Neuroscience and Hypnosis
I came to hypnosis and hypnotherapy, not as a scientist or psychologist but as a person sick of dealing with the same emotional baggage and triggers over and over again.
My childhood, like many of us, wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. On the contrary, I dealt with a lot of the same shit most people do, including: Negative family dynamics, the nightmare of the teenage years, 1990’s were a blur… as the rebellious teenager turned to self-medication, and of course the relationships, on repeat. Same issues, different meat suits.
However, by the grace of all that is balanced and sensible in the world, I was very fortunate to have my circle of friends that kept me going. Also, my guidance and intuition have always been there too. Although I hadn't realized this until I was in my 40’s, I have always connected to guidance through techniques like journaling and automatic writing.
So, I am the classic wounded warrior that has lived a lot of years, done lots of research, and has finally found and developed the tools that work for me. As I studied Hypnotherapy, I realized that some of the tools I was learning were the tools I had been using all of my life. For example, journaling and automatic writing, but also visualization which I used for weight loss in my 20’s, which led to a 10 year love affair with going to the gym on a regular basis, and business development, which I still use today. And the technique that I now know as self-hypnosis which I used for pain management during natural childbirth.
Why SELF-HYPNOSIS with TAKE BACK YOUR LIGHT?
The basic premise of hypnosis and hypnotherapy is being able to calm your conscious mind so you can access your subconscious, and therefore, calm your Autonomic Nervous System. If you are, for example, speaking in public or taking an important test, two classic situations where one might work themselves up into a tizzy. Self-hypnosis would be an excellent tool to use to calm your autonomic nervous system before stepping on stage and reprogram your old limiting beliefs that are triggering your negative feelings. In my practice, I teach the classic self-hypnosis techniques that I learned while studying hypnotherapy, but I add a tool I developed through my own personal process, identifying energy signatures in the body and removing them with help from guides and or through forgiveness.
How does science inform Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy
So, I am a bit of a neuroscience groupie. I love to listen to their podcasts, read the books, follow on social media, etc. (It has nothing to do with how cute Andrew Huberman is, I SWEAR!!) I especially love how they keep touting hypnosis and hypnotherapy or techniques that are called something else but have similar methods and purpose, or at least that’s how I read it.
For example, in Dr. Caroline Leaf’s book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, she expands on our current state of mental mess-ery and impresses that mind management is the key to a happier, more productive life. Lucky for us, we now know that the brain is capable of change. Enter the plastic paradox:
“Every moment of managing your mind is selective. It's just as easy to generate negative changes as it is to generate positive changes in the brain; this is called the plastic paradox. The ability of the brain to change, or neuroplasticity, can occur in good or bad directions; the point is that the brain is always changing.” p. 46
Ok, that’s great but what does my brain being plastic have to do with my mind, hypnosis and hypnotherapy?
Good Question, I’d love to tell you.
With the understanding of the plastic paradox comes a new found responsibility. We now have “proof” that we can alter our brains that have been negatively affected by the overactive stress response due to repetitive toxic thoughts, constant fear messaging, and the lack of personal agency that is built into our system. According to Dr. Leaf, when we are working with an overactive stress or toxic stress, we are more vulnerable to disease, which is why researchers now believe that toxic stress is responsible for up to approximately 90% of illness including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
“ In fact, excessive stress hormones are so effective at compromising the immune system that Physicians therapeutically provide recipients of organ transplants with stress hormones to prevent their immune system from rejecting foreign implants."
The practice of self hypnosis starts with the reduction of stress, calming our conscious mind. As we do, we calm our autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for either the sympathetic response, ie: fight-or-flight response or parasympathetic, rest and digest response in our bodies. Learning to calm your autonomic nervous system on demand is mind management. I would call this Step 1 in becoming the master of your mind. As we calm the body and quiet the conscious mind, we gain access to the subconscious mind. This is where the beliefs and memories are stored. Beliefs and memories are what creates the triggers or energy signatures that we react to in certain situations.
But wait, what about thoughts?
Before we get too deep into this, allow me to layout a few working definitions brought to us by Dr. Caroline Leaf…
What is Mind:
“The mind is energy, it generates energy through thinking, feeling, and choosing.”
My WooWoo friends would call this the Aura, or the electromagnetic energy field around the body. A healthy aura emanates from a healthy body.
What is Brain:
“The brain (is what) was responding to the person's thinking, feeling, and choosing as a stream of consciousness.”
What are thoughts:
“When we generate this mind energy through thinking, feeling and choosing, we build thoughts which are physical structures of the brain. The building of the thoughts is called neuroplasticity.” Further, “ A thought is a real physical thing that occupies mental real estate in the brain and the mind.”
What is memory:
“A thought is made up of embedded memories…The thought, therefore, is the big idea and the memories are the details”
Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy are more than just tools for positive thinking
As Dr. Leaf mentions many times in her book, positive thinking alone can be actually more harmful than doing nothing at all, because you are just suppressing the emotion further and dealing with feelings of guilt and failure when positivity alone doesn't work.
Importantly, in my work we do not gloss over the bad memory, we reprogram them while you are in the hypnotic state. The benefit to this is the client is able to recall all of the emotions while viewing the event from a third party perspective. Usually this is, the viewer, or your adult reasoning mind vs. the child mind, if the critical incident happened during childhood, for example.
So, in conclusion:
Now that science has caught up to the meditators around the world, we have “proof” that we are capable of changing the structure of our brains, with our thoughts. Neuroplasticity. We also know and have for a while now, how damaging toxic thoughts can be on our entire physiology.
We have also known for a long time that meditation, breathing and hypnosis can calm your conscious mind and relax your Autonomic Nervous System. Unlike meditation and breathing, hypnosis and specifically hypnotherapy, gets to the root of the toxic thought pattern, also known as the critical incident. It is this pattern or limiting belief that we reprogram.
“As you think, feel and choose, you will expect and believe, and in doing so, you are reshaping your mental landscape, your brain is responding to your mind.”
Dr. Caroline Leaf