How does hypnosis work?

I am going to answer that along with providing you with a model of your mind.  It is important to have a basic understanding of the mind and how it works in order to understand how we use hypnosis and hypnotic tools like the CONTROL System to facilitate change.

There are two main parts to your mind.  The conscious and the subconscious.  The conscious is your logical, rational, reasoning part of your mind. It is your immediate point of focus so the part that is paying attention to what you are reading right now.  It can handle maybe a handful of things at once so it’s fairly limited in its capacity.

By contrast your subconscious mind is constantly doing hundreds and hundreds things, all in the background, most of it outside of your conscious awareness.  It’s your emotional, imaginative, and creative part of your thinking.  Most importantly it is the part that holds all of your belief systems, your thought and behavioral patterns.

Anything you feel you do without thinking, you can’t stop doing, or you can’t start doing.  That’s because there is a thought pattern running in your subconscious that is driving that behavior. In order for us to make changes to that behavior we need to get in touch with the part that is running it.

Now up until about the time we reach double digits in age we are almost purely subconscious in the way we are processing things. We are emotional and in the moment.  We saw it, we did it, we learned it.  We then formed what we might refer to as our map of reality, or our idea about how the world works.

A little later on we started to develop our more logical, conscious way of thinking and what came with our conscious, logical mind is this thing we refer to as the Critical Faculty.  This is the security guard of the mind.  When new information comes in it judges it for truth. If it doesn’t match up with or isn’t at least compatible with what you already have on your map of reality, that security guard will reject it as false, no matter how logical it seems to your conscious mind.  Any attempt to change what is on the map is met with the resistance of that security guard whose only job is to maintain a consistent reality no matter how unhelpful that reality has become.  Let me give you an example.

Let’s imagine that you are four or five years old and you are in the kitchen playing and a spider runs out.  Your mom starts to scream and panic.  Your little mind says, that’s the appropriate response to those things because that’s what mom just did and that’s who we’re learning from and so that goes into your mind and onto your map of reality.  Then for the rest of your life every time you see a spider your mind produces a fear response.  You tense up, your heart beats faster, and you start to sweat.  Even though your conscious mind is going “that thing is tiny, it couldn’t possibly harm me”, but all that logical, rational stuff is rejected by the security guard because it doesn’t match with what you already know, spiders are indeed scary.

The resistance of that security guard is why we can’t usually make subconscious changes by ourselves.  However, what the CONTROL system does is it establishes a direct line of communication with your subconscious, and it does this by inducing a state we refer to as subconscious dominance.  Basically, instead of trying to get past the security guard and get in the building we just take everything that’s of interest to us and put it outside the building where we can deal with it without the interference of the security guard.

We achieve subconscious dominance by doing something your subconscious does on its own, without any recourse to a logical or rational process.  The two things your mind does really well all on its own; it emotes and it imagines. So we use our imagination games to determine how your mind likes to communicate and then make whatever changes we need to make.

I want to include an additional piece here that is the WHY hypnosis works piece and for that I want to use our Ship metaphor.

Think of your mind like a ship.  A ship has a Captain and a Crew.

The Captain is your logical, conscious mind.  The Captain knows where we are sailing to, why we are sailing there and he even has an edea how we are going to get there.  Unfortunately the part of your mind with its hands on everything that steers and sails this ship is the crew.  The Crew is your subconscious mind.

Every member of your Crew has a specific job to do.  Each member is only concerned with their specific task.  Some are doing the right things and some are doing what your Captain now recognizes to be the wrong things.

When the crew listens to the Captain everything is smooth sailing.  However, when the Crew isn’t listening then who knows where we are going. Maybe we are going nowhere!

The reason why members of your Crew are often found doing the wrong thing is because they decided what jobs they were doing before you had a Captain on board.  When you were young with no idea about how the world worked and what your part in it was your mind, and your crew, had only one priority… keep the ship afloat.  As a result your mind developed certain strategies that were only designed to keep you out of trouble at a time when you didn’t understand much about how to do that.

In spite of how it seems members of your Crew are only looking to do one thing.  That is to find the best strategy for the most happiness.  When you were young happiness consisted of staying safe and comfortable in the moment, and you had no long term goals or ambitions.  As a result many of the strategies your Crew members adopted don’t make much sense now to an adult who has long term goals and ambitions.  The Crew we have on board may not have developed many of the strategies that make this Captain happy.  This is why the Captain needs to speak to the Crew members who are now doing old and unhelpful things and assign them new jobs.

The reason your crew members will be happy to change what they are doing s because none of them are trying to sink your ship.  They are all simply looking for the best strategy for the most happiness.

When it comes right down to it change is as easy as a conversation as long as the right part of your mind is engaged at the time.

Remember to send an email with any questions you have and if you struggle being happy and staying motivated please get in touch and find out if working with me is a good fit.