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Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Some Things to Remember About Habits

(This blog was originally posted on August 8, 2016)

Photo by Rick Hustead

Most people seek hypnotherapy to change or get rid of (quit) an unwanted habit. Whether you want to lose weight, quit smoking, stop procrastinating, improve sleeping habits or any myriad of behaviors, hypnosis and therapeutic guided imagery are powerful, effective tools to help you achieve your self-improvement goal. While I do not typically need to delve into your entire back-story to understand why you started, and want to change the unwanted habit, I will need certain, specific details about it to create an effective hypnotic script. Following is some important information about habits and habit-change to keep in mind.

You must be coming in for hypnotherapy because you want to change the behavior for this therapy to be effective.

While you (your conscious mind) want to change an unwanted habit, the subconscious mind is unlikely to share that goal. Changing habits entails getting out of your comfort zone (rejecting a subconscious known) which the subconscious mind considers “pain.”

Hypnotherapy can help create and establish healthier/more productive and desirable behaviors in the subconscious mind to replace the unwanted one(s). However, habits do not begin overnight and habits do not change overnight. Furthermore, the longer you have been practicing that behavior, the more time it may take to change it. Remember, each time you have engaged in the habit strengthened its positive association in your subconscious mind.

Increasing awareness of when you engage in the undesired habit helps you gain greater control over that behavior.

Some behaviors may be a defense mechanism to avoid change and thereby protect the subconscious mind from the pain induced by change. In this instance, it may be necessary to address the cause of the behavior (habit) to help you achieve your vocational/avocational self-improvement goal.*

*California law allows access by California residents to complementary and alternative health care practitioners who are not providing services that require medical training and credentials. The purpose of a program of hypnotherapy is for vocational and avocational self-improvement (Business and Professions Code 2908) and as an alternative or complementary treatment to healing arts services licensed by the state. A hypnotherapist is not a licensed physician or psychologist, and hypnotherapy services are not licensed by the state of California. Services are non-diagnostic and do not include the practice of medicine, neither should they be considered a substitute for licensed medical or psychological services or procedures.

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Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. In July 2019 she was voted the Best Hypnotherapist in Santa Clarita, California. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Making it Happen

(This blog was originally posted on April 19, 2014)

Photo by Sara Fogan

Have I ever mentioned how powerful the subconscious mind is? As in, the SCM wants nothing more than to do what you tell it to do. You don’t even have to mean what you are thinking about; an idea just pops into your head and is gone in a nanosecond. Until…

I decided to wear my red jeans tonight so I could throw the blues into the washing machine with my other dark colors. I didn’t want to run the machine again just wash my magenta top; but if I could wait until tomorrow evening to throw the red jeans in with the shirt, that would be an acceptable load. Funny, my subconscious obviously didn’t agree with this strategy. Somehow, while I was eating dessert a stray blob of ice cream dripped off my spoon, onto the edge of the kitchen table and right on the leg of my red jeans. Really? Come on! I had only been wearing them for a couple of hours!

In my blog titled Power of Thinking, I described the premise of John Kappas, Ph.D.’s book titled Success Is Not an Accident. According to the Hypnosis Motivation Institute founder, any thought or idea that we program into our subconscious mind becomes a subconscious mental script; it is these mental scripts that determine the outcome of our thoughts—stray and intentional. Whether we imagine a positive or negative result, the SCM follows that mental script and work to actualize the goal it thinks you “want.”

If blogs have “morals,” this one is, be careful what you think of. I guess I really did want to wash those red items tonight.

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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Going for a Cause

(This blog was originally posted on May 4, 2014)

Photo by Rick Hustead

At some time in our lives, just about everyone uses a defense mechanism to cope with a stressful or disappointing experience. These strategies can include denial or displacement of the unpleasant emotion, repression of a memory, substance abuse, regressing to an earlier stage of development or even substance dependency. However these behaviors provide only a temporary perception of control over the environment; eventually, we have to deal with and resolve the primary issue that has triggered the defense mechanism in order to achieve personal growth. To be an effective hypnotherapist, I must recognize which one(s) a client may be using, how and why the device is working in this situation, and when it is preventing desired change and personal growth to occur.

According to John Kappas, Ph.D., resistance to changing a behavior is the first stage of effecting this change. “We do things systematically to avoid change,” said the founder of the Hypnosis Motivation Institute. “Change is a threat to the unconscious mind.” To facilitate change in a client’s behavior—such as helping someone to quit smoking or to lose weight—the hypnotherapist must “buy” the person’s symptoms of defensive behavior and provide some symptomatic relief. But for the problem or unwanted behavior to be truly resolved it is often necessary to go for the cause of the conflict or symptom. “The client may be subconsciously protecting [the cause] by employing defense-mechanism devices,” Dr. Kappas explained.

Usually, many factors combine to create the primary issue or problem, and the client is suggestible to those precipitating factors, the hypnotherapist explained. Consequently, the first hypnotherapy session with a client is the most important component of the therapeutic process, because this is the first opportunity to start working with the client’s suggestibility and “suggest” certain changes in behavior. For example, I might work with a client to desensitize the person to the association of smoking a cigarette while drinking an alcoholic beverage before supper. Or, I would create a new association in which a client would “choose” to write about his or her negative emotions in a journal rather than eat a bowl of ice cream when the person felt angry or sad. But these changes in behavior—social drinking and displacing negative emotions through eating—can and will only occur when the client is ready to recognize the relationship between the emotion and behavior.

“You cannot cure a person by telling him what the problem is,” Dr. Kappas said. “Whenever you hit the cause of the problem, symptoms start to disappear. Once you identify and remove the primary cause of the problem, you must alleviate secondary issues.”

Summer Promotion: Hypnosis for Weight Loss