Free Association Explained.

Free Association is the spontaneous, free-flowing process of linking and connecting thoughts, feelings and experiences, back to the root cause of the anxiety. This running commentary of your thoughts is verbalised to me. It's a bit like following the directions a sat nav gives you to get from A to B - you don't need to understand each one, just listen to it and follow it and you will ultimately get there even if little of the view out the window is familiar to you and you never know where the next turn will be.

How Free Association works.

The process of free association allows any experiences, thoughts or feelings connected to the bottled up emotions to surface. These things are always there at the forefront of your subconscious mind - causing you anxiety and symptoms. When the conscious mind is a little more relaxed than usual (deep relaxation or 'hypnosis' is NOT necessary) they will readily flow into your mind.

With Pure Hypnoanalysis, as long as you are properly free associating, you will finish therapy within 12 sessions - which is why we have the 12 session rule in our organisation*.

As much as I want you to get through therapy as quickly and as smoothly as possible, the only person who can really get you to finish therapy is YOU. Therefore it is crucial that you understand how to Free Associate properly.

Free associating is easy, as long as you are doing it correctly. Here is how to....

Rules of doing Free Association (not just intellectualising/thinking out loud)

DO say absolutely EVERYTHING that's goes through your mind/is in your awareness no matter how mundane, repetitive, seemingly insignificant/ordinary, absurd, embarrassing, intimate, personal, surreal, bonkers, surprising, distressing, confusing, dull, silly etc. you may "think" those things are.

Basically if you don't you will not move on in therapy (you may as well be chatting to your best mate about your problems down the pub - which I guess didn't work before did it?!).

By the way to help you realise why you may need to go to you "no go areas" as well as your safe comfortable ones it's often the case that the most cringeworthy things that go through your mind (the things you never tell anyone, let alone like thinking about) are really significant purely because of the shear amount of emotion they contain.

Only a part of the therapy is about memories - is it about ALL the thoughts that go through your mind in the session - which as well as memories includes dreams, fantasies, thoughts, ideas, worries, fears, sensations, photos, glimpses, wonderings, temperature changes, smells, sounds, words, pictures, what you see, what you sense. I don't just want to know what you see or sense, I want to know what goes through your mind when you see/sense it.

DO be specific rather than general.

E.g. Don't say "I'm just thinking about school" as I've NO idea what you're experiencing/seeing! Do say what you're actually focusing on, or what came to you first "I'm smelling the horrible brussel sprouts smell in the school canteen and dreading having to eat them as they make me feel sick!"

E.g. If you're thinking about the group of kids that would taunt you and call you horrid names on every walk home from school, just say that. Don't say "I didn't have many friends at school, no one liked me coz I had massive NHS glasses. I'd always get picked on". That is just your take on it! Do say quite simply a commentry of what came to you, just like explaining to a blind person (me) what's going on in your head - tell me so I can FEEL what you're feeling. Bascially, where you are, what's happening and how it make you feels...e.g. "The usual gang are at the gates, calling me a specky 4 eyed twat , and I just feel cornered, angry, frustrated, really embarrassed and small".

DON'T intellectualise/analyse/think about it/double guess "where it's going" (that's my job!). If you do intellectualise, you will not get through your therapy and you may as well go to counselling for a nice chat about what you already know.

It helps you to be concise and precise about what's in your head. No need for context, story telling, what you did before, or just after (to justify why you were eating dog biscuits!).

To make it easier still - For each thing that comes to mind, I'll just want to know:

WHERE are you, WHAT's happening and WHAT's it like (how's it make you feel)?

DON'T search or look for memories YOU think are important/significant.

As soon as you start looking, you are consciously directing your mind (which is what thinking/intellectualising is) and the spontaneous process of coughing up what's deeper in your subconscious stops i.e. you stop free associating. Therapy stops the moment you direct or control your awareness/memories/thoughts etc.

DON'T summarise what's in your mind, just the first thing that comes to you and say it straight away like pass the parcel with your experiences, just pass them onto me, don't try to take a peak, shake, sniff, try to guess what's inside by waffling, story telling, justifying, pinning down, dates or ages! Then, the next one will come round and do the same, see/sense it verbalise it to pass it on, do the same again with the next thing.

DO repeat yourself - if something keeps coming up, say it every single time.

DON'T say there's really nothign there! Everybody's "nothing" is different - you're rarely totally blank for more than a couple of seconds and if there's no pictures or words, just tell me what that's like - how it feels - cold, lonely, dark, wet, bright, peaceful etc? You may say there's nothing when actually you're thinking "I can't think of anythign!" so say that.

REMEMBER stuff will come to mind from any time in your life, not just your childhood so say every one. You will notice though that your mind will often naturally go back to your childhood because that is when your emotional self is being formed and is a time when many emotions were bottled up.