Self Hypnosis
Valerie Austin
Hypnosis is the most natural self-healing gift known to humanity. It is the key to changing old or unwanted behaviour patterns and creating new, positive habits.Whatever you want to do - stop smoking, lose weight, cope with stress, overcome your fear of spiders or just improve your snooker game - self-hypnosis will help you to harness your own inner power and change your life. Valerie Austin is a practising hypnotherapist who leads workshops and courses on self-hypnosis. She shares her years of experience and explains in simple terms the quick and easy-to-learn technique for hypnotising yourself. Your subconscious is actively working on your behalf in more ways than you can possibly imagine. With the scripts you need to hypnotise yourself easily and successfully, this book guides you step by step through the process of relaxing totally and programming your subconscious to help you get what you want out of life.
SELF-HYPNOSIS
The key to success and happiness
Valerie Austin
FOR MY SON
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ucde787e7-c34d-5540-9e83-f9be7f4e0f7d)
Title Page (#u4b2ebeaa-4d45-5c04-8dcd-162b349b656e)
Acknowledgements (#u01830709-e713-5064-8ed0-a3fe5a024928)
Author’s Note (#ub9818fa0-9b49-5772-b446-7c8b6980c6ea)
Glossary Of Terms (#u5fcc5e46-229c-51f7-a8d0-5e0f711f4f86)
Chapter 1 A Victim Of One’s Mind (#u8575f5e5-9c09-56e3-9b8e-abe22074ed16)
Chapter 2 The Subconscious (#u7c00d2d6-d18a-5864-9b9d-14ecb8a28ff5)
Chapter 3 Self-Hypnosis (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 Using Self-Hypnosis To Better Your Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 Client Case Histories (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Useful Addresses (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_9e429bf8-dd30-5bdf-90a3-d96c34c77548)
To Peter, my love and thanks for years of patience. My agent and friend Roy Stockdill, whose encouragement, loyalty and occasional bullying helped me enormously.
Gil Boyne, who was responsible for introducing me to hypnosis in the first place.
Ormond McGill, an American gentleman in the true sense of the word, who brought dignity to his wonderful skill.
My colleagues and friends, Pat and Vic Leslie, for many years of comradeship.
Frank Lennon of the British National Register of Advanced Hypnotherapists.
Kay Kiernan for being a loyal friend in difficult times.
All my students, each one expanding my experience.
My thousands of patients.
Dr Michael a’Brook, for sending me many of the above and for his wonderful sense of humour.
Dr Acharyya for his faith and support.
Mavis, Azman and Nina, Hj Ayub Abdul Ghani, Malaysia Airlines, the Malaysian Tourist Board, and the lovely people of Langkawi for their help and guidance.
Uri Geller for his positiveness and for mending my watch.
Paul McKenna, a brilliant stage hypnotist.
And finally my fondness and admiration to Mr Adam, wherever you may be now.
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_783c618c-9f80-5214-bdc8-193b03d91f5a)
You may find that the information in this book will help you, your relatives or your friends to relieve many problems, such as insomnia, smoking or weight control, to name but a few. But if you know someone who is in pain constantly and he or she would like some relief, the correct suggestions in the somnambulism state can give relief for hours. This is not a cure, just a natural relief, and should not be used to delay a visit to the doctor. But for someone with arthritic problems or pain-related illnesses or diseases, any relief will be a blessing.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS (#ulink_f4edec53-f069-5884-a6ba-542ca60cc3e3)
Words you will encounter throughout this book that sometimes cause confusion…
Abreaction: A raw emotion triggered off in hypnosis which then surfaces to the conscious level.
Deepeners: Specially selected words that form instructions for the purpose of guiding the mind into a much deeper feeling of relaxation in trance.
Hypnosis: Not sleep but a heightened state of awareness, similar to a day-dream. A state that a subject can be guided into by relaxation techniques or which can be induced by confusion or shock.
Hypnotherapist: A person who uses therapy while his or her subject is in hypnosis.
Hypnotist: A person who guides another into hypnosis.
Induction: A type of script carefully formed to guide the mind into relaxation.
Suggestion: Words that encourage the subconscious part of the mind into some sort of participation, either physically or mentally.
Trance: Many hypnotherapists do not like this word, but I am using it to establish a state of hypnosis. When a person is in a day-dream he or she is also in trance.
one
A VICTIM OF ONE’S MIND (#ulink_4e293051-0bd3-5936-a8e0-6328bf844298)
It all began with the car accident, the night I almost died—the extraordinary twist of fate that led me to become a hypnotherapist. I would never have believed at the time that there would be a time in the future when I would count the awful calamities and traumas I was to experience as blessings, allowing me to put something back into life in the form of helping people. If I had not had the car crash I would not have had to seek treatment for a serious memory loss and would never have been forced into discovering hypnotherapy as a profession in the first place. The fact that I did, albeit through a bizarre combination of circumstances, is why I am able to share my knowledge with you now. Let me tell you about it…
The car was speeding through the pitch black night, hurtling crazily out of control. I had no way of knowing which direction it was taking. I was very frightened and convinced I was going to die. Moments earlier I had been travelling at high speed on the motorway when suddenly I was forced to swerve violently to avoid a fleeing figure running directly in front of me. It was 1.30 a.m. and there was not even the palest glimmer of moonlight. Why on earth was someone crossing the motorway on foot? Did they intend to kill themselves? How ironic if that were so, as that was precisely what I had been contemplating—a quick end to my life.
As I wrenched the steering wheel to avoid the ghostlike figure, the car skidded and lurched forward into the unknown, deep in the Staffordshire countryside. My headlights no longer picked out the friendly cats’ eyes and I was spinning wildly towards thick undergrowth at the roadside.
I remembered being scared once before when I was a private pilot and wanted to qualify for a licence to fly at night. Unthinkingly I had chosen an extremely busy airport from which to do the two hours’ necessary flying. I was suddenly queueing in line with jumbo jets and getting swirled around in their back-draught. But that experience paled in comparison to my terror now. At least then there had been landing lights, but here, in this horror, there was not even a moon to cast shadows. A jumble of confused thoughts and questions swirled in my mind as I was buffeted from side to side of the car like a limp rag doll. Each jolt sent a dull pain through my body. It was all happening in a few, fleeting moments yet it seemed like an eternity, as if I were watching myself in some ghastly, slow-motion video playback. Not long before I had actually been thinking about killing myself over a broken love affair. Now, in those terrifying moments as the car spun wildly out of control in the darkness, I knew I did not want to die. All I could think of was what would be the result once the car finally came to a halt. Would I be crippled or scarred for life? Would anybody find me so late at night, or would I have to die slowly, badly injured and alone? Had I been selfish? Was this my punishment? Would the nightmare ever end?
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The car shuddered to a halt. Later I learned that it had hit three trees and plunged 30 feet down a ravine. Amazingly, however, I had not hit my head against the windscreen. I can remember sitting there dazed and shaking, yet still being able to think with remarkable clarity. The cassette player was still blasting out disco music, shattering the stillness of the night. Somehow, the windscreen wipers had got switched on during the crash. In my numbed and dazed state I could not remember how to switch them off. I was also alert enough to realize that there might have been a petrol leak and that the car might explode at any moment.
As I slowly and painfully eased myself out of the door, I felt as if I was the star of my very own horror film. The whole thing was so eerie and unreal. I was still trying to work out why my head had not hit the windscreen. I had not been wearing a seatbelt—this was the 1970s and there were still conflicting views about them—and the car had come to a dramatic stop. Later I learned that my head and face were the only parts of my body not to have been injured. It is something I have never been able to figure out to this day. Standing there, staring at my car, the shock of the accident must have distorted my thoughts. To me the car looked undamaged, yet actually it was a write-off. I had no clue as to where I was, I only knew I was somewhere off the M6. I was barefoot. My shoes must have come off in the car. My back felt strange. It was aching, but not too badly. I had heard of people walking after an accident even though they had been seriously injured. I wondered if it were possible to walk with a broken back. I seemed to be at the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by trees and bushes. Somewhere above me I could hear the whine of the occasional car going by. I began to clamber up the steep embankment, forgetting my shoes in my desperate need to get help. Eventually I found myself on the hard shoulder, more through luck than judgement. I probably looked as if I had been attacked; I was completely dishevelled and distraught. A few cars passed and I prayed that I would not pass out on the hard shoulder and be run over by an unsuspecting driver pulling in for a rest. Then, my knight in shining armour came along at the wheel of a large lorry.
He helped me up into his cab. He said he had seen my headlights down off the roadside. He asked me if I had been drinking—I had not—and offered to take me home, even though I lived a hundred miles away in Blackpool. The pain was now so severe that just before I passed out I asked for an ambulance. I woke up in hospital, to be told by a doctor—to my amazement—that I had no bones broken and that he was discharging me. I was battered and bruised in every part of my body except my head but, apparently, hospital cutbacks meant that there was no bed available for me, even though it was now around 3.30 a.m. The policemen who had been called out to the accident called me Cinderella because they found my shoes in the car. No one knew quite what to do with me, but the nurses felt sorry for me and gave me a bed in a corridor until the morning.
Shock does strange things to the system. The thoughts I had had earlier during that fateful drive—the overwork, the broken romance and other traumas that had led me briefly to contemplate suicide—flitted across my mind but only made me feel glad to be alive. They did not seem so important now. Maybe, I pondered, this accident was an escape of sorts after all. Next morning, still in excruciating pain, I took a train back to Blackpool. The friend who picked me up at the station was shocked by my appearance. I was a sorry sight—hunched over, with bedraggled hair, crumpled clothes and a tear-streaked face. It took me a year to recover, enduring six months of severe pain as my spine slowly healed. I regained my health but my income had gone. Previously I had earned a good living as a top sales representative and had also run my own promotional company. But because I still could not bend sufficiently to ease my way into a car, I was unfit to drive. I had to find other ways to earn a living, so I enrolled in a secretarial course to learn typing, shorthand and advanced French. It was only then that I began to realize that the damage I had suffered in the accident was more sinister than I had imagined and was not confined just to physical problems.
At first I thought I was just being slow at picking things up, though that was unusual for me as I had always been a fast learner. I was already a touch typist but I could not even do that properly without making dozens of mistakes. I found I was not able to understand even the simplest things. Worse still, my friends began to notice that the day after an evening out I would have no memory of the night before—nothing to do with alcohol, either. I could not recall people or places. To my enormous embarrassment I was having to ask lifelong friends who they were. I became what others considered ‘eccentric’, constantly losing things, never ready for a date or appointment on time. I also began to dress oddly. When I confided my symptoms and worries to my doctor he told me my head had been shaken up so much in the accident that it would take some time to ‘settle’. He remarked that I had touched the Pearly Gates and was very lucky still to be alive.
Another 12 months went by and my memory had not improved one jot, so I went back to my doctor. He suggested the problem was probably trauma-based. He suggested I find a doctor who was also a hypnotherapist, but warned me that it would not be easy to find a good one. No one knew the nightmare I was going through because outwardly I looked fine. But I could not perform even the simplest tasks, such as filing. I was a totally disruptive influence to those I worked with. I would start a job and move on to something else, forgetting to finish the first task. I had begun to drive again but I would lose my car keys, go to look for them in my handbag and then forget, when I had found my handbag, what I had wanted it for. I would even forget that I was supposed to be going out at all. I would spend hours looking for things, totally absorbed in the search and unaware of the passage of time. I lost all my money. I could not keep a job because I was unemployable. I tried writing down a list of things to do each day but it was useless—I would simply forget I had made a list!
I suffered two-and-a-half years of this mental fog, during which I got little help or sympathy from anyone except close friends. My father refused even to believe it, thinking I was just being flippant. It was only when my mother suffered a fall and was taken unconscious to hospital that he realized how serious my condition was—because I forgot all about my mother’s accident and went to a party rather than visit her in hospital. My son would be left outside my house on weekend breaks from boarding school while I was off staying with friends, having forgotten I even had a son. My life was a trail of confusion. I will give you an another example of just how bad my impairment was: I took a temporary job as an assistant to a film director. During my brief employment I was given a short memo to be typed and distributed to a dozen people in the film unit, with all their names listed at the top. I spent most of a morning typing and retyping it, trying really hard to get it right. Finally satisfied, I made a dozen copies and distributed them to the relevant people. It was not long before it was brought to my attention that I had left out one thing—the memo itself! I had been so preoccupied with getting the list of names right, I had forgotten about the message!
Very embarrassing.
Indirectly, though, this job was my entrée into the film world. I went to California, initially in search of a cure for my amnesia. I had read a story about a ‘wonder’ drug that was apparently only available in the US. I never found it, but I did find a husband. I fell in love with an American producer and writer and we became engaged. When I returned to Britain, he phoned me every single night just to make sure I still remembered him! This was a bit comical, but actually it also gave me an idea. I was still praying for a cure for my memory loss and badly in need of some money to pay for it, so I sold my story to a newspaper in the hope that someone would see it and be tempted to offer help. The story appeared in papers in both Britain and America—one of them splashed it with the headline: ‘Will Bride Remember Her Husband?’
My ploy worked. A famous American hypnotist called Gil Boyne, a stage hypnotist turned hypnotherapist who has treated many Hollywood stars, happened to be lecturing in the UK and read my story. Boyne tracked me down and said that when I returned to the US he would treat me free if he could use me as a ‘guinea pig’ in front of his students at his training school in Los Angeles.
Boyne was as good as his word. He did precisely what he had promised and cured me of my memory loss before his entire class. To me it seemed the session only lasted a few minutes but later I discovered I was in hypnosis for an hour and a half. One session and I was cured! That was the day before I was due to be married. After a terrible two-and-a-half period of not being able to remember anything, I was now ready to start a new life in the US, with a new husband and a memory that worked!
Ironically, though, my cure did cause a strain in my marriage, almost from the start. The new me was quite a shock for my American husband, who knew me only as a wacky eccentric who was totally dependent on him. He had never met the ‘real’ me, an independent, responsible and quite astute businesswoman.
Gil Boyne recognized the important contacts I had made through my husband, who was a senior editor on one of the top show business newspapers in the US. Boyne was aware of the publicity potential in my cure. He hired me to do promotional work for him and I became his ‘pet amnesia victim’, accompanying him on various television and radio shows. At the time I still had no real serious interest in hypnosis. I was too busy enjoying myself, travelling, building up a good business, interviewing the rich and famous and editing a column in my husband’s newspaper. For two years everything went swimmingly. Then…disaster struck again. On one of my frequent return visits back home to Britain a string of family deaths, accidents and traumas so devastated me that I suffered a relapse into amnesia. Incredibly, the newspaper headline came true and I actually forgot that I had a husband in the US! I never went back to him.
I spent the next four years in another mental fog. My confusion and eccentric behaviour were, if anything, even worse than they had been before. I had a memory retention span of no more than 24 hours at the most, so planning ahead was impossible. I had to live literally for each day alone. One of the things I noticed was how cruel people could be, though mostly unintentionally. I lost count of how many folk joked to me that they would not mind having a memory loss, too!
Throughout the whole sorry saga, I tried work as a journalist, a pop group agent, selling industrial diamonds, selling films and TV pop shows and, holding an Equity card, acting as an extra. Many times I forgot to pick up my salary.
I launched a magazine (it only lasted three issues), while at the same time working in a pub. The customers quickly got used to being charged the wrong money. The magazine failed, mainly due to my inefficiency. I was constantly losing copy and generally causing havoc.
Then I came upon a British hypnotherapist who was an associate of Gil Boyne’s. This man was conducting a training school and was well versed in American hypnotherapy methods. I asked him to help. He did and I regained my memory once more. But this time I took a deeper interest in the whole subject.
I watched the students training and for the first time the thought came into my mind that I might enter the profession myself. My motives initially were selfish. I thought that if I understood more about the whole thing I might at least be able to help myself retain my memory, or be able to call upon professional colleagues who could assist me. The more I learned about hypnotherapy, however, the more I came to see its tremendous value and its potential for helping people.
So that is how I became a hypnotherapist. I trained in Britain and later in the US where, because of my ‘celebrity’ status as Gil Boyne’s star ‘guinea pig’, I was lucky enough to receive some rather special treatment. However, there was a price to pay as well—as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch! I found to my dismay that video tapes of me being treated in front of Boyne’s class were circulating in the hypnotherapy world for other therapists and their students to see. There were all my most private secrets publicly laid bare on tape and recorded for posterity. Many thousands of clients later, however, I have never regretted embarking on my new life and new career. I went through so many different traumas brought on by my memory loss that I found it easy to sympathize with my clients. I seemed to have had all of their problems myself at one time or another.
With everything I have learned since then, I now know that when I had my memory loss the car accident was only the catalyst. The problems actually stemmed from eight years before, from an even earlier trauma when I had witnessed a terrible crime. New hypnotherapy techniques cut through the more superficial problems of life and go straight to the heart of the real trauma. But it takes a special kind of training to find them and, unfortunately, few therapists are taught these techniques.
A BRIEF LOOK AT HYPNOSIS IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES
Before we come to the main purpose of this book, it may help your understanding of hypnosis to know just a little of its history and background. Important dates include:
1775: Franz Mesmer developed healing by ‘animal magnetism’, which was later renamed hypnosis.
1784: Count Maxime de Puysegut discovered a form of deep trance he called somnambulism.
1821: First reports of painless surgery in France using magnetism.
1841: A Scottish doctor, James Braid, changed the name from magnetism to hypnosis. He established it as a psychological phenomenon.
1845-53: A surgeon, James Esdaile, performed 2,000 operations—even amputations—with the patients under hypno-anaesthesia and feeling no pain.
1883-1887: Sigmund Freud became interested in hypnosis and began to practise it.
1894: Freud abandoned hypnosis to concentrate on developing psychoanalysis.
1947: Hypnosis was being used by dentists in the US.
1950: Societies and associations for hypnosis started to sprout up.
1958: The American Medical Association approved the therapeutic use of hypnosis by physicians.
In short, it took nearly two centuries for hypnosis to be recognized as a therapy by the medical associations; after another 30 years-plus it still has not been fully accepted by the medical profession or the public in general.
It is true that there have been many casualties of hypnosis. However, these were not the clients but the practitioners, the brilliant men and women throughout history who have succeeded in hypnotherapy but who failed miserably in marketing the controversial phenomenon of hypnosis. Clouded in mystery, the dangers of the trance state have been propagated by the ignorant. Every time hypnosis obtains a foothold as a form of cure, those using it, whether medical professionals or lay people, are exposed to ridicule.
The vulnerability of hypnosis is that it does not have a 100 per cent success rate, therefore it is very easy to claim to disprove it scientifically. In Western society we demand proof for everything. Homoeopathy cannot be ‘proved’. The fact that it works does not seem to interest the sceptics, however, who demand proof according to their rules. Since you cannot prove the existence of the subconscious—let alone what its function is—according to some people’s criteria of proof, hypnotherapy is nothing less than quackery. However, we must bear in mind that science itself is not infallible. At one time it was ‘scientifically proven’ that the bumble bee could not fly—and, indeed, that the earth was flat.
Because of the lack of finance for research, hypnosis is still fighting to gain the recognition it deserves. Only as recently as mid-1992 has there been acceptable scientific proof that hypnosis does work, published in the New Scientist (June 1993). Having undertaken one of the largest surveys ever recorded of stopping smoking methods, spanning several continents, the New Scientist came out with the verdict: ‘Hypnosis is proven to work.’ Indeed, hypnosis was found to be streets ahead of anything else on the market when it came to helping people to stop smoking. Hypnosis is as natural as time itself and a gift to us all, once we know of its existence.
Although hypnosis has been practised, albeit under different names virtually since the beginning of human existence, it came to the attention of Western civilization with Maximilian Hell, a monk who introduced it to Franz Mesmer, the Austrian physician, in the 1700s. Mesmer treated patients with what he regarded as an ‘animal magnetism’ that pervaded the whole universe. His name and methods passed into everyday usage in the words mesmerize and mesmerism. Many years later, James Braid renamed this magnetism hypnosis, after the Greek word for sleep. This was actually a very unfortunate choice which has caused major misunderstandings of hypnotism ever since. For, although the hypnotized are not asleep, they give the impression that they are, which is very misleading.
The history of hypnosis is as chequered as that of some of its practitioners, and trying to outlaw it is as difficult as trying to stop video piracy. Some hypnotists have not exactly been the best advertisements themselves for the profession. When therapists put enough energy into promoting themselves and then revel in the publicity gained from evaluations of their supposedly ‘miraculous’ treatments, the result usually is that they find their egos expanding out of all proportion to their skills. Success can be its own worst enemy! Forgotten is the main rule: that they are only the experts guiding their clients to make the change. It is the clients who actually make the change in themselves, not the therapist.
Real hypnosis has many celebrated professionals. Of the many fascinating workshops I attended in the US, the one that most took my attention for its historical grounding was a session at which the speaker was Morgan Eaglebear, great-great grandson of the legendary Native American chief, Geronimo. Eaglebear is a practising hypnotherapist and healer. He explained how this form of natural healing had been used for generations among Native American tribes. They did not call it hypnosis but it was the same thing. A young tribal member would be chosen to learn the history of the tribe, which was never written down but just passed on by word of mouth. To ensure that the history was sound and the memory of the initiate was not impaired, the chosen one had to go through tests of bravery to prove his fitness. He was then strung up by his skin, while in a trance state. In this trance form, he felt no pain and each elder of the tribe would visit him and relay a part of the history. This went on for many days.
One test to tell if you are in a deep form of hypnosis is to check for anaesthesia. If you feel no pain, then you are in a deep trance. I suppose these Native Americans were unwilling, given that the passing on of tribal knowledge was so important, to take the chance that the chosen initiate was merely feigning a trancelike state. By hanging him up by his skin they could be sure he was definitely in a deep hypnotic trance. The famous film that depicts this particular practice, A Man Called Horse (1969), starred Richard Harris and showed this test of bravery using the most sophisticated cinema effects of the day. Of course, there was no mention of the trance state in the film.
To get back to the workshop, there in front of me was Eaglebear, this marvellously built and very charismatic man who wore his hair long and dressed as a brave, a living embodiment of Native American history. He lifted his shirt to show me the scars proving he had undergone the great test of bravery. I spoke to him after the lecture and he told me that the old Native American tribes used hypnosis on the newborn. Facing the danger of the campsite being attacked in the middle of the night, the tribal members had to ensure that no baby would cry and give the campsite’s location away. Mothers would therefore train their babies to go into a trance, talking soothingly to them and gently brushing the flat of their hands past their babies’ eyes, gently closing them. This was a practice that was passed from generation to generation. Whenever the mother’s hand passed over her child’s eyes in this fashion, the child would become silent. He also explained that the women, when giving birth, did not know it was supposed to be painful and so, not expecting pain, did not experience any. It seemed to me that there was so much that we of the so-called technologically advanced societies could learn from these ancient wisdoms.
WHAT WILL HYPNOSIS DO FOR YOU?
Let us now turn to the real purpose of this book—showing you how you can use hypnosis to improve your own life or to help others to solve their problems. This book is written to present the power that you possess to change your attitudes, which in turn changes your behaviour so that you can achieve exactly what you want. You can choose your own personality and begin to programme it into your mind. Your mind will follow the instructions you give it—as long as these instructions do not go against your interests for survival.
Hypnosis is the gateway to reprogramming an old or unwanted behaviour pattern or creating a new, positive one. It allows you to accept certain thoughts, which in turn change your attitude, so that you can do the things you want to do—or not do the things you do not want to do but cannot seem to stop doing. You may want to stop smoking, lose weight, or treat a phobia—for example fear of success, snakes or spiders. You may want to increase your productivity, improve your love life, bring back the love into your marriage, speed read, fly a plane, be more confident and outgoing or enable yourself, with full concentration, to pass exams or a driving test. Whatever you’d like to achieve hypnosis can help.
WHAT IS HYPNOSIS?
Everyone can be hypnotized. In fact, everyone goes into hypnosis every day of their lives. Every time you day-dream you are in a form of hypnosis. You can put yourself in hypnosis now. Just close your eyes and imagine yourself the last time you were eating a meal in a restaurant or in someone’s home. See what details you can bring forward. The decor of the room in which you were eating, whom you were with, what kind of atmosphere was present. See if you can remember the conversation—then open your eyes. What you experienced was a very light form of hypnosis. If you were to be put into a deeper state your vision would be more focused and accurate, for the more you practise hypnosis the more you develop your imagination.
Are You Visual?
To check whether you are a visual person or not (for the purpose of hypnosis) you can do a simple test. Close your eyes and think of a chair—any chair. When you have it in your thoughts, ‘see’ what colour it is, then open your eyes. Ask yourself if you actually ‘saw’ the chair in your imagination or just ‘knew’ what it looked like. There is a difference, if you think about it. If you saw it, then you are considered a visual person.
Freud’s research showed that two-thirds of the population were visual. I decided to make my own study on well over a thousand clients and the results more or less substantiated this figure. This was important to me because I am one of the non-visual people, that small segment of the population who have trouble visualizing. We can imagine what it is like to be visual, but it is impossible for a visual person to understand how someone can imagine without actually seeing. If you have a hypnotherapist who is visual and you are not, there will definitely be communication problems. This distinction has in the past caused a multitude of problems. It has resulted in there being many inexperienced hypnotherapists who have believed their clients awkward and ‘hard to hypnotize’. This is how the myth grew that not everyone can be hypnotized. A proficient hypnotherapist knows that everyone can be hypnotized. Of course degrees of susceptibility vary, but it only takes less susceptible people a little longer to be able to build their belief structure.
The simple ‘visual/non-visual’ test above solves the problem. Try it out on your friends as practice. If someone says he cannot ‘see’ the chair but just knows what it looks like, explain that this is not unusual. A third of the population does not visualize. For these people a hypnotherapist must abandon the words ‘visualize’ or ‘see’ which might otherwise be used, and instead use the word ‘imagine’—in the way you did with the chair. I was told by three hypnotherapists I was difficult to hypnotize. This could not have been further from the truth.
Hypnosis Is Not Sleep!
Hypnosis is a heightened state of awareness. While in hypnosis you are aware of everything that is happening around you. Conversations, the telephone ringing, any noise that occurs. It is the same as if you were day-dreaming. When you are guided into a relaxed state your imagination is more focused because your conscious is occupied. In order to protect your ‘occupied consciousness’ another facility, which we call the subconscious, comes forward. If anything untoward happens, the subconscious immediately alerts your conscious and you terminate the day-dream.
Imagine you are driving along a motorway and you start day-dreaming about what you will be doing when you arrive at your destination. If you get sufficiently involved in this day-dream you go into a sort of auto-pilot to drive your car. You know there is traffic about but you are not fully conscious of it. Then, after a few miles, you suddenly come out of the day-dream and realize you have not noticed the scenery and the traffic. You probably think to yourself that you might well have had an accident if you had continued in this state. The truth of the matter is that if the car in front of you had put its brake lights on suddenly, your subconscious mind would have come forward during your day-dream to protect you. It would bring your conscious back in a split second to deal with the emergency. As soon as your conscious mind becomes occupied, your subconscious always comes forward to protect you. All your senses link up with it and even become more aware at that level. Say there was a smell of rubber in the car. Your subconscious would alert your conscious and bring you out of the day-dream to attend to it. Or if there was an unfamiliar sound in the engine, the same instant awareness would come into operation.
Another example: allow yourself to imagine you are on a tube or train. You have quite a long way to go, so you are day-dreaming. In fact, you are oblivious to what is going on around you. If suddenly there was an odd sound alongside you, you would immediately become aware of it and respond accordingly. Therefore, if the sound was threatening, within a split second your conscious would be fully alert and ready to ‘fight or flee.’ That is the term psychologists use to describe our pre-historic instinct for survival. If the sound is not threatening, then you would just carry on in your day-dream trance state. You are always protected, even though you may not have been aware of such sophisticated processes going on in your mind.
This, then, is the difference between hypnosis and sleep. When you are asleep you are not protected in this way. But your subconscious is using this very valuable time for ‘internal affairs’, sorting out the new information to be filed away, etc. When you are anaesthetized or have certain drugs, your memory can bring forward incidents that have occurred while you were in this state. Medical staff in hospitals are careful what they say during operations, due to fairly recent findings proving that patients have subconsciously heard what has been said when anaesthetized and have later suffered irrational behaviour as a direct result.
A hypnotherapist is a person who uses therapy while his or her client is in the relaxed state of hypnosis. Good hypnosis is important to good therapy. The reason hypnosis is used in therapy is to relax the mind; in so doing the subconscious comes forward. When your conscious is relaxed, new information has more chance of being accepted, which is why at this point the subconscious can be accessed and behaviour reprogrammed. You are aware of what is going on the whole time and you are being guided by the therapist, not unlike a computer expert showing you how to work a computer.
In hypnosis you cannot be made to do anything you do not want to do! You have a failsafe survival trigger mechanism that protects you at all times.
WHO IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO HYPNOSIS?
This question conjures up an amazing and controversial set of opinions, based on various people’s belief structures. I can tell you what I understand, in the knowledge that my reasoning will probably be severely attacked by some. Nevertheless, my opinions are based on my experiences in working with well over 2,000 clients.
Everyone is susceptible to hypnosis to differing degrees. If, however you want to break the question down and ask who is susceptible to going into hypnosis immediately, then the answer is completely different. About a third of a group of people at any one time are likely to be susceptible to being put instantly into hypnosis. That is why the stage hypnotist can feel secure that there will always be a good percentage of his audience he will be able to work with, ensuring a fast-moving show. A brief explanation of the nature of stage hypnosis may help you to understand a little more.
First, the hypnotist will do a quick suggestibility test to decide whom he is going to use in his act. Normally he chooses a simple task, such as instructing the audience to clasp their hands together. He suggests that their hands will literally stick together as if super-glued and that, whatever they do, they will not be able to unclasp them. The hypnotist uses confusing and repetitive instructions, then he asks the members of the audience to try and unclasp their hands. Those who do unclasp their hands are not used in the act. Of the members of the audience who still have their hands clasped together, he will ascertain whether they are pretending or whether they really are in hypnosis. His experience weeds out the odd cheat. Those few who are left are considered to be in hypnosis and, therefore, susceptible.
Susceptibility in hypnosis has nothing to do with intelligence or trying too hard either way. The more someone is hypnotized, the more susceptible he or she becomes. Very susceptible people in hypnosis will still refrain from doing something that they find unacceptable. The grey area is that in hypnosis people may not have as many inhibitions as they would normally and may, therefore, be more daring.
WHY HYPNOSIS IS SO EASY TO LEARN
(Only fools laugh at what they do not understand!) To learn hypnosis takes only a few minutes. To understand why and how it works will take rather longer. If the basics are taught correctly, the learning is quick and easy because everything about the subject is fascinating. It is far simpler to learn than operating a computer. If you have any experience of computers, you will remember how difficult the manuals were to understand at first. That was not because the computer itself was difficult but because the manual’s explanations were at fault. A good basic training in any subject saves you hours of unnecessary hard work. Take away the unnecessarily difficult words that confuse the brain, interfering with retention and concentration, replace them with simple instructions, and you have a quick and easy new skill at your fingertips.
Hypnosis is a very easy subject to understand. Anyone with normal intelligence can be taught how to hypnotize or be hypnotized. Of course some hypnotherapy courses can be padded out to two years in length if they include study of psychology and the history of the subject, including its early masters such as Freud and Jung. Although this added information is quite fascinating it can end up being a bit too much, reminiscent of the old saying about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’.
Hypnotherapy can be split up into two basic categories: suggestion therapy, which is what is being taught in this book, and what I shall call advanced hypnotherapy, which is actually accessing the subconscious in therapy and communicating with it.
The techniques and methods can be taught in one to three weeks, depending on the degree of advancement. Any other length of time would only be necessary to show different techniques to come to the same conclusion. I have found that a 50-hour practical course is sufficient. If you want a comparison, this about the same amount of time necessary to qualify for a private pilot’s licence.
IS HYPNOSIS DANGEROUS?
This is the most common belief of all—and the greatest fallacy.
You cannot be hypnotized against your will! You have to agree to it. But you can be caught off-guard. If any unacceptable suggestions were then made, you would nevertheless have the choice of either terminating the voluntary trance state or continuing with it. You can be persuaded or told to do something but you still are able to reason and you can still say ‘No.’ You are, after all, still awake, as mentioned earlier.
Unfortunately many books on the subject, and even some courses, may lead us to believe that hypnosis is not only complicated but dangerous. If this were true there would surely have been some legislation by now to weed out the unsavoury charactors who were abusing this most natural healing gift. The fact is, the only danger is that, if done incorrectly, hypnosis just will not work.
Many people have been mislead into thinking of hypnosis as ‘brainwashing’. The simple fact is that people who are being hypnotized just will not accept a suggestion in hypnosis that is damaging to them. In order to be brainwashed you need three vital ingredients: pain, drugs and hypnosis. Those who say they were made to do something by a hypnotist or hypnotherapist against their will, then they should eliminate the word ‘made’ and replace it with ‘conned’—and you do not need to be hypnotized to be conned. You always have a choice as to whether you are going to do what the hypnotist says or not.
Do not be persuaded into thinking hypnosis is dangerous, because it is not. A lot of the misapprehensions about hypnosis stem from ignorance, while some of them, it must be said, are spread by practitioners of hypnotism themselves. They fear that too many people will realize how natural a healing process hypnosis is, thereby taking away their importance as ‘miracle workers’—whether on stage or in healing. Although the hypnotist is well aware that it is the person in hypnosis who is accomplishing any act or change, unfortunately the hypnotist’s ego sometimes intervenes and halts the otherwise natural progress by shrouding in mystery the most natural self-healing gift known to humanity.
two
THE SUBCONSCIOUS (#ulink_09b21605-de35-586b-bd99-4a9d1d5c7807)
In order to have a good, working understanding of hypnosis it is helpful to have an insight into how the mind works in general. This can be explained very simply. You do not need to know about the elaborate, sophisticated workings of the mind; a basic explanation will be sufficient.
The mind is made up of two parts: the subconscious and the conscious. The subconscious part of the mind functions automatically. It is not the thinking part, it is the doer. Before the age of approximately five years old, our ability to learn is at its peak. All the information passed on to us from our parents, teachers, etc. goes directly to the subconscious, which files it away immediately. This is why if you tell a toddler that a wall is black when it is white the child will just accept this, where an older child would challenge you. As the child progresses another facility comes into operation: the conscious.
The conscious part of the mind acts like an editor of a newspaper, who chooses which stories will be carried in each edition, which will be filed away to use another day, and which can be discarded. There is only a certain amount of knowledge that can be held at any one time in the forefront of the mind to which the conscious has immediate access. When this forefront is fully occupied, any additional information coming through is stored away in the mind’s ‘filing system’. Just like the busy editor who has an assistant in charge of the filing, the conscious passes over control of the sophisticated filing system to the subconscious. And just as when the editor’s assistant is absent the editor may have problems finding a file, the conscious has no idea how to work the unfamiliar, complicated controls of the subconscious filing system.
Everything we have ever done, said, heard, smelled or seen is stored away, in fact. In hypnosis the subconscious can be easily accessed and the memories of an incident retrieved and looked at in detail. The police find this particularly useful in uncovering information—such as the record of a numberplate or the description of the face of an attacker—when victims’ or witnesses’ immediate, conscious memory has been erased by shock.
In my practice in Harley Street I often take clients back in regression (a term used to describe taking someone back in hypnosis to an earlier memory) to the time when they first walked as a child. They can see what they wore (sometimes just a nappy), what their parents were like and how they looked, even to describing their hairstyles and what they were saying. This shows how fantastic a system the brain is and how easy it is to retrieve information.
There are many obstacles preventing certain information being directly available to the conscious mind. Accessing the subconscious overcomes these obstacles immediately. Remember, the subconscious is the automatic part of the mind and will take orders. If you ask for a certain memory to be brought forward, it retrieves the required information as instructed. If the memory is attached to a trauma, the whole package comes forward.
By accessing data straight from the subconscious the information is not edited and, consequently, you may touch on a particularly distressing incident. This unhappy memory may cause the person in hypnosis to undergo what is called an abreaction. This means that he or she is in the middle of the emotion and may burst into tears. This outburst can sometimes be very exaggerated, due to the trance and the lifting of inhibitions. To the untrained it can be quite frightening and is another reason why hypnosis has for so long been rumoured to cause people actual mental or psychological harm.
This concentrated raw emotion will usually only come to the surface while a person is being treated with advanced hypnosis, but there are occasions, though very rare, when it can surface during suggestion hypnosis—just as you can strike a raw nerve, by accident, in the middle of an innocent conversation.
I became aware that abreactions are in fact not that serious and that anyone can have one without warning. Just watching a film, listening to the radio or hearing someone speak can trigger off an emotional memory. When I had my memory loss I was told that someone whom I knew had died. I took it in but did not react. Six weeks later I was walking through the busy passageways at a London tube station when I suddenly burst into tears. Something had triggered off the memory of my friend’s death.
The conscious is the thinking, logical part of the mind. If there is no reasonable explanation for a behaviour pattern the conscious will invent one that seems to it to be logical. You can see an example of this thought process in the typical smoker. Asked why he smokes his reply could be simply: ‘I enjoy it.’ Yet this same person will probably have a list of objections to smoking as well, such as ‘I hate the smell,’ etc. He may even claim that he wants desperately to quit. There is definitely a conflict here, but not one so great or complex that the smoker cannot easily be treated by hypnosis. Because smoking is rarely trauma related, quitting with the help of hypnosis is a straightforward matter.
The person who overeats may say he does so because he enjoys it. This may be partly true but there are most likely other, deeper motivations. He may crave comfort, protection or even punishment, and overeating satisfies this craving. We all have to eat to live and therefore we are all programmed to be tempted by food. Our senses are tuned to pick up on the smell, taste, texture and look of food. Our bodies are also programmed to provide a feeling of fullness or satisfaction when we have eaten enough. When there is some trauma-based condition, however, a new behaviour pattern is created causing a person to overeat not just because he enjoys it, but for other reasons as well.
The answer from the conscious of ‘Because I enjoy it’ for the two entirely different problems of smoking and overeating gives little indication of what treatment is necessary. In either case the answer is the most ‘logical’ the conscious could generate, given its limited information. The full story is filed away in the subconscious filing system and, if trauma-based, is probably completely unknown to the conscious.
When I had my memory problem I was regularly told that I should write a list of things I needed to do each day. If you know you have a list to look up, then this method works. But if as in my case you forget you have even written a list in the first place, then this ‘solution’ is useless. Because I was not aware I had written a list it would be treated as just another scrap of paper. I did not associate it with a list of things to do and, therefore, either threw it away or popped it into a drawer for inspection at another time.
If the conscious has no knowledge of the information that has slipped unnoticed into the subconscious, it has no cause to retrieve it. The subconscious receives no instruction from the conscious to look for the stored, relevant information, so it is not supplied. Hypnosis allows us access to the subconscious so the files can be retrieved and the underlying causes of a problem can be looked at. Therefore, it is not surprising that what the conscious mind thinks is the logical reason for a habit or problem bears little resemblance to its actual cause.
There are differing beliefs about how the subconscious works. Some think it has an intelligence equal to that of a bright six year old. I prefer to believe it is completely automatic—like a sophisticated computer system that can hold a conversation and talk as if it were human only because it has been programmed that way.
WHY IS A BAD HABIT SO HARD TO BREAK?
The subconscious is often called ‘the unconscious’ in many teachings. I prefer ‘subconscious’ because this term is not so misleading. The word ‘unconscious’ perpetuates the popular myth that hypnosis is sleep. This brings us to the importance of another misunderstood facet of human behaviour, the bad habit. People are surprised that bad habits are hard to break but rarely consider what a blessing it is to be able to keep good ones. Imagine learning to ice-skate or drive a car and then suddenly losing the habit! The consequences could be fatal.
To form a habit you practise it and, when practised enough, it becomes automatic. You first consciously work at it, then, if you continue for a long enough period, the subconscious takes over. The subconscious does not judge whether it is a good or bad habit. It presumes that if you do it enough, then you must want it to be permanent. Likewise, when you want to put an end to a habit you have to practise until you ‘automatically’ stop doing it.
The subconscious is programmed to ensure that the conscious retains this newly-learned habit. Part of the ‘job’ of the subconscious is to create an obstacle course to prevent any change to the acquired habit.
Once the subconscious has taken a habit on board it provides an ‘urge’. It is, therefore, the subconscious that we need to access in order to persuade it to cancel the programme that triggers this ‘urge’. Hypnosis provides instant access to the subconscious and allows an immediate change of attitude which, in turn, changes the unwanted behaviour. Simply put, with hypnosis it is not necessary to practise unlearning a habit because the work has already been completed. The conscious mind is more or less bypassed—only, however, if it is in the individual’s interest.
If you were to decide at a later date that you wanted to regain an old habit, very little practice would be needed. The programme would already be set and could easily be retrieved. For example, if you had not ridden a bike for 10 years and then had a go, you might be a bit shaky at first but, nevertheless, your confidence would soon return. Or, just walking down a flight of stairs, try thinking which foot goes where and notice how difficult it is. Since you have formed the habit it has become an automatic instinct and you are no longer conscious of the action. Consider amnesia victims: whatever else they may have forgotten, they always remember how to open doors, how to talk and how to perform most habitual, simple tasks. I should know, if anyone does!
Just as you can eliminate a bad habit without practice through hypnosis, it is also feasible that you can create a good one in the same way. I have proved this in developing a speed reading programme in which I can guarantee at least to double a person’s reading speed, while increasing retention and concentration, in less than three hours (20 minutes if there is no trauma involved which may be preventing the subject from accepting the speed reading technique). To speed read properly you have to use a pointer, such as a pen, pencil or even your finger, to lead your eyes across the page. Without hypnosis it could take as long as 40 hours’ practice to master this. It may sound simple but involves a complicated procedure, linking eye movement and the correct maximum speed for optimum concentration. To achieve the 100 per cent success rate I have been able to claim with my speed reading clients there may be a need for advanced methods of hypnosis, but suggestion-only therapy can reach a healthy 60 per cent of those who try it. Obstacles to the success of the suggestion therapy arise in the form of trauma-based problems, which more than likely date from early childhood. The trauma can be as simple as that when you first attended school your teacher slapped your hand if you used your finger to point to the words as you read.
Our actions are dependent on the information we receive in early life and, therefore, many problems have begun with a ‘programme’ that was established in early infancy. If you are doing something that you really do not want to do it is because you are acting on an incorrect programme. It is not necessarily bad or good, just inappropriate for you. If a person says to me that he has a problem and he knows exactly when it started—it could be anything from fear of flying to insomnia—invariably he is wrong! Few if any of us are really aware of when or where a trauma started, only when the programme came into operation. The actual trauma will probably have happened much earlier, a later incident only triggering off the programme.
If someone really could remember the trauma, there would not be a problem. The conscious would have been able to deal with the trauma and solve the resulting problem naturally with its logic. The reason the conscious cannot solve the problem—say, fear of flying—is that it does not have all the information it needs to be able to use logic to eliminate the fear.
Sometimes, even trauma-based problems can be treated with suggestion therapy, but there is a higher success rate with problems that are purely and simply bad habits. Most bad habits are not the result of a trauma but rather of practice.
Smoking is a good example of a bad habit. It is only a bad habit once the smoker decides he or she wants to give up. It might have been an unhealthy habit but it did not start out as a bad one, from the individual’s point of view. Humans do not persist at acquiring bad habits, only at habits they want. For example, nail-biting in its early stages might have been done for comfort, just as thumb-sucking or nose-picking all begin innocently enough. There has been extensive research to prove that the nicotine in cigarettes is the reason that smokers find it nearly impossible to quit, although just as many other reports disprove this. In 1992 I was at a conference where figures were produced proving that 90 per cent of smokers gave up without any help from products on the market (including therapy), with 40 per cent of this 90 per cent suffering no ill side-effects whatsoever. The latter tallies with my own statistics. I have a Stop Smoking programme that only takes one hour and carries a very healthy (95 per cent) success rate. The client stops immediately and does not suffer the supposedly mandatory side-effects. Suggestion hypnotherapy that has a positive 30 per cent success rate (and with the right script and hypnotherapist a 60 per cent success rate) has worked for giving up smoking for many years. It is all down to the old rule: ‘What the mind expects tends to happen!’ If the smoker is programmed to believe there must be side-effects, then there will be. Out of the thousands of smokers I have treated, I have never found a common denominator in the type of side-effect they suffered to give credence to the popular but unproven opinion that smoking is an addiction.
At present there is a great deal of scientific debate over whether smoking is an addiction or a habit. I would say that smoking is a mental addiction, whereas, say, taking heroin is a physical addiction. A mental addiction can be eliminated instantly with hypnosis, without the occurrence of side-effects. On the other hand, a drug addiction takes longer to treat, as the body will necessarily have a physical response when deprived of the drug it has become used to.
There have been extensive tests and surveys by addiction clinics claiming to prove that smoking constitutes a physical addiction to nicotine. But the mere fact that they are called ‘addiction’ clinics will automatically discourage those smokers who believe it is only a habit. Therefore, the results of any survey based on test results in these clinics are bound to be totally flawed! The belief that smoking is a physical addiction is what the popular nicotine ‘patches’ trade on. It is hardly surprising that, whatever the manufacturers’ claims, their success rate is disappointingly low.
PROBLEMS AND HYPNOSIS
It always amazes me to see the huge number of weekend courses for the mind that are available in the UK. Unfortunately not all of them are good and some of them are very esoteric. The course ‘junkies’ tend to be forever taking one course or another, almost every weekend. You can easily spot them. They analyse your conversation and then assess you in public. Life is not as straightforward as this and it soon becomes very boring. I fear we may soon become a nation of DIY health analysts, just acting on theories. Not a very pleasant thought! As a therapist one is taught to watch out for ‘therapy’ junkies. These are people who go around the different therapists, trying everything even though their own doctor can find nothing wrong with them. These people never get any better and have either had every illness imaginable or stick to the same one that resists cure no matter whom they see. These people are always difficult to treat because they actually get satisfaction out of the constant attention their problem receives.
If you are going to try your hand at suggestion hypnosis after reading this book, then keep it simple. Do not try to analyse your problem too deeply. If you or someone you are hypnotizing does not respond to suggestion hypnosis, then you will know that more advanced work is needed. At least trying it yourself first will save you the cost of going to a hypnotherapist, who may charge anything between £25 and £150 per session to get the same results you could get at home. Also, the information in this book will help you to know which questions to ask a hypnotherapist so that you can find one with the right training to assist you in more advanced work. If there is some aspect of your behaviour that you want to change, use hypnosis to your advantage—but do not abuse it. If someone else says you have a problem which you have not been aware of and which does not bother you, then it is not your problem—it is theirs! Remember the old saying: ‘If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.’
RULES OF THE MIND
There are certain rules that the mind always follows. I have listed below the ones I find are the most interesting and helpful. You do not have to be an expert psychologist to follow them. If you want to use and programme a computer, you do not need to become a computer expert—you just need to know the basics for the work you will be doing. The same applies to the mind. You do not need to study psychology for years to use suggestion hypnosis; you just need to know the essentials. Although minds are far more complex than the most sophisticated computer ever designed, they all rest on the same basic foundations. The four rules that follow can help you to understand how you can work on yourself to achieve changes in your behaviour.
Rule 1
Every thought creates a physical reaction. Research has shown that emotions, brought on by thought, cause an inward physical reaction. Worry, for example, causes changes in the stomach (ulcers, diarrhoea, digestion problems, etc.). Anger stimulates the adrenal glands, causing increased adrenaline in the bloodstream affecting many bodily functions. It is better to vent anger, therefore, than to suppress it. Anxiety and fear stimulate the blood supply, possibly leading to a high pulse rate and blood-pressure. The subconscious mind, too, is affected by thoughts with strong emotional content; once these have been accepted they become a programme and trigger the same response over and over again.
Rule 2
You cannot have two conflicting thoughts at one time: for example, you can be either sad or happy, you cannot be both at once. You can train yourself to change moods, however depressing your environment. If you have a worrying thought you can learn to shelve it and bring forward a memory of a more pleasant occasion. You can make a ‘hell out of heaven’. I was living on a beautiful Malaysian island when I began writing this book. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there came a host of problems that brought me depression, even in paradise. One of the wise islanders to whom I remarked: ‘There is no peace in paradise’ replied: ‘The only paradise is in your mind.’ How true.
You can also make a ‘heaven out of hell’. Take for example the person in jail who still manages to live happily through his imagination and thoughts. One of my students had, many years before, served a six-year jail sentence as a political prisoner. He served his time in the same jail in South Africa as Nelson Mandela and, although the experience was horrendous, he kept his sanity by thinking of beautiful and peaceful surroundings and all the good things in life, remaining positive through the hell to which he was being subjected. When I met him he still had a wonderful outlook on life, which made him very easy to converse with and enabled him to become a very calming therapist. The jail sentence had given him the keen ambition to help people. He has now taken his skills back to Africa.
A negative mind can soon become ill and plummet into the depths of depression if not alleviated. Negativity and depression can be overcome by practising good, positive thoughts. The mind needs ‘feeding’ through the powers of hearing, vision and speech.
Hearing
Censor your thoughts to keep them positive. Choose carefully what TV programmes you watch or with whom you socialize. There is an old saying that your character can be assessed by the company you keep. When I lived and worked in Hollywood a famous old director I was interviewing put it simply, but colourfully, like this: ‘When you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas.’
Vision
Look at pleasant scenery. If possible, travel to the countryside or recall favourite places by looking through photographs. Watch pleasant and light-hearted TV programmes; switch off programmes which disturb you. Select carefully which newspapers you read. ‘Pass’ on upsetting news that is no use to you. I edited a video trade paper when I lived in Hollywood. This was in 1982, when cable TV was booming in the US while, back in the UK, video machines were first being marketed. I noticed that the levels of violence in the US were very frightening. Television news was full of violence. When it became apparent that video shops and video nasties were coming on the UK market, I predicted in an article that in 10 years’ time the UK would have changed out of all recognition, having itself become a very violent society. I fear that my prediction has come true.
Speech
Speak positively and you will begin to see the changes in other people’s attitudes towards you. Change negative ideas to positive ones and you will find yourself becoming more popular with positive people. Negative people will only hold back your growth. Suppose you were to go into a wine bar and see a group of people in a corner enjoying themselves, all talking positively and generating a feeling of enthusiasm. Now imagine a negative person joining the group. He or she would easily make the crowd feel uncomfortable, affecting their confidence, possibly introducing depressing conversation and sapping their enthusiasm even further. On the other hand, if there were a group of moaners in the wine bar with negative attitudes and a positive person were to join them, more than likely the opposite would occur. The solitary, positive person would be brought down to feeling negative in a very short time.
It is easy to slip into negative thinking. The ill mind is far more susceptible to negative thoughts, resulting in deep depression. When I have a client who is in deep depression, I advise him to start to monitor what he sees, hears and says, just as I am advising you now. Your brain is fed through these three faculties, so feed them correctly. This in turn will change your attitudes. To many people it comes as quite a surprise to realize that they have a choice as to whether they want to think positively or be depressive. It is even more unsettling to them when they realize that they can train themselves to take control of their thoughts and be the master of their mind instead of its servant. There is a difference between suppressing emotions and moving them. Suppressing is when you push an emotion down and bury it. Moving an emotion allows it to be accessible when you are ready to deal with it yourself.
I interviewed Uri Geller, the incredible fellow who became famous by bending keys and other metal through the power of his mind. I could not have been more impressed with his vast house, his personality and his many photographs of his beautiful family. On the face of it—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—he is living proof of what visualization can do. He told me how he used a television screen in his mind to visualize how he wanted to feel, using his imagination to invent his own movie, showing what he wanted to achieve, his goals, eliminating negative thoughts and spurring a host of other equally positive assignments. He takes the time to make it work.
Pictures are the language the subconscious understands. If you picture yourself happy, your subconscious will send you happy thoughts. If you picture yourself a failure, your subconscious, thinking that is what you want to be, will send you all the reasons you need to fail so that you can attain what it believes is your goal. In Uri Geller’s early days he performed stage hypnosis and was well aware of the power of the mind. He knew that you control your mind, not the other way round. Unfortunately, most people let their mind control them, looking on helplessly as it takes over. It is very difficult to get the average person to accept the simple fact that he is in charge of his own destiny.
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