Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy
Permissive style, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and/or Authoritarian Elman inductions.
Help clients with various issues and problems: Unconscious Resources for Natural Performance and Revivification; Induction of relaxation; Hypnotic Dissociation followed by Deep Relaxation Protocol; Unconscious Review and Integration to awaken skills, abilities and memories; Unconscious Clearing followed by Pain Release Format; Deep Trance and change work; Neuro Hypnotic Healing; Revivification; Deep Trance Identification; Hypnotherapy for weight-loss; Hypnotherapy for smoking; hypnotherapy for addictions or toxic habits.
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What is Trance?
It is a naturally occurring daily phenomena which shares strong resemblance to ‘hypnogogic’ state (the transition from waking to sleeping). Throughout the day and night, people go through cycles-biological rhythms- called ‘ultradian rhythms’. During these ultradian rhythms we enter something very similar to a trance state, some may call it ‘going offline’. For example, a student in a classroom whilst they are listening to the lecture, the mind may wander off somewhere and the attention shifts from external to internal. If and when the attention is brought again to external stimuli- in the case of our above example, the teacher asks that particular student what was just said and he/she doesn’t remember, that is they have no conscious awareness of what just occurred or was occurring in a certain time frame. These trance states occur at least every 90 minutes, without going into the reasons behind them, what’s important here to note is that trance is a natural occurring state and by using the right tools, a skilled hypnotherapist will together with the client utilize such a state to help solve deeply imbedded thought patterns or imprints as well as understanding automatizations of behaviour. In trance, as Milton Erickson noted, our attention narrows down and is focused to what is immediately important at that time. Thus in such a state, we can access also our memories and gather unconscious resources that will be used consciously out of trance.
Conscious Mind and Consciousness.
The conscious mind is attributed to the representations you are aware of in a given moment, or the immediate mental map which you have conscious access to. The conscious mind expresses through the internal framework of systems running and assigning commentary to the events you experience at a given moment or moments.
Consciousness, defined by Marvin Rosen(2006)* is ‘’a total perception of thoughts, memories, feelings and experiences of which we are aware’’. Thus consciousness is a purely subjective experience. What we experiences consciously is a very small fraction of perceived compared to unconsciously; we are mainly unaware and additionally to that pay attention to a selective few perceptions at a time, namely the ones that we have an interest is or are deemed important. Psychologists would therefore agree that consciousness is selective attention and that there are several levels of consciousness where the highest can be termed as the total focus on a situation/matter and the lowest level, unconscious likewise the middle to lower ones is where the mind wanders and where we ‘let our guards down’.
*Rosen, Marvin(2006). Meditation and Hypnosis. NY: Infobase Publishing.
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Unconscious Mind:
The unconscious mind, with respect to above, is everything in the mind-body system that isn’t conscious at a given moment or situation. The unconscious mind is a colossal library which holds the complete knowledge that makes ‘you’ at the essence and so compared to the conscious mind, it excels in its processing capabilities. Take this extraordinary illustration, at this moment while you are reading this text, your unconscious mind is going through the archives of all your learnings, expediencies, filters etc while at the same time regulating your body functions such as pumping blood to your heart; digestion; breathing; cleansing lymph cells; healing any internal or external issues; counteracting antibodies which come into your body system. This is just a small fraction of what happens in glimpses and seconds let alone minutes of your current state. Numerous research has shown an astounding case, that our unconscious mind absorbs millions bits of sensory information through the nervous system in just one second. Within a person’s unconscious are all elements of past experiences as well as learnings through all senses (mentally and physically). These are all stored representations and when we select a given experience or memory, our unconscious mind presents it to the current representation. Memories and experiences can change based on awareness and based on states (internal and external), through hypnosis we enter a state that is beneficial to understand and fully associate to in order to gather resources that are missing in our conscious awareness and life.
Features of Conscious Mind
1) Can recall up to seven or more chunks of information
2) Is sequential and operates in sequence pattern
3) Is organized, logical and linear
4) Operates in waking state and is most active then
5) Controls voluntary movements
6) Is aware of the now
7) Utilizes cognition
8) Seeks solutions and is orientated towards outcomes
9) Analytical
10) Has limited focus
11) Is the domain of language
Features of Unconscious Mind
1) Stores your whole experience and all your memories (past representations)
2) Has simultaneous processing
3) Makes judgment based on intuition
4) Makes associations
5) Experiences feelings
6) Is most active in sleeping and dreaming states
7) is accessed in altered states
8) controls involuntary movements
9) utilizes wisdom of body
10) creates solutions
11) binds the physical body
12) communicates through sensation
Emotions Vs Feelings
Emotions are just expressions, a feedback that it expressed by the body through sensations and feelings. They are categorized, labelled and filtered through the mind and called anger; rage; worry; anxiety or fear. We have certain feelings which connected to thought and thought processes which in turn connect to somatic processes of emotional expressions. Through our state, the unconscious mind and its signals along with our thought patterns (and imprints) prompts us to have an experience of an emotion. The feelings and sensations are not the same as the label we assign to emotion but repetitive thought and automatization of our minds through habits and learning have created labels for each emotion and what they mean. What truly is felt, its intensity and extent along with the finer components of our internal reference structure may be far away from the label, what’s more every person experiences differently each nominalization, also known as emotions.
The Unconscious Mind and Emotions
Our unconscious mind expresses itself through feelings and sensations in the body, as well as habits and habitual practices, for example: feeling pain, feeling dizzy etc.
The conscious mind tries to make sense of the environment internally and externally, naturally since its domain is language and structure, it assigns labels to these unconscious processes. Emotions felt in the body are sensations and through our mind and filters we nominalize this experience and express it as emotion. When this is done, we loose touch with the true feeling and may find ourselves too busy trying to explain an emotion and forgetting or even at times altering the original sensations/feelings experienced in the body at certain locations.
The key to change lies within the unconscious mind restructure and bringing it forward as homework for the conscious mind.
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Submodalities
This is an NLP term, briefly stated it means the finer components that create structure of our internal representations- so how we encode our internal pictures, sounds and feelings to create meaning for our representations. The power here lies in change, if the structure can be changed, then so will the meaning.
According to core NLP research, each person’s brain seems to code emotional significance differently through variations in mental “image” or representation. Examples found include people whose unconscious minds place black borders around bad memories, people for whom visual images seen dimly are less compelling than those seen brightly, people for whom a subjectively “good” memory is accompanied by one kind of sound whilst a “bad” memory is accompanied by another, and so on.
Submodalities listed according to the three representational systems:
Visual:
Black & White or Colour
Near or Far
Bright or Dim
Location
Size of Picture
Associated / Dissociated
Focused or De-focused
Framed or Unbounded
Movie or Still
If a Movie-Fast/Normal/Slow
3 Dimensional or Flat Loud or Soft
Near or Far
Internal or External
Location
Auditory:
Stereo or Mono
Fast or Slow
High or Low Pitch
Verbal or Tonal
Rhythm
Clarity
Pauses Strong or Weak
Kinaesthetic:
Large Area or Small Area
Weight: Heavy or Light
Location
Texture: Smooth or Rough
Constant or Intermittent
Temperature: Hot or Cold
Size
Shape
Pressure
Vibration
Filters: Values, Beliefs and Metaprograms
Through the thorough work of Neuro Linguistic Programming, we see that the world around us which we perceive and experience through our five senses( visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory) goes through a system of filters which are on different hierarchical levels and as such are conscious and unconscious. Whatever is our input from the environment( through the senses) and here we ascertain that the senses are in full function, the first set of filters are mainly neurological and therefore preconscious. This is very important to note here, preconscious, which means unconscious at particular moment. On this level we are not aware of constraints not until we first access it as an experience which is sensory based, eg. feel a touch; see an image; smell a flower; taste a fruit; hear a sound. It is here that the experience becomes conscious and then goes through a series of other filtering systems such as individual/personal and social/cultural. In order to make sense of the world we linguistically present it in our mind before an outcome or behaviour. In this mental linguistic representation there are yet more filters and here they take on a concrete filtering process. The filtering process composes of values, beliefs, metaprograms, memories(conscious and unconscious). The linguistic representations, before the behavioural output, also go through a system to ascribe meaning which is coded and constructed via 5 senses. Eg: ‘’this tastes like chicken’’; ‘’this tastes a bit like chicken’’; ‘’it is chicken’’; ‘’it isn’t chicken’’; ‘’its beef’’. The final behaviour output will be the outcome of the linguistic mental map that’s expressed through language( and its patterns and models) as well as nonverbal communication.
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The filters go through three processes( which are also terms for metamodel of behaviour) these are: Generalisation: When a specific experience ( or more experiences) are outlined to represent the complete category of which it is also a member. Eg: All women are inadequate; Every man is a charlatan. Distortion: Where the representation of something/someone and its parts are represented differently than how it was originally represented. Eg: ‘’Rich people are selfish’’. Deletion: When portions of the mental map aka deep structure( full linguistic representation) are deleted and don’t appear in the verbal expression aka surface structure. Eg: ‘’I hate her’’.
Values can be generally termed as what we hold most dear to us, the importance of something/someone and worth. Values also provide our motivations for doing what is deemed important to us in life, as well as offering evaluations. What’s quite important here to mention, once again, is that values are mainly unconscious as well as have a synaesthesia to them. This means that when a value is thought of or expressed there is a strong kinaesthetic attached to the word. They offer us unconscious blueprints which are placed or imprinted through developmental stages of one’s life; institutions of family and environment; personal experiences.
Beliefs, on the other hand, are more conscious than values. They are the generalisations which we make to support our value(s). These generalisations are about ourselves, our actions, intentions, others and systems. Therefore a belief system is a cluster of beliefs that support a value.
Core beliefs and values are formed through conscious and unconscious modelling(identification); significant emotional events which can be either positive or negative; conscious and unconscious decisions we make; and routine experiences and behaviours.
Awareness
When one is unaware, one is separate, in separation we build walls and defences and keep the loop of pain, emotions and other imprints, not understanding the prison we create unconsciously. We create multiple images of ourselves with certain expectations of each, certain roles and personas, but is it possible to live without an image of ourselves? The first step in resolving our ‘crisis’’ is through awareness and attention, through stepping out of our perceptual positions and taking a choice, giving a chance to experience something differently. The self is individual as it is collective, the self is aware as it is unaware, the self is an ongoing process and an invitation towards discovery of who one is independent of labels, stereotypes, identities and identifications.
Wholeness
Through integrating the unconscious mind and the conscious; tackling the frame of reference, understanding the choice(s) to be made and the willingness to take the necessary steps to a whole and unified self.