Changing Lives

Wellbeing Magazine interviews Tricia Woolfrey, author of '21 days to change your life' and 'Think Positive Feel Good'.

Tricia Woolfrey has been helping people change their lives for the last 10 years. Although people are becoming more accepting of hypnotherapy she still meets people who link it to stage hypnosis and are wary of using this life transforming therapy to improve their own lives.

Tricia is all about positive thinking, using Hypnotherapy, NLP and counselling as her tools of the trade.

So can the power of positive thinking really change your life? Tricia believes in the miracles of thought, although she is quick to explain that you don't just change one thought and everything falls into place, it is more like peeling away the layers of self doubt, core limiting beliefs and the language we use on a day to day basis.

Most of her clients come to her for weight loss, depression, anxiety, stress and smoking, so I quickly quizzed her about smoking as I have met some people who have given up from one session and never looked back and others who gave up for a while and then started smoking again, so I wondered why it helped some and not others.

Tricia explained that for most people a cigarette is a method of coping with stress, so just taking away the need for a cigarette is rarely the answer as it needs to be replaced by something else. She has learnt through her experience that for some people this is their only method of coping, so to take this away from them with nothing to support them, such as friends, family, hobbies etc would not be healthy, she would use a more phased approach for these clients and would also use stress management techniques along side.

I wondered what her most unusual case had been and she retold the story of a lady who had a phobia of things spinning, even to the extent that if she went to the circus and saw an elephant on a rope, going around a pole she was petrified. Through hypnosis, her client discovered that she has been caught up by the umbilical cord and even this very early memory had triggered this particular phobia, with careful work this lady is now free of her fear.

With the recent stories of Jade Goodie and her cancer in the press I have been discussing with many therapists the negative impact of having the world media talking about her imminent death and wondered that if the press had taken on a more positive route in trying to keep her alive would she have lived longer or perhaps regained full recovery.

I asked Tricia if she also felt that if Jade had been given the right tools could have recovered. While as a therapist they are not allowed to claim to cure people she believe it depends on the individual, if someone is highly susceptible they may be convinced that they will not get better, but someone else with a positive mindset may in fact get well or live longer than expected.

We hear many miraculous stories of people thinking themselves well and in fact Tricia had one such story told to her by a woman at one of her workshops (which she has published in her book ‘Thinking Positive Feel Good'.) Corrina was found to have a tumour the size of an orange growing into her brain and was given two weeks to live. She had the tumour removed and took it upon herself to talk to her own body and instruct it to get well, she decided to be positive, crack a few jokes and really listen to her body and although she had a bumpy ride she is now 100% fine.

When dealing with a client who is unwell, it is not always a simple fact of thinking positive and getting better, she has realised that for some people being unwell has a secondary gain. Being unwell usually means that the person suddenly receives a great deal of attention or a sense of identity and they fear that by getting well again they may lose the attention they have been receiving. This is very subtle and the person may not even be aware this is happening but hypnosis can tap into this to help the individual with their self esteem and find other positive ways to get what they need without remaining ill.

Tricia is now busy writing books on Stress Management and Weight loss and if they are as easy to read and implement as 21 days to change your life and Think Positive Feel Good, then she is onto a winner.

Tricia believes that anything made worse by stress can be made better by Hypnosis so she runs one-to-on or group sessions for her 7th Path Self Hypnosis workshop to help people ‘live the life you want'. Her next course is on the 30th May. Contact her on 0845 1300854 for more information or visit www.pw-hypnotherapy.co.uk