Get Rid of Guilt

Someone once said “Guilt is interest on a debt that need never be repaid.“
Guilt is an emotion that is limiting and draining. It is mentally and physically destructive to us. It is also harmful to those around us.

Many people spend their lives in anguish due to feelings of guilt and shame. We fear that if we were to expose our true selves, then no one will love us. We believe that no one will understand what it is we have gone through - in our lives and the way we operate. When we make what we perceive are mistakes, we isolate ourselves emotionally and in some cases literally. We think that we are the only ones who have experienced a particular situation and fear that we will be judged if we share our experience with others so many choose to suffer in silence.

So many people are brought up with highly religious backgrounds. Often, authority figures in religions teach more about sins or what you mustn't/shouldn't do than they teach about love or what's right and what you should do. Consequently many people feel guilty about simply being who they were born to be.

So how can you get rid of guilt?

Firstly it's worth remembering that all guilt is self-inflicted and created by the mind. It is a feeling that we choose to experience. The feeling is rooted in our ego; a fear of not being accepted by the peers in our social group. So many people try to ignore feelings or describe them as a psychiatric illness, rather than a part of being a human responding to the world. The easiest and best way to rid yourself of guilt is to:

Fully Experiencing the Feeling
As with overcoming any emotion, the best way is to fully experience it. Spend a few minutes in uninterrupted space, close your eyes, now fully and deeply feel the guilt surge over you. Witness it as a third-person. It will be scary at first and probably hurt a bit, but just go with it, it’s an experience that will help you overcome the feeling. As you fully witness the feeling, you will notice the feeling slowly fade away.

Seek to Understand Why
We know that there's more beneath the surface of why we feel guilt. Ask yourself why? Why are you choosing to allow guilt into your life? What is it about this feeling that is serving you and your ego?

Accept that there's nothing you can do to change the past.
You did the best you could with the resources you had at the time. Know that you were as good, loving, and effective as you could have been. If you were able to go back in time, you couldn't do anything differently because that's who you were and that's what you knew then. Constantly going over what you could've or should've done is pointless. If you can't go back to the past, then why are we spending energy on it?

Ask yourself the following question:
“Have I punished myself enough for what I did or didn’t do?” Since guilt is self-punishment, go straight to it and ask yourself if you want to keep suffering more, or are you willing to let it go? If the matter is closed and nothing can really be done to correct the problem, then the best thing that can be done is to forgive yourself and do better in the future.

Focus on What You Can Do Now
Instead of things you haven't done. Distinguish between what's right for you to do and what you do or don't do because you're guilt ridden. Don't let other people's values dictate the way you live your life. Decide for yourself what's important to you, what you value, or the way you wish to be. Don't expect to be pleasant, wise, and even-tempered at all times. It's normal to feel irritable or angry occasionally. Feeling guilty about negative emotions is futile.
That’s not to say we have carte blanche to behave any way we like regardless of other's feelings, but we do need to stop beating ourselves up for simply living our own lives.

Hypnotherapy and the Prevention of Recurring Ulcers

An ulcer is a wound that develops inside the body where acid and digestive juices eat away at the mucous lining. Duodenal ulcers are ulcers in the duodenum which is the upper part of the small intestine that connects to the stomach. Symptoms of a duodenal ulcer include heartburn, burning in the throat, and abdominal pain. These symptoms are most likely to occur a few hours after eating and are more likely to occur when acidic foods are ingested.

Treatment of duodenal ulcers is highly effective with the use of drugs such as ranitidine, H2 receptor antagonists, and tripotassium dicitratobismuthate. However studies have shown that anywhere from 60% to 90% of people who suffer from duodenal ulcers relapse within one year of treatment.

According to an article published in the U.K. medical journal The Lancet, a study was performed to test whether hypnotherapy would play a role in preventing relapses in people who suffered from duodenal ulcers. The study consisted of 30 people of whom 14 were women, 16 were men, and the average age was 40. All participants had been diagnosed with the disease through an endoscopy. They also experienced relapses with the most recent relapse being within the past six months.

Treatment for the thirty participants included taking the drug ranitidine. The ulcer was given time to heal and was shown to have healed through an endoscopy. All participants continued to take the drug for ten more weeks. The patients were divided into two groups. One group received seven hypnosis sessions and was given a recording of the sessions to listen to on their own. The other group did not receive hypnosis during their sessions. The participants were taken off the medication and follow-up reviews (with hypnotherapy sessions for the hypnosis group) were performed every three months for the next year.

The hypnosis sessions consisted of an induction to promote relaxation. The participants in the hypnosis group were told to focus their attention and relaxation on their abdomen. They were told to imagine feeling a sense of warmth over their abdomen and the warmth was to control the secretion of stomach acid. They were asked to visualize this process.

All participants were reviewed after one year. The relapse rate in the hypnosis group was 53% compared to 100% in the control group. Statistically this comparison was significant. The study showed that hypnosis can help those who have frequent duodenal ulcers. Hypnosis was shown to be a successful form of treatment along side of medication.

Source:

The Lancet. June 11, 1988. 1299-1300.

Hypnosis may ease inflammation in colitis

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Hypnosis therapy may help ease some of the bowel inflammation seen in ulcerative colitis, a small study suggests.

Ulcerative colitis is a disease that causes chronic inflammation in the lining of the colon and rectum, leading to symptoms such as abdominal pain and diarrhea. There a number of medications for the disorder, but there is some research to suggest that hypnosis could serve as an additional therapy.

For example, "hypnotherapy" has been shown to aid irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers -- conditions that, like colitis, involve inflammation and can be worsened by psychological stress.

For the current study, UK researchers had 17 patients with active ulcerative colitis undergo a 50-minute session of "gut-focused" hypnotherapy aimed at relaxation and relief of inflammation. Another eight patients, who acted as a "control" group, listened to their choice of music for 50 minutes.

Afterward, the researchers found, blood levels of IL-6 -- a marker of inflammation in the body -- fell by 53 percent in the hypnosis group, whereas music listeners showed no substantial change.

Similarly, certain other chemical markers of inflammation declined in the hypnosis group, but not in the control group, the investigators report in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

"This work shows that a single short session of hypnosis can return some of the chemical changes in the bowel associated with inflammation back towards normal in patients with ulcerative colitis," senior researcher Dr. David S. Rampton, of Barts and the London, Queen Mary School of Medicine and Dentistry, told Reuters Health.

Exactly why hypnosis might ease inflammation is not clear. According to Rampton's team, the therapy might have direct effects on colon activity or it might affect people's pain tolerance or perceptions of their symptoms.

The current findings, Rampton said, provide "a scientific basis for a properly designed clinical trial" to see whether hypnotherapy, given over weeks or months, might benefit people with ulcerative colitis.

He noted that it could also be worthwhile to study hypnosis for people with Crohn's disease, another form of inflammatory bowel disease.

SOURCE: American Journal of Gastroenterology, June 2008.

Why being angry is bad news for the healing process

A fascinating article on the BBC website today:

'Anger control' key to recovery
Learning to control your anger may may also speed up the healing process after surgery, US research suggests.
The Brain Behavior and Immunity study indicates stress has a major impact on the body's ability to repair itself.

Nearly 100 participants were asked to rate how well they could control their temper, and the speed at which they recovered from a blister was monitored. Hotheads were more than four times likely to take more than four days to heal than mild-mannered counterparts.

The team at Ohio State University gave participants blisters on one of their arms and then monitored how the wound healed over the course of eight days. They were asked to fill in a questionnaire which looked at how anger was expressed - whether externally, by shouting at others, for instance, or internally, when one rages insides but keeps a cool exterior. They were also asked to judge their general ability to manage their anger.

Whether one directed one's anger externally or internally proved to have no bearing on recovery - what was crucial was just how much control the individual was able to exert over their feelings. Those with low anger control produced higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which was in turn, associated with delayed healing. "Such stress-induced delays in healing could increase the susceptibility to infection at the wound site, a process that fuels further decrease in the speed of repair," the team, led by Jean-Philippe Gouin, wrote. They suggested that therapeutic strategies such as relaxation, or even cognitive therapy, could help those at risk make a swifter recovery.

Bedside manner
The team sought to ensure the association between anger control and healing was not explained by other health factors by taking into account sleep, amount of physical activity and alcohol consumption. Four participants ended up being excluded because these details were missing, but for the rest of them, anger control still proved to be the most significant factor affecting recovery. The findings also tally with others in the field of stress and recovery.

One study for example found women caring for a spouse or parent with dementia took on average 24% longer to heal a wound than a control group. Another found that even marital spats could slow down recovery from a simple wound.

Steve Bloom, professor of metabolic medicine at Imperial College, London, said stress was now increasingly recognized as a factor in recovery rates. "Your body prioritises and sorts one thing out at a time, so if you are stressed - angry in this case - your body works through that before it gets on with the process of healing. "We've yet to see a study that categorically proves having an attentive, calming presence by your bedside actually speeds up your recovery, but the evidence is certainly pointing that way."