Your phone rings. You answer it and a person on the other end says: “I have diabetes. I just can’t seem to control my food cravings and my glycosylated hemoglobin is 9. Can hypnosis help me?”

This article will help you to turn this caller into a client because you are about to discover one of the most important diabetic statistics that exists and that you must be knowledgeable about. This knowledge will make you much more credible as a coach to this person in need. Also, you are going to learn the Diabetes A.C.E. Short Session System TM that is very useful with a majority of clients.

Critical Diabetes Information

Every person with diabetes must know (and many don’t) what their Glycosylated (gli-ko-se-lay-tid) Hemoglobin (HbA1c) is and what it means. HbA1c is also called Glycohemoglobin or Hemoglobin A1c.

HbA1c is crucial to understand because it is a long-term measurement of a diabetic’s blood sugar levels. This test is typically performed by a doctor (there are home test kits available) and it provides a 3 month average of a person’s sugar levels.

Normal numbers for non-diabetics are 4-6%. For people with diabetes, their ‘normal’ levels are 4-6.5%.
Anything over 7% is dangerous.

This test literally measures the amount of sugar that attaches to the protein in a red blood cell. So, the higher a person’s sugar levels are, the more sugar attaches to a red blood cell and the higher their HbA1 level is. Knowing about this is crucial to your credibility and ability to responsibly work with a person who has diabetes.

Here’s a scary but important piece of information: if sugar levels are uncontrolled (over 7% HbA1c) a person with diabetes stands a 76% greater chance of having serious eye problems most likely resulting in blindness. A person with uncontrolled diabetes has a 60% greater chance of having life-threatening kidney problems. And there are many more scary statistics.

By the way, I do not suggest throwing these statistics at your client. Most diabetics already have a full itinerary for their guilt trip. However, if and when you do consult with a client’s physician, it is good for you to be able to let that health care provider know that you have a very clear sense of your potential contribution to their patient’s health and well being. Please realize that reducing a person’s chances of serious complications by even a few percentage points may make a crucial difference in their quality of life.

A Simple and Powerful Hypnosis Technique

So now that you know a critical piece of information relating to a diabetic’s condition, what can you do when they call and ask for help? Before moving into the A.C.E. short session (1-3) system, please notice that you can do one very interesting piece of work with the above information relating to numbers. Think of how many different ways you can help a person with diabetes to imagine changing their HbA1c number to a healthier level. Using a variety of fairly standard number changing scripts, you can encourage your client’s unconscious to create healthy changes in a limitless number of ways.

The Diabetes A.C.E. Short Session System ^TM

Let’s get into the A.C.E. short session system. It was originally created for my diabetic clients but it is not limited just to diabetes. In fact, it was designed to help my diabetic client’s successfully overcome a variety of obstacles; one at a time.

Each letter stands for two levels of action. A stands for Acceptance. You are going to hypnotically encourage in your client, acceptance of their condition. One of the biggest roadblocks to successful diabetes treatment is denial. One reason for this is that for the most part, diabetes is not a problem until it becomes a serious life-threatening problem. This is because symptoms are generally not alarming in the initial stages of diabetes. Another reason for denial is that it is extremely difficult to acknowledge within oneself the challenge of having a life-long disease that a person is reminded of every day by having to take medications and monitor blood sugar levels.

The second action aspect represented by the letter A is for the therapist to Anchor positive resources within the client. For example, let’s say your client has a tendency to feel like a victim in the face of the disease. Your work is to help them find (from their past most likely) a time when they overcame a significant challenge. Another example of a positive resource to anchor is their ability to create a support structure in response to difficulty. Perhaps in the past your client was able to master a school project by enlisting help from other people and resources.

C stands for Control at the first action level and Create New Options at the second action level. It is vital that the client be given some sense of control over their life. You can bet that it is very likely they have had their sense of safety and security ripped away from them by something they can’t even really see.

Creating New Options is challenging because it is hard for a person to get past deep fear. A very useful technique is the NLP New Behavior Generator. Be aware that this technique takes time and commitment but it does produce results.

E stands for Expectations. There are also two action levels for this third part of the short session system. One, find out their current expectations. Not their conscious expectations, but unconscious. In a nutshell, this involves diving deep into their fears. F.E.A.R.—Future Events Appearing Real. Once you have helped them to shed light on deep emotional dynamics, they will have more ability to do the second action step. This step is to create different expectations. Please believe that telling a client in trance that they will suddenly start checking their blood sugars and eating the right foods is not always effective because there is an almost invisible wall of fearful images blocking those suggestions.

A fellow hypnotist called a few weeks ago and asked the following question: “Devin, my diabetic client tells me they want to change and make better choices but they are actually getting worse. Do you have any idea why are they resisting my suggestions?”

My answer was to ask what steps had been taken prior to utilizing direct suggestion. I found out that other than the usual Ellman induction and a standard intake, nothing had been done to discover his client’s deep expectations. I explained the A.C.E. system to my caller and two weeks later he called me to let me know that every time he had been suggesting to his client that she positively change her habits, she had been responding inwardly with the fearful idea of “What if I don’t change? What if it only gets worse?” Since she was in trance, that idea became very powerful. The answer? Find your client’s fears, acknowledge them and then show your client good, solid evidence proving the effectiveness of hypnosis.

Next article we face the challenge of how to responsibly and effectively help a client who can only do one session. See you then!
 

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