Age regression is a way of accessing one’s memories from an earlier time. This can be helpful to remember what has been forgotten or to release emotional trauma from an earlier time. The unconscious mind has the ability to repress memories, which would occur particularly if the memory has some negative emotion attached to it, negative emotion, which the individual would be unable to deal with. However, when the unconscious knows you are ready to deal with that emotion, it can represent those memories for resolution.

Sometimes, we can remember events from the past and continue to recreate the negative emotions that went with them. Age regression can be particularly useful in this area, in fact, an NLP technique called Change Personal History, can help a person to change the way they represent their memories to themselves.

Due to the power of the unconscious, which is also responsible for creating the imagination, care and gentle indifference must be considered when performing age regression using hypnosis for traumatic memories that have been forgotten. This is because the imagination may create scenarios which justify the feelings. These scenarios may be real memories, or they may not be.

When using age regression to remember more generic things that have been forgotten, e.g. losing your keys, age regression in hypnosis can be a particularly useful tool. All of your memories are stored in the unconscious, so even if you cannot consciously remember where you left your keys, there is a part of you that knows. (And it will usually remind you as soon as you stop thinking about the keys!) Hypnosis can be used to retrace the steps taken just before the loss of memory, and ideomotor signals can be used as a direct way of communicating with the unconscious. These are generally yes and no signals which are given in answer to questions by unconscious movements, such as a finger being raised to indicate yes, and a different finger being raised to indicate no.

“Going back to a period of my life and dealing with the problems means I now have the whole of the rest of my life to look forward to.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk