Waking from the Pit: Using Hypnosis to Master Life's Challenges

The Pit in the stomach

It’s 3am and you wake up with a pit in your stomach that might also be in your chest and maybe even in your throat.  There may have been a thought preceding this.  Then a fear you may be found out for having this thought at all.  Or maybe it’s one of the other ones that wake you up.  You made a decision yesterday.  You felt bold and authentic.  Now you realise you may have made an error.  Now you fear you may have actually said (bad enough), or written (even worse!) something that wasn’t correct.  Did you screw up while actually trying to be brave?  Of course there are a hundred more scenarios that can lead to this pit in your stomach, and eyes open, at 3am.

Next comes the flooding

Because our left brain minds are ‘on the job’ now. You’ve hit ignition. You are fully ‘in it’! Maybe you could just spend the day in bed. Develop a fever. Pretend you are giving yourself space. Or maybe it really is okay and you are just making a mountain out of a mole hill. Maybe this, or this, or this… And now you are tired.Sometimes many, many thoughts like this can actually offer relief, by watering down the challenge so we can get back to sleep. Then we wonder why things never resolve.

It’s a Challenge not a defect

Shame says I am the problem. The reframe says there is a problem, and it is in front of me, not inside me.

Every one of these – the taboo one, the second-rate one, the unworthy one, is a challenge awaiting resolution.  We are not talking about positive thinking now.  We are referring to good old-fashioned structural correction, through clear and deliberate thinking. 

As our bodies bring us back to equilibrium, we breathe, and we sleep.  In the morning the problem is pushed under the chores of our day.  But ‘stuck’ is different from ‘feeling’.  We might be still ‘stuck’, but we can function and the feelings tied to our current challenges will subside, until triggered, at which point we might repeat paragraph one above, again, and again, and again.  And of course, nothing ever really gets buried when it comes to real challenges in our lives, because we are always working on these, even if it is only subconsciously.  And as we watch our own behaviours, we can notice how we are taking action on challenges we may never concede even exist.  Until the behaviour we adopted to cope becomes a challenge of its own!

Stuck isn’t weakness.

When triggered, these challenges often make us feel ‘stuck’.  The alarm itself is a good thing.  That is exactly what stress is built to do for us, signal that a challenge is present.  Being stuck is what happens when that signal has nowhere to go.  And Life gets interesting the moment we give it somewhere to go!  I know.  That ‘pit’.  That panic maybe.  Those tears of fears even maybe.  The freeze.  The anger.  The avoidance.  But we cry for Joy too!  We get anxious when we are truly excited about something too!  The physical symptoms are not the problem.  You are not the problem.  This is Life! And when we recognise this, that’s when we get the ‘aha’ moments we’ve been searching for all our lives!  We took the blows of ignorance.   Yes.  And there were probably many of these!  But now.  Now.  We’ve got it!  We are awake to who we are.  Dorothy had the power the whole way along.  She just needed someone to point at her shoes.

And now we are close to – why hypnosis?

The narrowing

This is worth spending a bit more time on.  Are you ready to talk about the “taboo to you”?

Let’s look at some examples.  Maybe you can empathise:

·         Jessie wants to get fit.  She has suffered with low self-esteem all her life.  Then she found weight training and she feels like this is something she can use to get fit.  The first time she did this she felt something inside of her come alive.  But it isn’t going as she planned.  No matter how hard she tries, she keeps hitting brick walls.  Is she meant to be a failure?  She watches others at the gym and she feels self-conscious, sometimes so much so, she shortens her attendance and has even found herself ‘not feeling well enough’ to exercise.  Her life is going just fine.  But this is a challenge Jessie has that for some reason seems insurmountable.

·         Tom really likes Susan.  He has done everything to position himself as her man.  But every time he even approaches her he feels like garbage.  He starts to notice everything wrong with him and sees only everything right with her. 

·         Tanya is so over the men at her office ignoring her input into the business, she has started drinking heavily at home.  She is never happy.  And she really doesn’t know what to do about changing others.  Why would they give up their power to accommodate her?  There doesn’t seem to be anything she can do.

·         Miranda feels like she must be the only woman alive who thinks the way she does about life.  She desperately wants to be included in groups, but she always finds herself ideologically different to those she likes, or doesn’t like.  Like an ugly duckling of standards.  Should she move location to resolve this?  What’s going on here? 

·         Jackson just shut up years ago.  It just isn’t worth speaking about yourself when no-one is interested, not even your wife.  And he worries that what niggles him most will seem really trivial to others, or disgusting.  So he says nothing. 

If you desperately need help at 3am or any time of day as an emergency, then call Lifeline 24/7 on 13 11 14.  If you are in immediate danger, call 000.

If your challenge is urgent but you are safe, then you are welcome to drop me a line for a quick appointment.  Sometimes we just tie ourselves up in knots that only seem hard to disentangle. 

How ignorance narrows the field

·         Options fall away

·         The world goes black and white

·         There is nothing I can do.  Who am I to think I can?

What knowledge widens

·        When the choices reduce to two, that reduction is information about your state, not information about your Life.  And states change throughout the day!

·        The field always widens.  And it widens faster with help than alone. Every one of us has every planet, every sign and every house in our astrology charts. Whether you are interested in astrology or not the anecdote is also a metaphor.. 

Language

We build our situations out of sentences, mostly unexamined ones.  “I always.” “I’m like that.” “There’s only one way this goes.” 

Change the sentence and the structure it was holding up has to rearrange.  This is a mechanism of Life, not wishful thinking.  Like it or not there is Structure to who we are.  There are, and always have been, tools we use to navigate our lives.  Biological tools.  We use our hands for certain chores.  No-one demands that we stop using and directing our hands.  So how come we stopped using our brains?

Jackson doesn’t have to say it

Jackson arrives with something he has not spoken aloud in eleven years. He has rehearsed the two possible receptions so many times they feel like facts: trivial, or disgusting. Those are his two doors. He has been standing in front of them so long he has stopped noticing they are the only two he can see.

Here is the first thing that surprises him.  He does not have to tell me what it is.

One of the reasons we don’t talk about our challenges as they really are is that we can’t readily put them into words that truly reflect the experience.  Our subconscious doesn’t speak English, or Chinese, or Polish, or French, or any other language, the way our cognition does.  This is valid.  It isn’t evasion, and it isn’t a failure of nerve.  It is one of the things hypnotherapy is built to work with, and to teach you to work with.  

His language reveals structure.  His body emotes the narratives.  The subconscious does not use language the way our cognitive awareness uses language.   

There is no stage-hypnosis theatre here, and no shock treatment.Hypnotherapy takes place in a state of relaxation, and there is a good reason for that. Debriefing someone immediately after a distressing event, walking them straight back through it in detail, was standard practice for years, until the research caught up. It does not prevent lasting difficulty, and for some people it makes things worse. Hypnotherapy works the other way round: from a state of deep relaxation, with the pressure to narrate removed.

Somewhere in our process Jackson does something he may have never done before.  He steps outside the Doer.  He becomes the one watching Jackson, and the one watching Jackson watch Jackson!  The terrain expands and more doors begin to appear.  Zoom out and try this yourself.

It is very curious how we notice with such precision the challenges our loved ones and close friends face, but rarely pop out to recognize our own until those deep gurgles force us to do so.

So the insurmountable thing turns out to be a welcome intrusion.  It teaches Jackson how to work with the emotional meat of this particular challenge.  More importantly, it teaches him the method.  Next Tuesday, on his own, without me, he can turn the same technique on whatever arrives next - and something always arrives next.

Challenges have strange faces sometimes.  The scary monster we keep hidden can offer so many gifts.  We are all so constantly surprised by this!  Yet it is so common.

What is different when he walks out? Not that the thing is gone. Anyone promising you that is selling something else. What is different is that Jackson can find the position from which it is workable, and find it again on his own. He has more than two doors. And he has the option of speaking - whether he uses it, and to whom, is his. When trauma is no longer present, speaking about events and challenges we overcame becomes something we might want to do to help others, because now they no longer affect our biological fight or flight once processed.

 

So what is Hypnosis?

Definitions and experienced descriptions of hypnosis:

• Insight into using our brains.  Emancipation from ignorance, the agnotological kind and the self-perpetuated ignore-ance kind. 
•  A natural method we use every day to learn and grow, applied with awareness.
• Using the REM state to enjoy Life’s challenges and leave a great legacy. 
• Hypnotherapy: Help with learning how to learn, how to use Hypnosis!

I can’t wait for you to get involved in my Practice.  All enquiries welcome.  Bring whatever you’ve got.  But be prepared to enjoy Life more! With all your C H A L L E N G E S!  Bring ‘em on!

How can you get involved in this wonderful Journey today?

Some services that might excite you now:

Engage a Discovery Session about Hypnosis and find out where it fits you.

·        Book your One-on-One Hypnosis Session.  At our Practice at Capalaba, Brisbane or Online. Start your journey today.

·        Attend a weekly Meeting Your Needs Meet-up

Check out our website for more ways to use our service – to turn challenges into welcomed friends! 

Jessie, Tom, Tanya, Miranda and Jackson are composites drawn from patterns I see often. They are not clients.