later, Pamela Ball tried to contact the victims or the killer through channeling, in which a living person becomes a means through which the dead can speak. Calling her method "evidential Mediumship," she used several different means, including astrological charts of the victims, to contact someone with "inside" knowledge. She received feelings such as nausea and resignation, and images of several different men, which indicated that there may have been more than one killer. She tried contacting various suspects and came to the conclusion that there were political secrets that most of the victims knew, and that's why they had been killed.
Dr. Gabrielle Mancuso has consulted officially and unofficially on several cases in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco areas. Call for further information. 831 626-6565.
Depression
Hypnosis is a very effective and versatile tool for treating depression problems. Clinical depression is one of most prevalent mental health problems today. If you are clinically depressed, you need help. Living with clinical depression is a daily struggle. Life is too short to be depressed.
Symptoms of clinical depression include some or all of the following:
Low mood, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, self-deprecation, depleted self-confidence and self-esteem, feeling useless, loss of energy and motivation, and feeling disconnected.
Excessive sleepiness and/or an inability to rest, boredom, inability to stay focused and concentrate, memory loss, pessimistic and morbid thoughts, mental perseveration, loss of the desire to socialize, inability to experience simple pleasures in living, and suicidal thoughts.
Appetite changes, weight loss or weight gain, difficulties getting out of bed in the morning, dreading the day, looking forward for the day to end, anxiety, agitation, fears, shakiness, mental slowing and dullness, slowed reaction time, and total inefficiency.
Living with depression is very painful. Clinical depression is both a medical illness as well as a problem in living. As such, clinical depression needs to be evaluated and treated both medically as well as psychologically” both components are necessary.
Medical treatment of clinical depression largely involves the prescription of anti-depressant medications. These drugs can ameliorate the biological/physical and mood symptoms of depression, but they do not treat the underlying psychological factors and negative fixed ideas that need to be addressed.
The psychological treatment of depression involves supportive psychotherapy and psychological counseling aimed at changing the cognitive, behavioral and mood symptoms of the condition.
If you are currently suffering from depression, and you are seeking Psychological Treatment for your condition, you will need:
1. To be helped to identify your negative, self-defeating thinking patterns and to replace them with healthier ways of thinking.
2. To be coached to engage in activities to keep yourself occupied and to distract yourself from your morbid thoughts.
3. To be helped to interrupt your morbid thinking habits.
4. To be helped to pursue mood lifting activities.
When people are clinically depressed, they do not think clearly. They hold a pessimistic view of the future, unrealistic expectations, and are unusually harsh and overly critical of themselves.
If this is true for you, you probably tend to judge things in stark all or nothing terms. When you are depressed, you tend to key in on the negative aspects of situations, seeing the proverbial glass as half empty as opposed to half full. It feels as if there is no future. This is NOT the truth, but it does FEEL this way.
If you are clinically depressed, you feel trapped and devoid of choices. You are in fact trapped in a mental prison by your negative thinking, pessimistic expectations, and perseveration on morbid themes.
Hypnosis can offer a positive way out of this predicament. Through the use of hypnotic techniques and language, the doorway to your subconscious can be opened with your permission and cooperation, and then, information can be introduced hypnotically through hypnotic suggestion to:
1. Change your negative self-suggestions.
2. Reduce your feelings of guilt and self-blame.
3. Help you to begin making positive choices again.
4. Shift your perspectives on your negative experiences.
If you are clinically depressed, Therapeutic Hypnosis can help you begin to move in a positive direction and take steps towards healthier behavioral functioning and mood lifting and mood shifting activities. Hypnosis can help you learn more adaptive behavioral and psychological coping skills.
In hypnosis, you are guided to mentally rehearse the process of countering and refuting your negative, pessimistic thoughts. The tool of hypnosis makes the rehearsal of these cognitive coping skills easier, quicker and more effective. The coping skills become imprinted directly into your subconscious mind. Through the use of hypnotic imagery and post-hypnotic suggestion, you can learn to psychologically inoculate yourself against the adversity of difficult daily living situations that depress you.
Hypnosis is also employed to uncover and re-process past experiences and memories that have sensitized you to continued depressive reactions in the present.
When you come to see me for Hypnosis Treatment, you will also be taught the use of Self Hypnosis and Deep Relaxation skills. All of the resources of your mind and body are in balance during deep relaxation. There is no wasted energy on anger, pain or discomfort. All of that energy becomes available for positive healing, growth and change.
Grief
Structured interviews were carried out with 49 widows and 19 widowers under the age of 45 who had been bereaved 14 months previously. A number of indices of health and emotional disturbance were shown to distinguish these bereaved respondents from a matched control group. The 13-month-bereaved group was characterized by recent disturbance of sleep, appetite and weight, by complaints of depression, restlessness, indecisiveness and sense of strain and by an increased consumption of alcohol, tobacco and tranquilizers. They were more likely than the control group to have been admitted to a hospital during the preceding year. Widowers reported an increase in acute physical symptoms although neither sex had more chronic physical symptoms than the controls. Two to four years later there was little difference in health between bereaved and control groups but there was evidence of persisting "disengagement."
Sex & Intimacy
Relaxation techniques and hypnosis can overcome sexual aversion disorder, also sometimes referred to as sexual anorexia, because all psychologically based disorders are products of the way in which the mind has interpreted and absorbed certain experiences or impressions. Hypnosis is a proven method of utilizing the latent power of the mind to change positively the habituated subconscious thought patterns that derive from past negative experiences or impressions. Firstly, though, there's a difference between a temporary loss of desire for sex and a diagnosis of sexual aversion disorder.
People can experience temporary lack of sex drive or interest in sexual contact for numerous reasons. Bereavement, unplanned redundancy and unemployment, financial stress, childbirth, menstruation, post operative recovery, divorce and of course finding yourself in an unhappy relationship are but some of the circumstances which can cause a temporary reduction of interest in sex.
What is Sexual Aversion Disorder?
The condition of ongoing sexual aversion, first acknowledged as such in the 1980's, relates too much more than the normal fluctuations in male or female libido that most people experience through their lives. Someone with this condition would exhibit or express highly negative emotions or reactions with regard to the thought of any form of sexual intimacy with anyone, although it does occur in varying degrees.
In some cases, the person concerned may feel fine about intimacy up to a certain point, even perhaps certain levels of foreplay, but would have a strongly negative reaction to the prospect of actual genital contact, either as a male or a female, though this condition is more common among women
In other cases sexual or intimate contact of any kind or extent is avoided, the prospect of which, along with the fear of being touched, causes feelings of panic, nausea, disgust and sometimes anger.
Sometimes this fear of and repugnance toward sexual activity has been present in the individual since their early years, or comes about after some deeply upsetting experience later in life.
Others have a more specific (situational) form of the condition, which means that they're strongly averse to the idea of intimate sex with a particular partner or types of partner(s) and/or in certain circumstances.
The more generalized and more serious form of sexual aversion disorder, which makes the person unable to feel good about any kind or level of sexual activity at all, is often based on highly negative past experiences such as rape or some other form of violence or prolonged negative mental conditioning. Gender identity disorder has also been sometimes seen as a contributory factor.
Hypnosis for Sexual Aversion Disorder
There is now such an acknowledged understanding of the power of the subconscious mind to overcome psychological - and even physical - problems, that the potential value of hypnosis as a means of successfully treating this condition cannot be overlooked. Once it's been established that there are no physical factors, which could be causing aversion to sex, it's time to focus attention on the mind.
There is a debate as to whether treatment in these cases should be viewed as a method of dealing with an anxiety disorder or purely as a psychological aversion disorder relating specifically to sex.
The important thing, it would seem, would be to start at the place where the problem began. You would get there; of course, by going back in your mind to where, when and how the problem began.
Undergoing the process of acknowledging, absorbing and letting go of the past experience(s) is the first real step towards overcoming it.
Sleep & Relaxation
If you have insomnia, those can be some very welcome words. Insomnia can be the result of worry, fears, anxiety, and badly functioning brain wave patterns. In order to fall asleep, your brain must go from a BETA brain wave into ALPHA. Alpha state is where everything is dreamy, where visualizations are clear and that sleep switch in your brain is ready to let you go into DELTA and THETA, and be asleep.
So, how do you make this happen?
When the conscious mind is busy, with worry, anxiety, fears, anger, emotional conflicts, etc. the brain has a hard time letting go of it's conscious processing. Some people hear music in their head, repeat endless statements with their inner voice or just worry so much about not being able to sleep that they indeed cannot sleep!
If you have insomnia, you know the problem. You start worrying early in the day about whether or not you are actually going to be able to sleep that night. And once you miss a night of sleep, you worry even more about not sleeping the next night. And this PERPETUATES the problem. Worrying about insomnia creates the insomnia.
You can change it. But you are going to need help. Your brain is an expert at having insomnia. It does not know how to do it any differently. If it did, you wouldn't have the sleep disorder any more. So, in order to sleep deep, you are going to have to teach your brain how to go instantly into an alpha state, how to use subconscious triggers to eliminate worry and anxiety and stay asleep once you are asleep.
Hypnosis is very effective in curing chronic insomnia. It is easy. It works. I wish more people would try it, instead of all the pills and drugs. The interesting thing about sleeping pills is the placebo effect. This means that when you think you are taking a sleeping pill, but it is really a sugar pill (placebo) your brain believes that it will fall asleep and so it does. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I put myself into a state of trance, and imagine that I am taking a sleeping pill. I am usually asleep in a few minutes. Even though my conscious mind knows that this was not real, my subconscious mind does not know and this is the important part.
THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND DOES NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REAL AND AN IMAGINED EVENT. This is why hypnosis works so well. Hypnosis changes the way the subconscious mind works. It creates the belief that something is possible, acts on it as if it is real, and creates a new outcome. In this case, sleep.
I have created these hypnosis MP3s for sleep because I know you can end insomnia for good. Once you use them, you will know that this is the answer you have been looking for. Just turn on the MP3 player and GO TO SLEEP!
Imagine what a relief that will be! No pills, no drugs, no worry.
In May 2008, Dr. Oz introduced viewers of The Oprah Show to Dr. Brian Weiss and his study of past-life regression. Dr. Weiss uses hypnosis to lead his patients back in time to their earliest memories. Then he takes them even further back to what he says are their previous lives. From that point, Dr. Weiss says he and his patients are able to examine the experiences that seemed to have formed the roots of their current fears and phobias. Dr. Weiss says if you can connect your current fears to a past life, those fears will often disappear.
For as long as she can remember, Jodi says she has been terrified of dolls. One of her earliest memories is having her picture taken with Santa. To her horror, the photographer asked her to pose with a doll for the photo. "I can remember holding this doll and trying to smile, Jodi says. "I was screaming inside, 'Please
don't make me hold that doll!'"
Jodi's fear is so strong that she says she doesn't even let her daughter own dolls. One day when picking her daughter up from day care, Jodi arrived to find her little girl holding a baby doll. "My heart went to my stomach and tears welled up in my eyes and I started to shake," Jodi says. "I thought, 'There's my baby, she's got this doll, and I can't pick her up.'"
Jodi says even photographs of dolls scare her and nothing she does can rationalize her fear away. "I know that that doll cannot come to life. I know that there's nothing that doll can do to physically harm me," she says. "I'm still terrified.
After Jodi meets Dr. Weiss and explains her fear of dolls to him, he begins their session by hypnotizing her and guiding her into her past lives. "Go through the door and through the light," he says. "Join the scene where the experience or the person on the other side of the light is in a past life."
Jodi says she sees her grandfather, who died almost 20 years ago, welcoming her. She says she's happy to see him, but misses him. Dr. Weiss says Jodi's grandfather is her spiritual guide.
Then she mumbles the words "died too soon." Dr. Weiss leads Jodi to the moment when, in a past life, she died. "I see an accident scene car," she says.
"Was there anyone else in the car with you?" Dr. Weiss asks. "Who did you leave? Who was in the car?"
"My babies," Jodi says. "It feels real. And then I'm kind of gone. And then I'm with papa."
As she continues examining the scene of her death in a past life, Jodi says she sees the emergency personnel comforting her crying children. Jodi is worried about the babies. "Do they see me dead?" she asks through tears.
To comfort her, Dr. Weiss asks Jodi to look beyond the moment in which she died, and to focus on the lives of the survivors of the accident, specifically her babies in the car.
Jodi does, and says she sees them as they grow up. "They're healthy and good kids," she says.
Dr. Weiss says his session with Jodi was a long and intense one. "It was very emotional, but that's where the healing often comes from: from the catharsis, from the emotion, from remembering," he says. "And this was really important for her to go through."
Dr. Weiss believes Jodi's fear of dolls originates from not being able to protect her children in a past life. "This is a fear she would have carried over [to her next life]," he says. According to Dr. Weiss, the dolls Jodi is so fearful of are representative of the children she left behind. "The doll was a metaphor symbol for babies."
Jodi says the lessons of her past-life regression were put to the test almost immediately when she watched the episode of The Oprah Show that featured an Osmond family reunion. During the show, Marie Osmond presented Oprah with a gift: a one-of-a-kind doll of Oprah as a child.
"My instinct says to me, 'Flee. Turn it off.' Because that's what I would have done in the past," Jodi says. "Instead. I immediately thought of the light and I heard my grandfather's voice say, 'It's okay.' Before, there's no way I could have watched that show, absolutely no way."
While one in five Americans say they believe in reincarnation, Dr. Oz wonders if what Dr. Weiss calls past-life regression might be something else. Are the people he treats really reliving memories from lives they have lived before?
"When symptoms disappear, that's usually not from imagination or something like that. It's usually from the real memory, the experience," Dr. Weiss says. "Imagination doesn't cure symptoms."
We are multi-leveled conscious beings with many levels of awareness, ego states, and past life scenarios, actively at play at any given moment in time.
The physical, spiritual, and emotional levels are not often in harmony or aligned with each other, and states of dis-equilibrium or dis-ease are created.
We have an innate drive or instinct toward wholeness, integration, and equilibrium.
Pain and disharmony focus our attention on the non-alignment aspects of our psyche, so that we are eventually forced to create a homeostatic balance, whether it be pathological or healthy. On a spiritual level, movement is toward karmic homeostasis.
Past life therapy enables a therapist to move a client to explore deeper parts of the psyche. The process allows a client to understand her/his inner myth and the emotional, attitudinal matrix that unconsciously influences her/his physical and motivational system.
Because these life scripts, problems, and life style patterns are replicated on many developmental levels, we can approach the resolution of these patterns in many ways and at different levels, such as in the current life patterns, or the peri- or pre-natal experience, or past life experiences.
Past life therapy's primary concern is not only in the alleviation of symptoms, but also focuses on the dynamics and attitudes that support the systems. The mental, emotional, and physical levels often need to be examined for symptom relief.
Past life therapy helps us to understand more profoundly the mind-body-spirit connection, and how we as evolving souls are responsible for creating our universe for our own spiritual growth.
The primary aim of past life therapy is to help the individual to live a more integrated life style, to live in the here and now, to realize her/his connectedness to the universe, and to participate in the creative process that gives meaning to each moment of awareness.
Hypnotherapy
There is no definite dividing line between a normal waking state and a hypnotic or trance state.
Examples of alterations in consciousness occur frequently and most people experience some of them. Both children and adults can become so absorbed in daydreaming that they lose track of what is going on around them. Some people consciously use daydreams to divert themselves from certain aspects
of their existence. When someone is concentrating intently on a work project, the hyper-focusing that
aids the work may also shut out noises and other distractions. Someone who is absorbed in an activity may, when the activity ends, need to take a moment to reorient to the external world
What hypnosis is not: Sleep. Adults who are hypnotized often prefer to have their eyes closed. This
is not necessary in order to have a deep trance state. In fact, many children prefer to have their eyes open and even to walk around during hypnosis. While in hypnosis, one's attention and concentration
are more focused. During sleep, this is not usually the case. EEG patterns during hypnosis and during sleep differ. Hypnosis is an intensely focused concentration, with the partial or complete exclusion of awareness of the peripheral phenomenon. Some feel that individuals who are able to become intensely absorbed in an activity or daydreaming make the best hypnotic subjects. Hypnotic or trance states can occur spontaneously both inside the therapy room and in everyday life.
Indications for Medical Hypnosis
Pain: Some clients worry that if hypnosis helps their pain that it means that the pain in "all in my head." Actually, that is true because ALL pain is mediated through the brain. Pain-related to surgery or medical conditions such as shingles can respond well to hypnosis. I usually work with the client to build in safeguards so that he or she will be alerted to any change or increase in the pain.
Habit Disorders: Hypnosis has been shown to be effective for bruxism (repetitive teeth grinding) I have used it successfully to help individuals stop smoking. For individuals with alcoholism or another chemical dependency, I strongly suggest that if they are seeing me for hypnosis, they also attend 12 step meetings.
Nausea and other Conditions in Pregnancy: I have had good results using hypnosis to attenuate nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy. An added benefit in one individual was the ability to learn to dilate small veins prior to a needle stick. "Morning sickness," nausea associated with pregnancy, can range from mildly annoying to medically dangerous. Pregnant women often wish to avoid medication unless absolutely necessary. I do not see hypnosis, in isolation, as a substitute for childbirth preparation classes such as Lamaze or Bradley. However, it can work in combination with these approaches. Women with anxiety disorders, who wish to avoid medication during early pregnancy, can often use these techniques to decrease anxiety and minimize panic attacks
Relaxation: Almost by definition, hypnosis induces a state of relaxation. This can be short term, as when used to interrupt panic. When used with self-hypnosis, a motivated individual can often achieve longer-term results.
Anxiety states: Hypnosis can help anxiety disorders in more than one way. It can directly decrease anxiety and panic by inducing a state of relaxation. The therapist can also use the hypnotic state to help the client focus more clearly on issues that might be causing the anxiety. Often the use of fictional stories, used as metaphors, can give the client a new way of looking at his or her problems. Storytelling is more permissive than direct suggestions. It gives the client a chance to accept or reject the suggestion without feeling that he is being "non-compliant."
Interruption of strong emotional state: Individuals in crisis are often more susceptible to suggestion. Susceptible individuals may actually dissociate spontaneously during trauma or crisis. This tendency may be used therapeutically in emergency situations.
Hypnotizability
Some, such as the Spiegel's, feel that each individual has an innate capacity for achieving trance state. They see this capacity as relatively stable over time. They suggest that there may be inheritability of this capacity. Thus, they do not use deepening techniques as much as other clinicians. They do note that expectations and rapport with the therapist can influence the success of the hypnosis.
Milton Erickson emphasized less a biologically determined capacity for hypnosis. He attempted to find metaphors suitable for each individual. He also would use deepening techniques. He felt that individuals who seemed to have a limited capacity for trance could still achieve trance states with proper technique. Many clinicians approach their hypnotic work from a middle ground. It is useful to get a sense of the client's capacity to easily achieve trance. However, much can be done to deepen and enhance the trance state. Additionally, a great deal of productive work can be done while an individual is in a light trance state.
Hypnotic Induction
The induction is essentially a ritual that helps formalize a transition to a more focused state of consciousness. Deep or light trance states can occur spontaneously. The formal induction process serves to organize and structure the process so that the trance state can be more efficiently used in therapy. There are a wide variety of types of hypnotic inductions. Some therapists tend to use a particular type of induction most of the time. Others vary the type of induction depending on the personality type and preferences of the client. Brief induction techniques can be more practical because the client can often learn to use it himself in "real world" situations.
Self Hypnosis
I will often teach clients how to use self-hypnosis so that they can gain more control over the process. They can use it between sessions as boosters. Often I teach them a long induction for when they have time and a shorter induction for quick use in crisis situations. Individuals who have difficulty doing
the self-hypnosis may benefit from hypnosis tapes. I will often make up custom tapes for certain clients.
Contraindications for Hypnosis
This is a controversial subject. Different clinicians have varying opinions about the appropriate uses
of hypnosis. I tend to be more conservative than some other experienced clinicians. Most licensed clinicians agree that they should not use hypnosis for public entertainment. It is not a good idea to try to induce hypnosis in a client who does not want it. One should not use hypnosis to try to achieve goals other than the client's wishes. Generally, it would be difficult to use hypnosis in this way. However, there have been reports of manipulation of ambivalent clients in hypnotherapy and other forms of therapy.
Structured interviews were carried out with 49 widows and 19 widowers under the age of 45 who had been bereaved 14 months previously. A number of indices of health and emotional disturbance were shown to distinguish these bereaved respondents from a matched control group. The 13-month-bereaved group was characterized by recent disturbance of sleep, appetite and weight, by complaints of depression, restlessness, indecisiveness and sense of strain and by an increased consumption of alcohol, tobacco and tranquilizers. They were more likely than the control group to have been admitted to a hospital during the preceding year. Widowers reported an increase in acute physical symptoms although neither sex had more chronic physical symptoms than the controls. Two to four years later there was little difference in health between bereaved and control groups but there was evidence of persisting "disengagement."