Holiday Baking

(This blog was originally posted on December 22, 2014)

Photo by Sara Fogan

                I imagine that a lot of people have kept busy baking—or preparing to bake—treats for the holidays in the past week or so. I sure have!

    

            As I have gotten older, opening gifts has become less of an event for me than selecting, wrapping and giving presents. Especially baking holiday goodies: cookies, cakes, side dishes for the main meal… Whatever can be prepared with love and specific attention, I am totally there to do it. For me, this is the part of holiday cheer that really makes me smile and, well, puts me in the holiday spirit.

     

           Perhaps my enjoyment comes from the known of these activities and behaviors. Of course, certain family favorites are on the menu every year: Gingerbread men and sugar cookies cut out into various Christmas and Chanukah shapes are a given. (Nothing says Christmas like Gingerbread men, right?) Then come the chocolate-chip cookies, peanut-butter cookies and assorted other flavors per my craving. After watching my mom baking goodies and fussing with holiday decorations/preparations during my childhood, I came to associate the delicious smells emanating from the kitchen with the love and attention she put into it. Over the years, sifting flour, measuring sugar, cracking eggs, pouring the chocolate-chips into the batter, cutting out the shapes of gingerbread men all became ingrained in my mind as a subconscious known.

Every so often a new goodie would be added to the repertoire: lemon bars and “peppermint bark” are recent family favorites. But I remember how almost resistant I was to adding those new treats to my baking repertoire. Not because I thought it would be too much work, but because they were new (unknown) and not yet part of the family tradition. Yummy as I knew those new treats would be, I was a little reluctant to try a new recipe. What if the recipe was too complicated? What if the finished product didn’t look like the cookie in the picture? Yes, it was fear of the unknown; ultimately, thankfully—with a lot of practice making them—all of these recipes have worked out very well.

Now, rather than strictly follow a recipe I can rely on my subconscious mental scripts for holiday baking. Since I have been following this same behavior for so many years, I know I can trust my instinct (muscle memory) to adding just the right amount of a specific ingredient to the mix. Even more important, after “experimenting” with different versions that have come out of the oven over the years, I know what I can substitute (or not) and the recipe will still make a delectable treat.

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2016

Suggestibility and That Jerry Lewis Interview

Photo by Rick Hustead

On December 19, 2016, actor Jerry Lewis sat down to do an interview with journalist Andy Lewis from The Hollywood Reporter. One of the goals was to discuss, among other things, the contributions that Lewis and his nonagenarian colleagues continue to make to entertainment. Since the seven-minute clip aired, it has been dubbed “a train-wreck” and “the most painfully awkward interview of 2016.” Throughout those seven minutes, Lewis provided primarily monosyllabic (yes/no/why?) responses to questions or a “Why should I?” and so on. During the course of the interview, the journalist’s and the performer’s voices start to betray more than a hint of frustration. People watching Jerry Lewis’s THR interview on-line or listening to excerpts during various radio or television programs might have laughed or squirmed in sympathy for the interviewer.

I was immediately fascinated.

The first time I watched and listened to the interview I wondered and suspected that Mr. Lewis is a physical suggestible because he answered each direct question with a yes or no answer. As I have explained in previous blogs about emotional and physical suggestibility, this person receives information differently. For a Physical, message units are taken in literally and directly: an object is this or it is that; a direct question is answered directly and literally. Conversely, someone with emotional suggestibility automatically infers meaning or significance to a question or comment, and is likely to provide more details than necessary when answering it. Andy Lewis might have been able to elicit additional information or conversation from his subject with more or differently phrased open-ended questions. However, even when he tried this tactic, his subject stayed true to this one-line-answer patter.

Hmm. Someone with physical suggestibility and/or a physical sexual personality also like to talk, to provide explanations and make sure he is understood. That is why, for example, a physical suggestible typically provide a lot of details or back-story when working up to his main point in a conversation. A physical sexual individual tends to be comfortable and relaxed and even enjoy being at the center of attention, which Mr. Lewis does not seem to like at all (on this occasion, anyway). An emotional sexual personality is more likely to provide more direct or even terse responses (written or verbal), as Jerry Lewis does during this interview. An emotional sexual also prefers to avoid being center of attention or even noticed much in the first place, which seemed to be what was going on in this case.

Based on what I saw in this interview, I believe that Mr. Lewis is an emotional sexual personality with emotional suggestibility because he does elaborate on some of the yes/no information he provided. When he answered the interviewer’s questions with another question (“Why?”), these responses suggest that he was evaluating/analyzing every word he was asked and making a case-by-case decision how much information to provide.

As a final note, one of the rules of handwriting analysis is that the way a person writes is a reflection of his behavior and personality traits. It is a snapshot of your mood at the time the sample is produced. It would be interesting to compare how much of Mr. Lewis’s behavior during those seven-plus minutes would show up in his handwriting.

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2016

The Day Peace Broke Out

Photo by Rick Hustead

This afternoon, someone told me an interesting anecdote that I would like to share with you.

In 2008, after years of violence and discord, Ulster unionists and the Irish Republican Army declared a cease fire. Northern Ireland’s Ulster Defence Association disbanded its paramilitary group and said the war between the two countries was finally over. Both sides promised to work toward a lasting and productive peace, and citizens in Ireland, Northern Ireland and even England breathed a sigh of relief. For generations, citizens in Great Britain had lived with a constant threat of IRA-related terrorist activities; but now that “peace had broken out” everyone could go about living their lives without fear. 

That expression—now that peace had broken out—was so interesting to me. Usually the words “had broken out” conjure negative images: disease, physical/emotional pain, social discord, war or even bad weather. But if the only thing you knew was a sensation of constant physical threat or danger, and verbal and written rhetoric to incite or condemn violence is always around you, these experiences become known and familiar. It could even be suggested that this situation was a kind of comfort zone. Of course, this doesn’t mean you felt comfortable. But you knew what to do if and when a terror alert was raised and had adapted your other behaviors to basically live your life as normally as possible in the meantime. It was not surprising, then, that even after the cease-fire was declared and the hostilities between these nations was over that many people remained vigilant for a while longer. 

The perceived mutual animosity, hostility and distrust had been going on so long that it was difficult to know what to do with and in the new status quo. They were used to following a specific subconscious mental script that kept them safe all those years, and it took some time to write, reinforce and believe a new one that the danger was past. But maintaining that high state of vigilance couldn’t go on forever: The physical body simply can’t and wasn’t made to handle this constant flood of hormones coursing through the bloodstream, non-stop. Eventually, something had to give, whether that was an emotional reaction (or over-reaction) or, equally likely, going into a trance-like state to escape the sensory overload (environmental hypnosis). 

Hypnosis Motivation Institute founder John Kappas, Ph.D.’s Theory of Mind concept exemplifies this phenomenon. According to Dr. Kappas, we all start learning and adopting various beliefs and behaviors at a very young age. Every time we repeat an action or express/observe one of those beliefs, we reinforce that subconscious “known” until it becomes an established subconscious mental script. While this script can be rewritten to accommodate a new social norm, initial efforts to modify previous beliefs and behaviors are also likely to be met with considerable resistance. After all, even desired change can be uncomfortable, inconvenient and even painful as we learn a new way of doing things and living our life, which can be very different from the comfortable and familiar patterns of the past.

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2016

Thoughts of the Day

Photo by Sara Fogan

      Every now and then I like (and need) to take a few moments and remind myself about what is really important to me, in my life. If you follow me on my Calminsense Hypnotherapy Facebook page you may have seen some of these quotes before on this page, or will in the future. Many of these Quotes of the Day are beautiful examples and illustrations of the work I do as a hypnotherapist, so I will probably draw on them in future essays.

• “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anais Nin

• “Fear complacency more than failure.”– Gerri Chambers

• “Life is found in the dance between your deepest desires and your greatest fears.” – Tony Robbins

• “Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” – Henri Louis Bergson

• “For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”– Thich Nhat Hanh

• “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” – Marcus Aurelius

• “Empowerment is oxygen to the soul.” – Lolly Daskal

• “Goals aren't voluntary, they’re imperative. If you’re not setting goals, you’re setting a goal to fail.” – Bille Baty

• “Stop worrying about what you have to lose and start focusing on what you have to gain.” – Unknown

• “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” – Dalai Lama

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2016