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 by Carl Jung, without our conscious awareness or agreement.
How does Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy interface with and enhance these Jungian concepts to make them more therapeutically available to our clients? First, with hypnotherapy we can actually slow down long enough to drop into the unconscious mind, to be able to hear the unconscious dialogues that play in our heads like a radio left on. These internal dramas, akin to soap operas, take on a life of their own, uncensored and uninterrupted. When we, the client and the therapist, enter into the dialogue through hypnotherapy, we become aware that this radio program has been playing for a long time. Through the wisdom of the unconscious mind, we can regress to the origin of this dialogue and discover the age of the child part that is hiding in the shadows, i.e., the blind spot of our rear view mirror.
Second, with hypnotherapy we can resolve the infantile, unresolved conflicts that gave birth to the immature parts of us that felt unsafe and had to hide in the shadows and recesses of our consciousness. As children, if we grew up in families where we were criticized instead of encouraged and loved only if we performed to an impossible standard, we had to develop some defenses in order to survive and not become completely hopeless.
It was a strong survival instinct that created our internal shadow parts that knew they could not be seen or we could have been punished to the point, in some families, where the abuse would have been even more devastating.
Without the tools of hypnotherapy, we are limited to using only 10 percent of our minds, which is the conscious mind. Like the blind spot in our rear view mirror, the limited, conscious mind can think, analyze and talk about the concepts of our deeply hidden shadow parts.
With Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy, we have complete access to use the full 100 percent of the mind. Having increased access to the unconscious mind allows us to drop down into our memory banks in order to expand our full awareness of when and how these young shadow parts and complexes were created. These complexes can be untangled so that the intertwining issues that were suffocating our human development can be resolved.
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