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Self Control

Body image / weight


Health


Addictions

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Weight-loss.  Accessing the unconscious mind and providing suggestions that are absorbed as new ‘strategies’ are used as a pathway to achieving and maintaining a more desirable figure.

Amanda’s Therapy will aim for individuals to:

  • Experience a less intense struggle;
  • Gain willpower and determination to make changes toward their desired weight;
  • Make lifestyle changes (as a whole) become long term views;
  • Make wise choices regarding food (and health in general);
  • Feel better, healthier, positive and confident.

Making lasting changes to your weight, does not rely entirely on finding the right weight loss program.  It has to do with lining up mental, emotional and psychological behaviour so that together, they keep you focused on goals, through a strong mindset.

Emotional eating does nothing to satisfy hunger, but provides temporary respite from painful emotions.  It is this pattern of emotional eating that leads to bad eating habits and subsequent weight-gain.  Typical triggers for emotional eating include guilt, low self-esteem, the feeling of repeated failure, loneliness, sadness, and frustration.

Amanda’s Therapy aims for positive changes:

  • To become more relaxed, with a clearer mind;
  • To keep emotional needs and physical needs separate, and to practice this until it becomes automatic;
  • To look for more creative ways to process and work through emotions;
  • To improve diet;
  • To feel more positive, more confident and more fulfilled in everyday life;
  • To understand behaviour and the underlying drivers, so that real needs can be met in a more constructive way;
  • To experience positive changes to your health and mental being that will create a more satisfying existence.

As mentioned, weight loss programs can be successful, when the appropriate mindset is developed.  Amanda will aim for her clients to develop the discipline and the appropriate mind-set to be successful.  Exploring and eliminating poor lifestyle habits, nutrition, exercise, health and medical issues, are all important when using a holistic approach to better health.

Sugar (e.g., chocolate) can be considered an obsession.  When the urge for sugar emerges, it can become the most important thing at that given moment.  The impact of high sugar consumption on health and happiness is high.  It is not a cycle that is easy to break.

Amanda’s Therapy aims to provide individuals with:

  • Calmness that is no longer plagued with worries about sugar and weight;
  • Determination to meet weight goals;
  • Strategies to control what is consumed;
  • Greater willpower in resisting sweet treats;
  • A palate that lends itself to healthier food choices;
  • A more efficient metabolism that is restored to its natural equilibrium;

Bad habits are difficult to break because they are associated with thoughts and emotions at a very unconscious level.  Counselling and Hypnotherapy is an extremely effective way to re-program the mind to replace bad habits with good ones.  At a very unconscious level where automatic thought patterns are developed, small adjustments can be made and new behaviours established – so that you start to react in a way that’s healthier and more rewarding.

Smoking is often used as a coping mechanism.  Some form of low level stress or agitation is the most common driver.  If you quit without dealing with the stress you are more likely to return to smoking one day, or turn to something else (e.g., sugar) to alleviate the agitation.  Counselling and Hypnotherapy deals with whatever sits with the smoking “rituals” and offers you something to replace them with.

The same is true for other addictive behaviours. Binge drinking, marijuana, amphetamines, and other addictive substances /behaviours can all be dealt with once drivers are identified.  All that’s needed is a commitment.

As a victim of gambling addiction, your life is not your own. Important aspects of life – relationships, family, health, well-being and financial security, suddenly become secondary to the driving force that controls the gambling habit.

Gambling addiction not only drains away money, in a very deceiving manner, it drains away the real you. When in a state of gambling ‘trance’, the gambler becomes helpless in stopping.  The spiral of destruction, deceit and spending continues.

Counselling and Hypnotherapy sessions will help free you from your gambling addiction so that you can take back control of your life, re-build relationships, and get your finances and your life back on track.

Alcohol abuse causes physical problems and a negative effect on relationships, finances and work performance. Under the influence of alcohol addiction, the individual can be tricked into believing alcohol is the key to stop anxiety, have better sleep, and achieve relaxation – when in fact its effects are the total reverse of this.

The only way to effectively overcome alcohol addiction is to develop a change in mindset towards alcohol.  Simply trying to resist it will, in most cases, not be successful. Those who are able to easily turn down the temptation of alcohol have altered their relationships with alcohol, so that it does not control their thinking any longer.

Withdrawal from any addiction is never pleasant.  Therapy aims to dramatically improve withdrawal experience, so that you can be more positive during this time, and of course more relieved from the anxieties about the future.

Thought patterns such as “it’s only once” and “it won’t do any harm” are negative.

The only effective way of repeatedly overcoming negative thoughts, is by dismissing them as nothing more than unhelpful thoughts.  Faced with situations where there are external pressures to drink alcohol and internal voices telling you there is no harm in one drink, a preventive strategy is required.

Amanda’s Therapy aims to:

  • Reconnect with the ability to have fun without the help of alcohol or other chemical substances;
  • Increase ease and relaxation in social situations;
  • Decrease obsession with being ‘denied’ a drink of alcohol;
  • Refocus on the important aspects of social gatherings;
  • Promote a more enjoyable, enriched and fulfilled life.

Compulsive shoppers purchase much more than they need, spend more than they can afford, and spend money to make them feel better.  They feel good for a short time, but then feel bad later on, they own a variety of items that are left in the bottom drawer, and have spiralling debt problems (but keep shopping anyway).  They also usually feel depressed after a large spending spree.

Like all addictions, shopping is filling some sort of void.  It is replacing what is missing, with something else that offers relief from sadness, even if this is only temporary.  Amanda’s Therapy explores and deals with all of these issues.

 

Amanda offers services both Face to Face in Clinic, as well as Distance Professional Services (also known as Telehealth, Teletherapy, E-Counselling, E-Therapy, Online Counselling, and Online Therapy, and Online Conferencing).