[Adapted from Dr Knight's Health and Happiness with Hypnosis]

You may be obsessed with someone: can't stop thinking about him or her, wondering what the person is doing. If the person was a romantic partner who rejected you, you may spend a lot of time wondering why you were dumped, reminiscing over the “good times” and scheming how to win your ex-lover back.

You Can Stop Obsessing -- You Can Forget

Forgetting Someone

Only when it becomes clear your cause is futile will you turn to face two tough questions:

“Why did I allow myself to become addicted?” and, “How can I forget about him [or her]?”

The first question requires psychotherapy, or a blunt friend with great insight. The second can be resolved with hypnotherapy.

The hypnotherapeutic technique basically involves you seeing the dumper as a “zero”, a non-person. Coupled with post-hypnotic suggestions about you being strong on your own, self-sufficient, and so on, this approach rids your mind of the emotional pain and obsessive needs you have associated with the dumper.

Hypnotherapy can help change the repetitive thoughts which otherwise strengthen your dependency.

Like Brenda, who had thoroughly convinced herself that “no decent guy would look at me twice”.

So Brenda settled for Garth, a married man who made lots of promises but seemed to find time only for sex. Brenda worshipped Garth.

Her women friends told Brenda to stop deceiving herself about Garth's intentions. But Brenda would not listen. She remained steadfastly faithful to Garth, thus cutting off any possibility of meeting a man who might be available. Only after Garth dumped her for a younger mistress did Brenda seek professional help.

With guidance from a hypnotherapist Brenda gradually came to see the truth about how she had shortchanged herself. Her low self-esteem had led her to believe she was unworthy of the love of a man she could fully respect.

This belief was perpetuated by her devotion to Garth, by the positive things she told herself about him, and the negative things she thought about herself.

But the more Brenda developed her own identity the less she needed to lean on Garth, or anyone else.

And the more self-reliant, the more attractive Brenda became to men who were looking for an intelligent female companion.

At the close of a series of hypnotherapy sessions, Brenda had become her own best friend, had shed the self-concepts of unworthiness and despair. She is now vibrant, confident and eager to meet a man as an equal, not as a dependent.