Don’t think of a blue tree!

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What happened?

You thought of a blue tree, didn’t you?

The way that our minds work is that we seem to have to focus on the thing that we don’t want, and the more that we don’t want something, the more we focus on it. And this can have some rather unfortunate consequences, because what we focus on tends to grow in our experience.

So if we are dieting and tend to crave chocolate, saying to ourselves “don’t think of chocolate”, “I don’t want chocolate”, just brings chocolate into our mind more and more, thus increasing the craving.

In the area of relationships, we probably all know of someone who seems to go from one bad relationship to another, repeating the same mistakes each time. So if a someone has had some bad experiences with bullying men, for example, she really wants to avoid them, and her unconscious mind is primed to “keep an eye out for bullying men”. It does keep an eye out, so bullying men are all she notices. Her choices are severely limited as a result because all the decent men don’t even register: she doesn’t notice them. She is forced to pick from a bad bunch and the cycle continues.

Because our minds are having to deal with millions of pieces of information coming to us through all our senses every moment, and there’s no way that we can possibly pay attention to them all. There has to be a system in place to filter out and delete most of that information, allowing us to function as a human being and notice only the things that are important to us and our survival.

So it’s as if we have little computer programs, or apps, running in our minds, deciding for us what we will notice and what will be invisible to us. And although the subconscious mind is working in what it believes are our best interests, sometimes it gets things wrong and we can end up with the opposite of what was intended.

This has been described as the “Therapeutic Paradox” by Trevor Silvester, internationally renowned Cognitive Hypnotherapist, founder of the Quest Institute, and a good friend of mine.

So how do we help someone who is trying to avoid the chocolate, or trying to keep away from bullying men? Well we need to help the unconscious mind to understand that the way that it has been behaving is no longer useful or appropriate. It is doing the best it can, but it was mistaken in the meaning or belief that it attached to a past event, that led it to produce the current behaviour.

So maybe one of the ways in which a loving and doting granny demonstrated her love for a grandchild was by buying her sweets and the child decided this meant that “sweets = love”, and in stressful situations when the now grown-up child feels unloved, sweets are the solution. If we can remove the meaning that became attached to the Grandmother’s past behaviour, then the behaviour that resulted will also be removed.

Sometimes it can almost seem that there are two conflicting ‘parts’ working inside a person so, in the case of the woman with the bad relationships, on the one hand there is a part of her that realises that there are many decent, kind men out there who she could go out with, and another part of her that is afraid of all men and wants to avoid them. If we can encourage these ‘parts’ to acknowledge each other and work together to achieve her goal of a successful relationship with a good man, then she can move forward with her life.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy offers people with such problems the opportunity to move forward in their lives, leaving their problems behind, and it is surprising that even long-standing behaviours and unhelpful beliefs can be shifted in a short space of time.

Contact Taggart

If you have any questions about Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy and how I can help you now, hop over to my Contact Form, send me a message, and we can arrange a 20-30 minute Zoom chat about what I am going to be helping you with.

Click to arrange that chat now

Some of you may have seen the drama series “Being Erica”, where the main character is a well-educated, single Jewish girl in her early 30s. Erica is an underachiever and the series begins with her being fired from a mindless customer service job because she is overqualified. Erica is convinced that poor choices she made in her past have made her life a failure. She she seeks the help of a “Dr. Tom” to undo many of her mistakes, making a list of her many regrets. The therapist, amazingly, has the ability to send her back in time to actually relive these events and even change them. As the series progresses, by changing her past experiences and what she believes about herself and other people, she gains confidence in herself and her choices, dates and finds love, and gets promoted to junior editor at a publishing house.

As far as I’m concerned, Being Erica is all about Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

Let’s think of an example: Jane is in her 30s comes for treatment because she has a poor self image. She doesn’t think very much of herself. She believes that she’s stupid and, while she doesn’t enjoy her job, she won’t apply for a promotion because she’s afraid that she won’t get it because she’s not good enough. Using Cognitive Hypnotherapy we search for the root cause of this unhelpful belief and we find that when she was 13 she was sitting at home doing some Maths homework with her father. He is getting frustrated with her because he hasn’t very much time, and Jane is not ‘getting it’. He gets angry with her and Jane is upset. Jane decides that she must be stupid.

This belief sinks down into Jane’s unconscious mind and sits there, unchallenged, guiding her thoughts and her beliefs about what she is capable of. We tend to notice things that support our beliefs, so Jane always notices when she messes something up, which helps to reinforce her belief that she’s stupid. Any events where Jane does well are not noticed, they are glossed over by her unconscious mind because they ‘don’t compute’.

Not wanting to feel like she did when she was 13, Jane tries to avoid situations where she might be found to be stupid, and seriously underachieves as a result.

But if Jane could go back in time to experience that event again, she could realise a few things about that event, for example:

1. Her father was actually acting out of love: he loved her and wanted her to get a good education so that she could find a good job, be happy and have a better life than he had had.
2. He didn’t think that she was stupid. Not at all. She was only 13 and some people take longer to get the hang of things than others.
3. His anger was all about his frustration and the lack of time that he had, and he didn’t express himself well. It was limitations in him as a person that this event was all about.
4. It wasn’t about Jane at all. No matter what child had been sitting there, he would have behaved in the same way.

And if Jane could have realised all these things when she was 13, what a difference that would have made to her and her life. She would have been free of that limiting belief that sat there in the background guiding her behaviour and her beliefs about herself. What new things would she have attempted, how much more would she have pushed herself, what would she have achieved if she had been free of that debilitating belief? How would her life have been different? It would have made all the difference, wouldn’t it?

Because it’s not the events in our lives that shape us as a person: it’s what we choose to believe about those events, it’s the meaning that we attach to them that guides and sometimes limits us. An event takes place and we decide what that means: what it means about us and our capabilities, what it means about other people, about the world, about relationships. And those beliefs guide our thoughts and our behaviour over the years.

So if we could go back in time and change the meaning that those significant events have to us, we can change the thought processes and beliefs and perceived limitations that resulted from them.

And that’s what we can do using Cognitive Hypnotherapy: going back in time in a sense, to give new meaning to those events that shaped us a person, allowing us to quickly grow free of those limitations that we thought we had, allowing the real you to shine through, the you that is free from limitations and unhelpful beliefs and behaviours.

Contact Taggart

If you have any questions about Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy and how I can help you now, hop over to my Contact Form, send me a message, and we can arrange a 20-30 minute Zoom chat about what I am going to be helping you with.

Click to arrange that chat now

We’re all familiar with how seeds work: you sow a seed and it starts to grow. You can’t see any evidence of growth to begin with because all the growing takes place beneath the surface, but after a while the plant starts to reveal itself, reaching up to the sky, growing ever stronger as its roots send tendrils ever-deeper into the ground, bedding itself down, clinging on, driving down its foundations and making it more and more difficult to shift.

It’s a bit like that with ideas and beliefs, too, with a seed of an idea in our childhood establishing itself in our subconscious mind, growing, making more connections, eventually showing itself in the way that we behave and think about ourselves, what we believe about ourselves, other people, and the world.

Because our mind works out what we should do in any new situation by looking to the past, scanning its memory banks for a similar situation that we have experienced, so we know what it’s about and how we should react. And if there is a past event that sends a big warning signal, we can become ‘hijacked’ by a strong emotion and go into ‘automatic’, behaving in a way that our unconscious mind believes is the best thing to do. And this is all done unconsciously, with us clicking into a particular behaviour pattern and trying to rationalise what happened to us.

Perhaps when we were little we were in a nativity play at school, and when it was our turn to walk on stage, someone had left a piece of wood in the wrong place and we tripped over it, sprawling across the stage, with many people laughing. We feel awful and embarrassed, humiliated, and because children tend to attach a personal meaning to things – seeing themselves as being the cause of what goes on around them – we could believe that being on stage is a very frightening thing, something that we need to avoid; our subconscious mind is there to protect us, after all, and it has learned something very useful about the world.

Now fast-forward by 20 years and we are working for a company, and we need to start to give business presentations. Our subconscious mind says to itself, “what’s this like?” and it finds that early memory; our subconscious says “Oh S**t! I’m not doing that!”. Your subconscious mind is facing a threat, and the basic human response to a threat is the “fight and flight” response, where our heart rate and blood pressure go up, blood drains away from our digestive system and into our muscles, adrenaline is pumped into our body and we start to shake. On the day of the presentation we will probably do one of two things:

(1) Go through with the presentation, but we are so overwhelmed by strong emotion – strong emotions make us stupid – that we really mess things up. Our subconscious evaluates what happened and says to itself, “I knew you shouldn’t have done that. I knew it was going to be bad. Next time I’ll make sure you’re even more frightened.”

(2) Sit in the loo before the presentation, feeling sick and nauseous. We may even vomit. We can’t go through with it and go home, saying that we have been taken sick. Our subconscious is looking for a “high five” from someone because it has prevented you from experiencing the humiliation that you had when you were 8 years old. It has done its job well by keeing you from danger.

The irony, of course, is that by trying to prevent you from experiencing the humiliation that you experienced when you were 8 years old, you have ended up humiliated at age 28, and since all this activity is going on underneath the surface (we can’t even remember the Nativity play episode probably) all we can do is to try and rationalise our behaviours as best we can.

We will probably conclude that we are stupid, or inadequate, or no good at public speaking, or not cut out for a career in business. And that belief will limit our choices and our potential.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy can deal with such situations by helping to uncover the original event that caused this behaviour, and by tweaking the meaning that we attached to this event, we can make sure that it no longer hijacks us like it did in the past, allowing us more freedom and choice in our life, allowing us to fulfil our potential unhindered by mistaken beliefs from the past.

Contact Taggart

If you have any questions about Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy and how I can help you now, hop over to my Contact Form, send me a message, and we can arrange a 20-30 minute Zoom chat about what I am going to be helping you with.

Click to arrange that chat now