An example of this would be growing up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family system. Having the experience of sitting at the dinner table with an explosive parent who pounds the table and emphatically yells, “You’re not leaving this table until you eat everything on your plate!” or sitting at the dining room table night after night with parents who are fighting, drunk or screaming at the children might cause children growing up in this family to draw the conclusion, “I’m a bad person.” Or “I’m not safe, even in my own family.” Then those conclusions may be followed by an unconscious decision about how to behave in order to feel safe. That decision might be, “I’ll just become invisible—if I become really small, perhaps no one will notice me and then I’ll be safe.”
Later on in life, such people may wonder why they cannot really be successful in reaching goals in their lives. They become aware, perhaps in cognitive therapy or counseling, that they keep on sabotaging themselves, hiding their own light, so to speak. Getting it all figured out in the conscious mind is certainly a good first step. But after lots of time and money spent trying to change this behavior of self-sabotage by talking about it, analyzing it and deciding to be different, most of us have learned the hard way that the self-sabotage continues!
Hypnotherapy has proven to be a most effective and efficient path to creating change within ourselves and our clients. Through hypnotherapy we learn that the way to change these old, stubborn patterns that have plagued most people for a majority of their lives is to have direct access to the unconscious mind, discover what conclusions and decisions are still operating and re-program them. This is just like the operating system of your computer. If you don’t upgrade the old system, it will no longer be functional. The old programs are just not sufficient to serve you. Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool in re-programming what no longer serves your highest good.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HYPNOSIS AND HYPNOTHERAPY: AGE REGRESSION
Hypnosis is the process of getting a person relaxed and giving them suggestions that may or may not help them get their desired results. They may stop smoking or lose weight or decrease their anxiety. However, these hypnotically-suggested changes are often temporary, because while hypnosis has provided access to the unconscious mind and its “operating system,” it has not addressed the underlying motivation for continuing behaviors, no matter how self-limiting or self-injurious. The actual motivation, the primal conclusions and decisions, need to be found, resolved and released.
The most effective and efficient way to discover the unconscious conclusions and decisions still operating in one’s life is to go back to the source, back to the formative experiences which dictated forming those beliefs and choosing behaviors to deal with them. Hypnotherapy provides an ideal vehicle for that journey back to the source, because it provides us direct access to the unconscious mind where these long-term memories and deeply held beliefs are stored. We call that journey age regression because it involves much more than remembering a past experience; it creates the opportunity to re-experience a past event as if it is happening now. In age regression, an individual feels the emotions deeply, the body sensations kinesthetically and the trauma or conflict acutely. The experience draws in all the original chaos, confusion, immaturity and helplessness. There is a huge difference between the original experience and the age-regressed experience: this time the individual is not alone. The therapist is available to suggest alternative responses and to encourage empowerment. An individual in an age-regressed trauma can revise the original scene, can yell at the abusive parent, “Stop it! You have no right to treat me this way!” or can kick and scream and repel the attack of a sexual abuser. Then, in this newly created state of personal power and self-respect, the person’s old conclusions about being weak or stupid or worthless unravel. New beliefs of self-worth and belonging and personal power automatically emerge. These new beliefs, together with the immediacy of a successful rehearsal of new behaviors, establish a profound shift in the person’s whole being.
After thousands of hypnotherapy sessions and an immense body of research, we have determined that most of our lifelong patterns do begin very early in our lives—in early childhood, at birth, during our time in the womb and even at the moment of conception! All this invaluable information is stored in the vaults of our unconscious minds. Hypnotherapy is the key to unlocking this valuable wealth of information and to changing these patterns where they began. That’s how a new pattern can emerge.
For people who have never experienced hypnotherapy, it may seem unbelievable that you could return to your early childhood or birth, let alone your conception, and that it could have an effect on your life. Yet many people have had these life-changing age regressions in hypnotherapy.
An example is Abigail, an intelligent, well-educated woman who has a small private psychotherapy practice. She wants to expand her services and begin offering groups. But something has kept her from taking the steps to make this happen. She balks at speaking to church groups or service clubs in her community, feeling a gnawing sense of doom at even the thought of standing before a group of people and being the center of attention. Abigail began a hypnotherapy session with this self-sabotaging fear, and very soon found herself back in the first grade, feeling humiliated by the teacher and her fellow students as she stumbled in trying to tell about her summer vacation. The therapist tapped her forehead and took her back to an earlier time when she had the same experience of shame. Abigail was a tiny fetus, only a matter of weeks old, at the very moment that her mother discovered that she was pregnant out of wedlock. Abigail’s mother’s fear and shame was palpable for the fragile new life inside her, and Abigail felt responsible (“If only I wasn’t here, my mother wouldn’t feel so bad”). Her conclusion about herself in that crucial moment was, “I am shameful. My existence causes pain for others.”
How did this little fetus try to defend herself from the pain of that felt rejection? She decided to become as small and invisible as possible, to fly under the radar. The source trauma for Abigail was her sense of rejection at the moment of discovery, and that prototype experience was replayed many times throughout her childhood, for example, in her experience in the first grade. She had never understood the sense of doom that plagued her at even the thought of public speaking, and was powerless to overcome it no matter how many motivational talks she attended or recited to herself. But now Abigail understood viscerally the deep, existential basis for that fear—deep in her unconscious, it really was a matter of life or death! With her newfound insight and reclaimed sense of worth, she was much more able to bring her ideas forward, enroll her classes and even do some public speaking. It was now okay for her to be seen.
HYPNOTHERAPY AND JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY
These self-sabotaging, self-limiting aspects of ourselves are long-held patterns of behavior motivated by deep and unconscious beliefs and defenses. In Jungian psychology these are called shadow parts. These shadow parts are actually hidden parts of our personalities—hidden, that is, to us but certainly not to our friends, family and co-workers. Shadow parts are akin to the blind spot in a rear view mirror. Even though the car passing on our left side is nearly upon us, we cannot see it. Examples of personal blind spots or shadow parts may be having the self-concept that we are loving, kind mothers, wives and friends and then losing control and lashing out at those closest to us, then later on acting as if nothing has happened. It’s like the car we don’t see in the rear view mirror until it is suddenly in front of us and we continue on our journey as if we had seen it all the time.
Another example is believing that we are fair, kind and accepting and then listening to the voice of our inner judge who stands back and mentally criticizes or finds fault with others, nearly continuously. Perhaps outwardly we act normally, giving them compliments about how nice they look, how accomplished they are or what great friends they have come to be. The running, shadow dialogue in our heads is quite to the contrary: “What an ugly dress; he/she is an idiot and will never get anywhere. I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them.” These inner dialogues indicate that our shadow parts have actually formed an alliance within us called a complex
