Wendi Friesen innovated Hypnotherapy in a lot of different ways, going beyond the power of suggestion by itself or even outdated methods, in order to arrive at the inner conflict or trauma that is keeping one stuck in addiction.
“Strong, Healthy and in Control” is her mantra when working with clients that suffer from addiction – each one of those three words anchor a very specific state of mind that she takes time to build on with her clients towards making it a really powerful belief in their subconscious mind and in their physical body. She works with a client’s subconscious mind, crafting a resistance to the addiction through an empowering and powerful belief system.
The success that she’s had was first of all by removing the label of “You are an addict. You’re an addict for life”. Removing that because once you’re not an addict anymore, you are not an addict. In hypnosis, putting people into a state of being is the main focus – strong and healthy and in control. And as a result, anytime that you see someone else drinking alcohol, anytime you notice alcohol in the store, when you’re shopping or you have any thought about alcohol, you remember that you’re strong and healthy and in control.
You feel a wave of peace run through your body, and you know that you’ve got this, that you love living a healthy life more than anything. And any of those old thoughts about alcohol just drift away because those are no longer part of you. It is the exact opposite of what they’re doing in a lot of rehab centers.
And talking about rehab, there is a study about this who was saying the only efficiency was 3% to 5% success rate. And this is actually the result of the social bonding between the members and not because of the program itself, but because of the mentorship and the social relationships that are built within those groups.
This leads to the idea that we need people that we can bond with and people who know how we feel and to be honest with them, because you’re not going to go around telling anybody that you’re this messed up. But unfortunately it is not enough, as individuals experience the healing of addiction differently and most of the times, negatively in an addiction center.
There are stories from people who are hopeless, they go to rehab enough times and they feel like it’s their fault – ”I didn’t work the program, I didn’t work the steps.”, “It’s that you had bad thoughts and you had not put yourself into it fully.” Other times, these kinds of programs might work in rare cases.
One question would be: what’s going to work long term so that a person doesn’t have to make a decision? – Wendi Friesen
So the point in this is: that the sight of alcohol, the thought of alcohol, any old memories of alcohol you don’t need anymore or anyone else drinking, even if someone offers you a drink, you remember that you are strong. Through the program we embed the word “strong” with the things that someone loves about themselves.
You don’t have to try, you just are. And when you notice anything about alcohol or if it’s for drugs, you know you’re strong, you just know that. And then we go “healthy”. So what they love about being healthy and what it means in the future to be healthy, and this is the key, that through hypnosis they go into the future and experience themselves as being these things because we want to build the memories that the brain accepts as real.
And it operates from these new future memories. And the brain doesn’t care that it was imaginary in the future, it holds it as who I am now. So you’re healthy, and we go over that you’re in control, and then we take those three things and we make those things that are triggered if you were to see alcohol, think about alcohol, whatever.
The future pacing usually takes the client three months, then six months, then a year into the future. And each one of those your identity is becoming that person who is strong and healthy and in control. And the identity concept is very important, because if your identity is that you’re an alcoholic or an addict for the rest of your life and all that goes with that, drawing from that belief is not going to create any strength or any pride in who you are.
Therefore, when you go in that future timeline, when you’re starting out in it, at some point you will stop when you notice the fork in the road – the left one, you can keep doing the same things you’ve always done, and there’s a lot of struggle and pain, and that is a choice that you can make. And the one to the right goes farther and farther into the future, it’s bright and it’s beautiful and it’s absolutely freedom from having to think about alcohol or think about drugs.
But to think about it or have any feelings about it, you just know what you want, the one to the right. So then the therapist takes you on that one to the right and then have you float back to the point where there was that fork in the road – And now, you make the decision, you get to choose which way you’re going to go.
So, now it’s not the therapist telling you, your subconscious mind is making a decision. And I say there is a lot of pain and a lot of struggle on the one to the left, you know what it’s like, on the one to the right, this and this that we’ve created, and on the count of three, make the decision and take that step. This is a moment that defines them with an identity of the person who is no longer a struggling alcoholic, always expecting that they may relapse not allowed to have anyone in the house who has alcohol or whatever. And that’s a big moment.
One example from Wendi Friesen’s hypnotherapy practice is of a man that drank over a case of beer a day, every day for all of his adult life, he was 45 years old now, and carrying the identity of
“I’m a fat, slob drunk, and that’s all people know me as”. “But in my future timeline, I was something else, I was an athlete. And I’m not an athlete, I’m a fat, slob drunk. But why did I see myself as an athlete?” And then a few days later, he called me and he says “there’s beer in my fridge. I didn’t even notice there’s a six pack of beer in there still and it’s been there all this time, I didn’t even notice. So I opened one of the beers and I poured it in a glass, and I looked at it, and it was like, I don’t want that. And that was all there was to it.”
He started training and became an iron man, he has traveled the world doing iron man competitions. Had he not done the hypnotherapy session? There’s so many lives like this that people found something that’s more important to them. Being an athlete. Somewhere in his brain, it told him, “go work out. Let’s see what happens.”
That would be the power of future pacing in hypnotherapy but what about going back into the past? You never know what you’re going to find. You’re going to find some trauma if you’re doing regression to cause. You’re going to find some things that really link a client’s base need for the alcohol or the drugs or the pain they’re trying to escape.
And that’s where you explore it a little more and disconnect the experience from the act of smoking, drinking, taking drugs. Forgiving yourself or anyone else who influenced you to do that, some inner child work to go back to things in your childhood that possibly set you up to have this addiction or the addiction that you had always wording it to put it in the past.
Some people say the word quitting is going to be too confusing to the subconscious mind because it’s connected with so many other things. And for all the things they’ve tried to quit, might not be the best approach. We’re not going to quit, we’re simply going to do something better that you love more. You’re going to be really strong and you’re going to be able to fight it, and even if someone offers you drugs, you’re going to be able to say no, but we shift it from the struggle to the joy.
“I do tell my clients this, if it happens that along the way you slip up a little bit or you have a drink or something, it’s not a thing, it doesn’t matter. Your inner mind is going to guide you to get right back to the life that you love, to being strong and healthy and in control, that will be easy for you. And you realize that, no, you just don’t want that in your life. It’s just not a thing. So now I took the pressure and the shame and the guilt off of ‘Oh, my God, I had a sip of alcohol.'” Wendi Friesen says.