In this session, Andrea Yearsley, RTT Therapist & Transformational Coach, Founder of Pebble Fertility, has discussed how hypnotherapy can be beneficial for those struggling to conceive and what happens during a typical hypnotherapy session.
Andrea founded Pebble Fertility because she had her own IVF struggles and her own fertility journey. She had been trying for a baby for 8 years, she had numerous IUIs and IVFs. At 38, she started trying for a baby and, at that time, she had a very busy, stressful career as a television producer, and she noticed that she didn’t get much support to deal with the stress of going through IVF.
She did have some hypnotherapy. Someone suggested she have classic hypnotherapy to help her deal with the stress and, according to Andrea, it made a massive difference.
It helped me move forward and feel more relaxed about the whole situation.
After she had her first child, she left television and retrained as a therapist specializing in fertility. She loved it. She’s seen loads and loads of women and many of them have gone on to have healthy, happy babies.
When people think about hypnosis, they think about stage hypnosis, meaning they’ll be left clucking like a chicken or have no control. Hypnotherapy is very different because hypnosis isn’t a different state.
People often imagine that they’re going to feel different as if they’d been drinking alcohol, but hypnosis is just a different brain frequency and it’s a completely natural state. It’s very relaxing, and it’s something that people will have been to many times, even though they’re completely unaware of it.
When someone is in hypnosis, they’re absolutely in control. They can hear things outside and inside the room, and they can talk. A nice example of the way hypnosis feels is given by Andrea: If you’ve driven a car on maybe a long journey, going along a road that you know very well and maybe when you arrive your kind of thought ‘ Oh, I don’t remember driving down that road’. That’s the same state as hypnosis. It’s when you’ve zoned out or maybe somebody’s been talking to you, and it wasn’t that interesting, so you kind of zoned out, and they suddenly go ‘Hello? You there?’. You’re there in that state, you are awake, and you can talk, but you’re just different from when you have a normal consciousness.
In the image shown by Andrea, there are brain waves when hypnosis kicks in. The brain has different frequencies of waves.
Gamma brain wave
Beta brain wave
Alpha brain wave
Theta brain wave
Delta brain wave
The border, according to Andrea, between Alpha and Theta, is the optimal state for hypnosis because the body is relaxed, but it’s not asleep, the mind is open and highly suggestible, you’re able to access the subconscious mind and previously stored information, which is really important.
In children up until around the age of 7 are in this state all the time. That’s why they pretty much accept anything they’re told. So, information that’s presented to the mind before the age of 7, 8, or 9, goes straight onto the subconscious completely unchallenged. People are unlikely to remember events that have created beliefs at this age, beliefs that could be causing an issue with fertility.
At around the age of 7, that critical faculty develops, and we start questioning information coming in. For this reason, kids stop believing in unicorns, fairies, and father Christmas, they start to question what they’re told. This is important to know because that’s when things start to change.
Hypnosis
This is simply a method for getting the brain into the Alpha, Theta state, to access hidden areas of the brain. These areas aren’t accessible by the conscious mind, so it’s a bit like a computer; the operating system or files cannot be accessed from the desktop, they’re somewhat hidden away, and you have to go to a special route to get to them and that’s to make sure they’re not inadvertently accessed. The subconscious mind it’s like that, you can’t just get to it via the conscious mind.
In the state of hypnosis, you can access the subconscious.
Classical hypnotherapy
Generally speaking, this is about taking a person into the state of hypnosis and then, basically, giving them positive suggestions to help them move forward.
RTT
This is the type of hypnosis Andrea does, and it’s a little different because doing this takes the person into hypnosis, then discovers what the subconscious blocks that are causing the issue, deals with them by reframing them, and then layers new positive beliefs onto the subconscious. Finally, give a recording that’s played every day to embed the new positive beliefs.
A good analogy for this, according to Andrea, would be if you wanted to plot some seeds, and you had a flower bed full of weeds, you throw the seeds down over the weeds, but there’s no great chance that they’ll take those weeds. Here, the weeds represent the negative beliefs of subconscious blocks, and the seeds represent the positive beliefs; therefore, if you throw them down over something covered with weeds, they don’t have a great chance to take it. If you cut the weeds down and throw the seeds over the ground, then they have a bit more chance of taking the weeds. Nevertheless, the weeds have strong roots, and they will come back thick and fast, so it’s probably not going to work that well, it might work temporarily, but for longevity, it’s not the greatest answer.
However, if you dig up the border and the roots, you throw them away, you go through the soil to make sure that there are no roots left, and then you plant the seeds. The seeds will have a good chance of growing, especially if you look after them properly by watering and making sure they’ve got sun. That’s the same effect as listening to the recording every single day; that’s giving the seeds what they need to grow, giving the beliefs what they need to grow.
They can be created at any time in life, but they’re often created during childhood before this critical faculty has dropped in.
They can be created by very emotionally charged events, something that embeds itself in the subconscious mind.
They can be created by feelings or thoughts that are repeated many times. For example, a teenager saying ‘I mustn’t get pregnant, I can’t get pregnant, it would be a disaster, I’d be a disaster, I really mustn’t get pregnant’, could be embedded in the subconscious mind.
It’s also like installing a program on a computer. For instance, you might have installed a program in 2000 and, at that time, it made complete sense, and it worked the hard way that you had, and it was right for what you were doing at the time, but now you don’t want it anymore, it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s sitting there like a virus, kind of running in the background causing issues. That’s like subconscious blocks most of the time, people don’t know they’re there, but they’re sitting in the background creating issues. At that time, those beliefs may have made perfect sense, but now they don’t.
A few examples of beliefs that Andrea’s clients came up with during sessions and have caused them issues are:
Now you’ve got an idea of some of the issues that come up and also the impact that subconscious blocks have. – says Andrea
There are many different studies on hypnosis and fertility, and they know that stress causes issues. Therefore, it can be said that relaxation improves IVF conception rates, as there have been many studies done on that.
It’s also well known that infertility is stressful, and IVF is even more; the process, the cost, the physical effect of the hormones on the body, time off work, and people constantly asking questions. This is quite stressful and when the body is stressed it produces cortisol.
Cortisol is the body’s response to danger and worry, in the 21st century, it’s the equivalent to danger. People’s brains haven’t changed much in 30000 years because danger, in those times, would be something like a tiger coming after you. So, cortisol allows the body to respond with a quick burst of energy and it prioritises the immediate survival function, the muscles operate at maximum potential. However, cortisol also stops anything that’s not essential for immediate survival. For instance, fertility is not essential for immediate survival, not when you’re being chased by a tiger. Also, body repair is not essential for immediate survival, not in that situation, and those are turned off when your body is flooded with cortisol.
Moreover, it’s known that animals in zoos have real problems having babies, they’re given all the correct food and nutrients better than they would get in the wild, but they are stressed because they’re in captivity, and stress strops them from getting pregnant. Humans, states Andrea, are no different.
By going into Alpha Theta brain wave state, during hypnosis, you’re actually signaling to the body that everything is safe, so cortisol is reduced, the body can repair itself and it’s more ready to support a pregnancy. If you regularly go into a state of hypnosis, it’s good for the body.
Andrea Yearsley shows some studies that support the use of hypnosis during fertility treatment and, if you’re interested in knowing more, you can go to her website, scroll down to the bottom of the science page and you’ll find the links to the original study.
The British Medical Journal published a study where women with difficulties conceiving were taught how to replace negative beliefs.
This is a massive difference.
In another study in Israel, out of 185 women who were hypnotized for IVF treatment, 28% of them became pregnant, whereas in the control group where they weren’t hypnotized for IVF, only 14 % became pregnant.
Another study made by the Journal of Fertility and Sterility published that infertile women using mind-body techniques, such as hypnosis, had a conception rate of around 42 to 55% as opposed to the women who were only using IVF and their conception rate was 20%.
It’s also known that anxiety impacts eggs production and quality; thus, there was a study done on women who were undergoing IVF and were very worried about the medical aspect of the treatment. They had 20% fewer eggs retrieved and 19% fewer eggs fertilized. Once again, it’s a huge difference; when the mind is worried and stressed, it affects the body.
In another study, they looked at how attitudes, moods, and behaviours affect hormone production. It was also shown that the mind can cause definable reproductive disorders, thus, sometimes when people are told to look at their mindset, they think it’s all in the head and that it’s not a real issue. However, the mind is so powerful it can affect the body because the subconscious mind runs the body, it controls the heart beating, hormone production, blood pressure, and everything in the body. That is why mindset work is so crucial when it comes to dealing with fertility.
Andrea believes that creating new beliefs with hypnosis can move her clients forward because the mind moves you forward to whatever you focus on, and believing that you may not get pregnant creates anxiety and stress.
Now, often clients will say to me ‘Oh, but I’m focused on having a baby, that’s all I think about’, but when I kind of like dig deeper and ask them questions, it’s clear that, yes, they want a baby, but what they’re focusing on is the fear of it not working, so what they’re focusing on is not getting pregnant. – explains Andrea.
There is a very interesting rule of the mind: The mind responds to the words and pictures that people create, also the mind cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction. That means if you implant positive beliefs and attitudes into the mind, and you do it enough, the mind will believe it, and when the mind believes that the subconscious might believe it, this creates what’s called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance means that the subconscious mind has one belief, such as ‘Yes, I’m going to be a mum’. Even though your mind knows you’re not pregnant, it’s not quite aligned and this causes tension. Therefore, what’s going to happen is that the subconscious mind does everything it can to make it happen and it affects how the body works. Due to this, it’s really important to work and focus on creating positive beliefs like, ‘it will happen’, ‘you’re going to be a mum’, ‘you’re going to be a dad’, and ‘you’re moving towards what you want’.
Andrea considers it crucial to focus on that because she saw it with clients. Her clients are prepared to let go of that fear, which is completely natural, that fear of thinking ‘What if I believe it’s going to happen and then it doesn’t, I’m going to be completely gutted’, or believing ‘Well, it may not happen and that’s understandable and natural”, but that’s not helpful. You have to be 100% focused on the belief that it’s happening for you.
You focus on that, on seeing, imagining, creating in your mind: your house full of baby stuff, going with your car with a babysitter if you’ve got a car, buying some baby stuff, doing everything that you would do when you’re expecting a baby, looking at pram, looking at baby’s clothes, all that kind of stuff is important. – clarifies Andrea.
Andrea also recognizes that some people kind of worry that if they do that it’s bad luck but, actually, it’s really important to focus really positively on what they want.
Andrea Yearsley shares a few client cases to give an idea of how some of the issues that clients come up with affect them.
One of Andrea’s clients was very religious, a very strong Christian and she’d been trying to get pregnant with her husband for several years and kept miscarrying at about 6 weeks every time. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong, so Andrea took her to hypnosis and went back to the scenes to find out what was holding her back from having a baby.
This client went back to two weeks before she got married and her husband revealed to her that when he was younger, he used pornography. As she’s a very religious lady and had this belief, she wasn’t aware that, maybe her husband would not be a good father because he’d done something that she disagreed with, but when they looked at it under hypnosis, reframed it, and discussed the fact that she didn’t discover him using pornography, he’d revealed it to her because he wanted her to know everything about him before getting married.
This was a long time in the past, so that made him honest rather than being a negative thing. When they reframed it, funnily enough, 6 weeks later she got pregnant naturally. However, Andrea got a message from her, 3 months later, saying she was expecting and had a healthy baby girl. It was perfect, no issues, perfect pregnancy.
There was a lady who worked with Andrea and was in her early 40s. She’d been trying for quite a while with no success, and when they went back to her scenes, she came from a very large family and her mother had had children very young (she’d been 18 when she had the first), it was a very big family. There might have been 7 children.
According to Andrea, her client grew up seeing her mother in a very resentful way because she’d been a child herself, basically when she got pregnant. They had no money, so it was very hard, her client had to work really hard and developed the belief that being a parent was drudgery. She wasn’t aware of this consciously, but deep down there was a part of her that thought that it was drudgery and hard work.
However, when they talked about it under hypnosis and reframed the fact that she’s a successful businesswoman, she wasn’t her mother, she’d done all sorts of exciting things and done all the things that she wanted to do, and if she wanted to have help around the house, she could afford it. As soon as she reframed that belief, she got pregnant, not a problem.
This client had one child and she was a doctor. Her mother had said to her that she didn’t believe she could cope with her career and another child, that she better just stick to one. She had been trying for 3 years and couldn’t get pregnant.
She went into hypnosis, went back to the scene where her mother had said to her she wasn’t going to manage with two children, talked about it, and reframed it that there are many different ways to parent, that she could get help, and again, about 5 months later she was pregnant with a healthy boy.
What was holding her back was the belief that she couldn’t have her career and cope with two children.
So, you can see how these negative beliefs can cause massive issues, and they’re things that my clients weren’t even aware of, and they were quite surprised when they came up. They were unaware that they had these beliefs. – expresses Andrea.
Andrea concludes by saying hypnotherapy can help with:
The three core areas make a massive, massive difference which is why I love working with my clients because it’s just brilliant when you can see the change when you know that they’re pregnant and they’re having a healthy baby. – says Andrea.
I guess I was probably too old. Now, bear in mind, I had classic hypnosis, so I didn’t have RTT, which looks at limiting beliefs, and I know perfectly well now that I had a very, very strong limiting belief which I honestly think that if I had RTT at the start of my journey, things would be different. I wouldn’t change the way my story worked out. I ended up having donor eggs, but I wouldn’t change that for the world because I have two beautiful children whom I adore, and I wouldn’t swap them for anything. For me, the classic hypnotherapy had relaxed me and allowed me to see that there was a different route, which was the donor egg route. I’m not convinced that without it, I would’ve gone down that route, but for me, the doctors said ‘Your hormone levels are low, they’re just not responding to treatment, and the egg quality is not good’, so I guess by the time I went into donor eggs it was that the eggs were just not viable. But I wonder if I had RTT when I was 38 when I started, I think things would have been different, but who knows?
Everybody can be hypnotized, but it’s a choice. If you didn’t want to be hypnotized, I couldn’t do it, it’s a choice. Some people are more suggestible than others, so it works better on some people, but everybody can be hypnotized. It’s possible to hypnotize everybody. Hypnotherapy will support and help everybody, but it doesn’t mean that hypnotherapy allows everybody to get pregnant, depending on what’s going on with that body. It helps with stress, I’ve not had one client who has not felt different and just said, ‘Oh, you know, I just feel so much ease,’ or the husband has said, ‘You’re like a completely different person this round; you’re chill. ’ It’ll work whether there’s a subconscious block that’s the reason that somebody isn’t getting pregnant. It’s not always the subconscious block; sometime’s some things are going on physically, as with me, the age of the eggs, but yes, absolutely everybody can be hypnotized.
I do RTT, which is what I like to describe as hypnotherapy on steroids. Generally, for RTT, it’s between 1 and 3 sessions, I would say 90% of my clients have one session, and the other 10 have two sessions. I’ve never had a client who had three sessions. So, hypnotherapy is very different. It would be a lot more sessions because it’s working differently, it’s just giving positive suggestions, so I would say between one or two sessions. But, if somebody came to me and said, ‘I’m starting IVF this week, ’ I would tell them not to have a session with me because I would ask them to come back if the IVF didn’t work. You do need to allow time for it to take effect, ideally, I would say three months minimum. I don’t want you to waste your money because it does take time to embed the beliefs.
I normally allow three hours for the session, which doesn’t take three hours under hypnosis. However, I do like to deal with whatever comes up, and you can’t always tell what’s going to come up. Also, I like to have time to talk to the client after the session and give them whatever time they need to discuss things, so I took out three hours.
Normally, the sessions take about an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, depending on how complicated it is, and that goes hand in hand with the question about how many sessions you need because issues can be like onions; you might peel off the one layer and then something else might be underneath as well, and that’s when generally you would need two sessions. However, it would be chatting to the client after about three weeks listening to the recording, checking in with them saying how are things going, how are you feeling, and what shifted, and then finding out at about three weeks, deciding whether I might say ‘well listen to the recording for a few more weeks and then we’ll talk’ or ‘no, I think that I know what’s come up in the session’. I have a very good instinct when somebody is going to need another session, I might say, ‘Well, my recommendation would be that you have a second session, ’ but that’s from experience.
Yes, I only do online, and not just because of COVID-19. I like doing online sessions because clients are more relaxed, generally, in their own homes. I don’t like clients driving immediately after they’ve had a session, and sometimes, it’s difficult for me to say to a client ‘Well you need to sit outside for half an hour. ’ When they’re in their own home, they feel more relaxed, and they just think it works well.
I also work with clients all over the world, so they can’t often come to see me. I’ve had a couple of clients who’ve just said to me, and live in my area, I’m in Wales, I’m completely zoomed out. Furthermore, I just can’t deal with another Zoom session. I do have a clinic, and I’ll take them to it if necessary, but I prefer the online sessions. and there’s no difference in how effective it is, whether it’s online or in person, it makes no difference whatsoever.
Because some people have quite analytical minds. There are different methods of taking somebody into hypnosis, so I normally do some tests when I first talk to somebody at the start of the session to see how suggestible they are. Some people are very suggestible, but as I’m taking clients into hypnosis, I’m testing all along to see how they’re doing. If I felt that somebody wasn’t in the right state, then there are other resources I would pull in. However, what’s interesting is that people sometimes think they need to be in a really deep state of hypnosis, and you don’t.
When you hypnotize children, they wriggle, open their eyes, scratch, and do all sorts of stuff, but it works brilliantly. It’s not the depth of the trance that matters; some people will go into a very deep state, and they will be much more Theta. Other people will be in a lighter state. When I’m hypnotized, I’m in a much lighter state, but it still has a brilliant effect. It’s not actually how deep the state is. I think that’s a misconception, and if that’s not explained to a client beforehand, what tends to happen is the client lying there, thinking it’s not working, and that thought is what’s causing the issue because there’s a little part of the mind going ‘well, I have just heard a fire engine go past, this is not working, I don’t feel in this deep state, it can’t be working’.
So, I like to explain to my clients that if a fire engine goes past, they will hear it; it’s not a problem. They will not feel like they’ve been knocked out; they’ll just feel pleasantly relaxed. It’s like having a relaxed conversation with their eyes closed, and when people know that upfront, I think it diffuses all those problems with the overactive mind trying to analyse everything, which is often a reason for somebody being a bit resistant.
No. I think a 4-hour hypnosis session would be a very good idea. But if you mean, ‘Can you have too many hypnosis sessions?’, no, because it’s taking you into a state that’s very good for you. When you’re in that state, the body can start repairing itself, so it’s physically very good for you. You can’t have too much hypnosis – absolutely none- but you could have a too-long hypnosis session, which is a different thing. If I were to take you into a session and spend ages and ages, you might come out feeling exhausted and a bit woozy. You could deal with too much in one session; for example, I would only ever deal with one issue in a session.
If somebody comes to me and they’ve got a weight issue that’s affecting their fertility, they come to me for fertility, but they’ve got a weight issue, I’m not going to do weight and fertility in the same session because it would be too long a session, too much information, overwhelmed for the mind. I would probably say, depending on their BMI, ‘let’s look at your weight first, get you a good BMI to give you all the chances, and then we’ll look at the fertility’, but getting your weight down so that you’re at a healthy weight is going to increase your chance of fertility in itself. If you try to deal with a whole load of issues in one go, that would not be good, and it would overwhelm and confuse the mind.
