Valerie’s ‘new lease of life’ after hypnotherapy
7:00am Sunday 1st November 2009

Success story: Hypnotherapist Philip Monaghan with

Valerie Yates, from Horwich

DEPRESSION is a difficult thing to have to live with and the recession is not making things any easier.

But help is on hand in the form of hypnotherapist Philip Monaghan, who believes all current problems have a root cause that needs treating before the patient can recover.

That means, says Mr Monaghan, that although the patient believes, for instance, the economic crisis is causing their depression, it will actually be something that happened much further back, perhaps even in their childhood.

Apparently, we all carry these events around with us but have put them, literally, to the back of our minds.

But when something stressful comes along — the death of a relative, a job loss or marriage break-up — those past events come to the surface and bring on the depression.

What Mr Monaghan does is allow the patient to bring those locked-away past experiences back into their conscious mind, deal with them and move on.

For depression and social anxiety there is no suggestion therapy involved. People are not told how to deal with it, instead they are given the tools to work it out for themselves.

It may sound complicated, but it works, and Valerie Yates is proof of that.

Valerie, aged 51, from Horwich, was suffering from depression and anxiety until she met Mr Monaghan.

She would not have been able to face a camera or chat with a journalist before she discovered hynotherapy. The idea would have filled her with dread.

Even going out shopping with her daughter was an ordeal, while parties and family occasions were a nightmare.

Now Valerie has a new lease of life, having worked through her anxiety and depression through the hypnotherapy.

She finally managed to talk about something that happened to her as a small child — although she is reluctant to reveal what that was — and rid herself of the problems that were blighting her life.

Valerie had tried different treatments before opting to give hypnotherapy a try.

She said: “I can enjoy going shopping with my daughter, which is something I used to endure.”

It has changed Valerie’s life for the better and that of husband, Garry, aged 48, and children, Alex, aged 18 and Collette, aged 15.

This Christmas will be the first one the family has properly enjoyed in years.

To Mr Monaghan it all makes perfect sense. He said: “As children, things happen to us and we store them away. It’s a coping mechanism and it works really well.

“But they can cause us problems when something else happens in our life and that then becomes the trigger for the depression or anxiety.

“It can be something traumatic that has happened or something as simple as dropping an ice cream. To a child that is a terrible event and it can stay locked away for years.”

Mr Monaghan knows the treatment works as he was treated for depression by Nigel Isherwood, from who he took over at the practice in St George’s Road, Bolton.

He treats a wide range of problems and phobias some of which can solved in one session, using different therapies, including smoking cessation.