- December 10, 2023
- Posted by: h1b@adn1m
- Category: Hypnotherapy Help
Three years ago I was contacted by a man who was in desperate need of help. His wife was leaving him. Her problem with him was that he was too controlling of her, and at the time, he couldn’t see that he was a control freak. Indeed, he saw himself as a loving and kind husband and father that only ever wanted the best for his wife and children. He worked hard to please them.
His wife very clearly told him her reasons for leaving. “You just want to control every aspect of my life” she said to him as she made preparations to leave. My client came to me so distraught and in a state of disbelief around the breakup. He couldn’t accept what she was saying. And of course, he was feeling utterly devastated.
He also related to me how inharmonious things had always been at home. His children, three teenagers, were forever miserable and avoided him. I got the impression from things he related that he also tried to control his children as well.
During our first consultations I worked with him to help bring him relief and to try to accept the situation of their relationship breaking up.
Internet Dating
The next time I saw him, he’d met a woman online and once again found himself in a high state of anxiety and panic about the new relationship. Again I noticed how controlling he was being with this new relationship that had barely taken off. In fact he was so controlling, he wanted to control every aspect of it so that it didn’t end up like his last relationship.
That relationship ended after a short duration. That woman related to him that she found he was coming on too strong for her. She wanted to take things easier, and not get so serious too soon, but here he was, guns blazing, ready to commit to her and really really wanting to control the outcome.
By this time I could see that his control issues were really wrecking all the relationships in his life, not just with the new women he met, but with his children as well.
Again we worked on bringing about comfort and relief from the shock of it all being over too soon. And then I tried to get to the bottom of what was causing my client to display such controlling behavior in his life.
Working With Someone with Control Issues
When I say ‘control freak’ I mean it. As his Therapist he even tried to control me. He’d do that by interrupting me, by trying to control the outcome of the sessions to what he wanted, and I found that I had to be very firm with him to keep him on track. One time I even had to ask him to leave because he made the session impossible. Over time I built up trust with him by making him realise that even though he couldn’t control me that I would always be there when he needed me. At some point later that finally got through to him.
Past Life Therapy
I interviewed this client many times over our sessions but I could never find a connection from his past that would make him behave in such a controlling manner with such extreme behavior and fear.
I even did a few Past Life Therapy sessions with him and couldn’t find anything from a past life that would explain such abnormal behavior.
Enter the next relationship
The next time I saw him, he had started seeing a new lady that he felt had some potential.
Again he came to me for help because he didn’t want to mess things up. He wanted help controlling the outcome. Again he wanted to go in too much, too soon because that is what he does with new relationships. I tried to convince him not to do that, and to take things slowly.
Again we recommenced sessions to work through the same issue again. I tried to work with him about not needing to control her by coming on too strong and demanding commitment too soon.
I also had the fortunate experience to meet with her, not because of his issues, but she’d been severely hurt by her past and found it useful to undergo her own counselling and hypnotherapy sessions for her own benefit.
As I got to know her, it became very clear that because of her past, she really wanted to take things very slowly with my male patient. Knowing that, confidentially, I could really encourage him in our sessions to slow things down.
The breakthrough story
Then one day, when having a session with him, he told me a story that finally made sense. A story of why he needed to control all the relationships in his life, particularly the the one’s closest to him such as wife/love partner and his children.
The day he almost drowned as a small child
When my client was a young boy, he was swimming in the river with his older brother. His older brother had also bullied him ever since he could remember and yet his parents did nothing to stop it.
Anyway this day while they were swimming, his older brother jumped on him in the water and held him down under the water until my client felt that his lungs would burst. He somehow managed to break free and get a breath, and got pushed straight under again. He told me that he remembers quite clearly thinking he was going to die that day. He could feel his head going light as he was running out of air. Finally the brother released his hold on him and allowed him up. My small boy client then vomited up water almost choking to death as he tried to gasp for air. When he went home and told his parents what his brother had done to him, it was laughed off by his parents, as if it was just a bit of playful and harmless school boy fun. They told him to “get over it”.
It was at this point that I realised why my client was a control freak. That day, through no fault of his own, as a child with no defenses against a bully older brother he was unable to control the situation. His brother had taken all his personal power away from him. And it was done by someone who he only ever wanted to be close to.
This would be a highly traumatising event for any child or adult to experience. And to not have any sympathy or protection from his parents, the small boy never healed on the inside from that experience.
His natural survival instincts kicked in and as he went through the rest of his life, and got older his natural instincts for survival were on high alert (read anxiety) about all the close relationships in his life. Unconsciously he thought he had to control the people in his life so that they couldn’t hurt him. But sadly, it had the reverse affect. The more he tried to control people, the more he pushed them out of his life.
When I say “unconscious behavior” I mean that the client does not have any knowledge that this is how they behave.
When I asked him if he could see how that traumatic event had created his control issues, he said he never ever thought about that because what he remembered most from that event was a feeling of sadness that his brother had done all that to him, and that they never got close.
In fact, in their adult life, they never made amends with each other, and the relationship continued to be inharmonious as it was when they were children.
How I treat traumatic events with Hypnotherapy
Once we had uncovered this huge event, I could then go to work on him, and really start to work with him through Hypnotherapy.
How I did that with him is that I took him back to that event under Hypnosis, and I got him to see as an adult that none of that was his fault. He saw that to keep himself safe from his brother, he later on developed a pattern of trying to please his brother, and how that then began to translate itself into his adult relationships and his relationships with his children. My client began to unravel the pattern and see it from an adult perspective.
Once he could see that as an adult, I then went to work with him through hypnosis to end the bad energy that had been following him around like a dark shadow ever since that day.
Trauma creates bad energy. It creates fear, it creates hate, anger and grief and left untreated, it grows into an energy of it’s own. Its there with you, you don’t know why you feel the way you do, but somewhere down deep, this bad energy is living a pretty happy life of it’s own, robbing you of any happiness.
I help my clients release their bad energy under hypnosis by going back to the event and leaving it all back there in the past where it belongs.
I also work with them on releasing the emotions and leaving them in the past.
I explain to them that when something like that happens, and is then treated with hypnosis, the bad energy of the time will go away, but the memory will always be there, but it’s not attached to the emotions or the bad energy anymore. This then frees my clients to move on, and live in the present, free of the past literally ‘haunting’ them in one way or another.
In my client’s case, his past haunted him by turning him into a control freak to keep him safe and away from an unconscious danger he was not even aware was affecting him to this present day.