Solving moral dilemmas: how hypnosis helps

Divorce, arguing, whether or not to take those soaps from the hotel room; there are big and small moral dilemmas in life, and sometimes you find out that not everything is so black and white and that there is a gray area about what is morally right to do. Resolving moral dilemmas in your personal life is something hypnosis can help you with.

In this blog, you're going to read more about what morality is, how people develop morality, how to keep morality high, and what you can do to provide moral support to people.

What is morality?

What is moral or moral to do is something that is much debated. What is moral for one person may not necessarily be for another.

The most familiar example of a moral dilemma is whether to allow a train to turn down so that it only kills one person instead of five, which is often allowed. But many people find it morally wrong to push one person in front of the train if doing so would save five people. While the outcome, namely one dead person, is the same[1].

This shows that anything (such as emotions or actions you take) affects what is morally right.

Actively throwing someone in front of a train yourself is worse than having the train follow another track where someone else has already put one person down. So the emotional distance to the person dying has to be a bit greater before we can sacrifice that person.

Things may already be changing if those five people who can be saved are your family members. Perhaps then you might throw ten strangers in front of the train if necessary.

Morality is relative and can vary from culture to culture, time to time and person to person.

It is a kind of value judgment that someone makes to determine whether a certain behavior is good or bad. You often see that in societies or cultures, that norm is determined by a religion, such as the Ten Commandments in the Bible. For example, these are not followed by the cannibals in Papua New Guinea (even though it is no longer permitted there either[2]).

And in doing so, you really don't have to be religious to have some form of moral sense. Atheists who just behave every day prove that. This can also be seen in how food is prepared and with certain hygiene rules[3].

Moral Development

As a child, you base your moral development on social norms and values you see around you. If mom or dad says something is right, it is right.

In adolescence, you first get some kind of opinion about what is morally right and that you can think about why something is good or bad. That opinion then often fits the group you want to belong to. Then you get a phase where you become more skeptical and can put many things into perspective. You become more nihilistic. For example, you often see students become very anti certain things or even everything.

Your moral development continues afterwards, too. For example, research shows that from the age of ²¹ you acquire certain moral reasoning (trains of thought) about your social contract with people such as with family, friends, your boss, your co-workers, your clients, and a more universal view about justice[4].

For example, this is why people sometimes say that you have no heart if you have never been left-wing in your political orientation and no intellect if you have not had at least one right-wing(er) phase after that.

For example, this is also why many left-wing parties want to bring down the voting age, because left-wing views often sound morally correct at first and therefore young people tend to vote left first. So the younger the voters, the more seats for parties like SP and GroenLinks so to speak 😉.

Because you are increasingly confronted with moral dilemmas in your life, making these kinds of choices, experiencing the consequences, and taking responsibility are often important for your continued moral development (source 4).

For example, after making a certain choice, you might still regret it , and that can lead you to make a different decision in the future.

Giving moral support

As a hypnotherapist, it is often also important to provide moral support. Initially, you already do this by bringing people into hypnosis. By doing so, you enable them to think more deeply about their decisions and make decisions that have been well thought out.

You can then help people visualize how something will turn out or what this is like for the other person so they can better determine what is wise to do.

Sometimes, making a moral decision can also be a source of anxiety. For example, deciding whether or not to end a relationship is not a choice you make lightly. Hypnosis can also reduce anxiety, enabling you to think calmly and clearly about the implications of your choices and possible solutions—for example, if someone still wants to make a difficult relationship work.

In addition, you can also help someone figure out why making decisions is right or wrong and how logical the person's moral beliefs are.

After all, how good is it to keep overworking, for example, if you neglect your family as a result? And how good is it to call in sick to have a day with your family if it inconveniences colleagues at work again?

Where do these kinds of beliefs come from? As a hypnotherapist, you can explore this through regression. You help the person go back to the very first moment when something felt good—or, conversely, bad—to see how well that idea still serves them in their current life. You can, in fact, change that moment in their mind, which alters the belief[5] and makes some moral dilemmas suddenly much easier to resolve.

Keeping morale high with hypnosis

Sometimes you might hit a slump where you struggle to put in the effort for your work, your relationships, or whatever else. That’s when a hypnotherapist can help keep your spirits up. One way to keep your spirits up is by practicing mindfulness[6].

In a nutshell, this means keeping an eye on your thoughts and reframing them if they’re too negative or immoral. A posthypnotic suggestion regarding awareness of your thought processes can already go a long way toward this.

But even more fun is to perform a progression as a therapist instead of a regression. In that case, you actually help the person to imagine an ideal future image. For example, about what his/her relationship is like a year from now. What that looks like and so on and then you have the person take a step back in his/her mind each time from that moment to the moment with you in the chair.

In this way, you have given the person hope and given themselves an achievable roadmap to reach their ideal.

How cool is that?

In addition, you can also have the person repeat certain suggestions. You can then teach him/her self-hypnosis to have him/her repeat the suggestions in that state (or in thought or out loud).

These may include suggestions such as:

"I get to rely on myself."

"I make a choice for the sake of myself, my relationship and my job, in that order."

"I feel what is good or bad."

These are just examples. Depending on your client's problems, you can bring other suggestions.

In hypnotherapy, it is important that clients make their own choices about what they feel is morally right. This may be a different choice than you as a therapist would make yourself, but that just goes to show that everyone has their own way of looking at moral dilemmas.

Of course, you can ask questions to see if the person is sure. But your morality is not his/her morality. That's important to keep in mind.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works and how you can use it to help yourself or others? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

Or attend one of our seminars or training courses. The courses are offered live online or in a classroom setting. Choose the format that suits you best.

The online classes involve live teaching from a professional studio and with enough assistance to still provide one-on-one attention, just as with classroom teaching.

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