What is the problem you are going to work through? When you answer this you make all kinds of assumptions, namely that there is a problem and that it will soon be gone. Because you are going to work through it and then it will be gone.
You will do this because you will also work. For example, you can work on answering the question, "What do I want to do with my life?"
You can then add all kinds of interesting questions in a session.
For example, you can ask, "What would you like?"
Pay attention to your focus
People often know very well what they don't want. I don't want anxiety on an airplane. I don't want depression. I don't want this, I don't want that.
It all seems very logical to say this. But then you just keep dealing with your anxiety and the plane.
When you say, don't think of a pink elephant, you think of it anyway.
So it is much more convenient to think about what you do want.
For example, you can say, "I want to feel free on an airplane."
In that case, your plane does not link to fear, but to freedom.
So what you do want in your life is a good question to ask yourself sometime. In doing so, you will also help yourself focus more on what you do want.
What do you want now?
During a training session, this was also asked and then the answer came, "I want to feel good again. I feel inferior and I feel like people look down on me. I just don't want that anymore. I want people to look up to me. That I matter."
This found this very interesting. That you want people to look up to you. You actually want to do what you don't want other people to do to you. Because if you want people to look up to you, then you have to look down on them. There is no other way then. Then they must be lower than you, so to speak.
Very interesting and a classic example of the bullied and the bully. For example, people who have been bullied don't want that anymore and then they go and bully. After all, then you won't be bullied anymore.
This doesn't always happen in the classroom. The bully might be bullied at home, by parents or an older sibling. Then they go to school to beat someone up, or suppress someone, so at least that doesn't happen to them at school.
Unfortunately, this is a poor strategy because there is always someone else the victim. Only actually, you have two victims.
Because imagine if the person who plague had a fine home situation and who had a fine childhood, would he still do it? No. Now you can have an exception of someone who likes it, but that doesn't happen very often.
We see the bullied boy or girl as the victim. This makes perfect sense because it can affect the rest of one's life.
But if you really want to eliminate bullying completely, you also need to help the bully. The latter needs positive attention to resolve his story.
If you take out the aggressor, there will be fewer victims.
This is often a better strategy than just helping victims.
The interesting thing about this session is that despite the hypnosis of "I want to matter," something special happened. We did a regression. Then you go back to the moment when the feeling arose that people were looking down on you and then you change that moment so you can deal with it in a different way.
After that, he felt fine and didn't feel the need to look down on other people. Or that people should look up to him. Instead, he felt equal.
From what emotion do you want something with your life?
This is also very interesting. Consciously, he wanted people to look up to him. This came from the feeling of inferiority. When that feeling is gone, you want something completely different again.
If I am very scared and you ask me something, I answer it from that feeling. But if I feel very free, then I give a very different answer.
So what you consciously want is probably not what you need.
So that unconscious drive for recognition can change if you can change your story. Then what do you want? Then a very different answer can come.
This is the beauty of what can be achieved with hypnosis. You don't necessarily get what you want, but what you need. Often, then, that is what you actually want.
For example, when I look at bullies and those who have been bullied. Imagine that in those individuals, we neutralize the stories that cause these behaviors. This is often difficult with children because they are still in the middle of the situation at home. Then you have to help the parents.
Imagine having a fine childhood, would you still hurt anyone? Imagine having enough self-confidence and self-esteem? Then you won't bully and you won't be bullied.
When you strip everything away, only one thing remains, and that is love. From true love, people never do harm.
Also listen to this podcast:
Emotion and decision making
What you want in life is, of course, a choice you can make. Research also shows that emotions are incredibly influential in the choices we make. They have a lot of influence on what we want and don't want.
Emotions can have both a positive and negative impact on the decisions you make[1].
Often we want to make rational decisions about our lives, but then it can be helpful to process emotional events from your life, so that you can decide from a loving foundation for yourself (and therefore for the world) what you want with your life (or just dinner😊), for example.
When you look at what you do on a daily basis, emotions also play an important role. For example, if you are working on personal relationships or personal goals that require people, many people often try to avoid conflict.
Distraction and reappraisal or reframing are often used to feel better. So you start listening to music, reading a book, gaming or doing something else altogether to distract yourself from bad emotions[2].
That reframing is something you do with regression therapy, for example, when you get help from a hypnotherapist, but this is also something you can do with self-hypnosis. Then it is helpful that you know what you are doing.
Your goals regulate your emotions
In addition to emotions regulating your goals, the same is true the other way around. Depending on your goals, they can also influence your behavior. So if you choose beforehand, then the emotion can follow afterwards.
For example, if you want to feel good about yourself, you are more likely to choose the situation you want to be in, change that situation faster, distract yourself faster and also reframe a situation for yourself faster.
Do you have goals like getting more friends? Then you engage in more reframing, and if you are busy managing how you come across, you suppress emotions more (you may not directly stand up for yourself then, where you are more likely to do so if you don't care how you come across)[3].
Hypnosis and what you want
In hypnotherapy, what you want is very important. Usually before therapy, you conduct your own exploration conversation. In this conversation, you state what you think is important and what you want to achieve, as in the example of the session in the text.
Then, when hypnosis is induced, you can be made aware of these values and life goals so that during the hypnosis session you have your focus on your goal and what you want to achieve[4]. This can contribute to lowering your stress and getting more satisfaction from your life.
You can also do this when you're doing self-hypnosis in the morning, so as to get your focus right for the rest of the day. That way, in fact, you will start doing more of what is right for what you really want and need in your life.
Want to learn more about hypnosis and how it can help you achieve what you want in your life? Then come to a free online master class.
Or enroll in one of our training courses. The trainings are held online to ensure the progress of the training and so you can stay in the flow. The outside world then has much less influence on your ability to attend classes.
Sources:
[1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5482525/
[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopy.12447
[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207144.2020.1722028
