Open post
Everything makes me nervous

Everything makes me nervous

    Everything makes me nervous

    I had a first today with a client. The client was a tiny woman but grossly obese.  She seemed to be almost as broad as she was tall. She was also excessively nervous and fidgety.   And that was the problem she wanted to deal with: anxiety. Anxiety makes her overeat. She said she had been anxious for as long as she could remember. I asked her "what make you anxious?" She said, "Everything". I assume that this was a joke, but she told me she was deadly serious. "Everything makes me nervous."

    So I started to look for the reason for the anxiety and the overeating. I expected that there would be something in her childhood. So I got her to tell me about situations where she feels nervous generally, and any specific situations where she felt nervous today. She couldn't find any. She just said "everything makes me nervous."

    I started to talk about her overeating and what she might do to prevent anxiety. I outlined some situations where this or that might happen. As she thought about these, she began to get visibly anxious.  

    Not how to deal with anxiety

    She reached down the side of the chair to get her handbag and put it on her lap. Then she opened it up and said to me 'Do you mind if I eat?' I thought I had misheard. I asked her to repeat what she had just said. To my surprise, she took out a packet of cookies. Apparently she carries around a bag of butter cookies everywhere she goes. She nibbles on one every time she feels anxious. My questions were making her feeling anxious right now, so she wanted to start eating a cookie while lying in the chair talking about overeating!

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    weird dreams

    Weird Dreams

      Last night as we put the light out I was about to say to my wife 'sweet dreams' when I realized that 'sweet dreams' is actually the last thing you would want to wish on someone.

      What weird dreams are for

      The purpose of dreams is to allow the mind to resolve things that have not been resolved during the day. Dreams also are an outcome of processes by the unconscious mind. All dreams are expressed as metaphors. This is why then seem so bizarre. Each element is a symbolic representation of something that is held in your mind and the action of the dream represents the interaction between different parts of your mind. The essential aspect of a specific dream is that everything represents you, every part of the dream is a part of you.

      My Weird Dreams

      I recently had a weird dream of having to go into a large multistory building. Outside was an Indian looking couple in a four poster bed with rich drapes hanging down. Around the couple was a large group of angry people. The couple in the bed were looking very apprehensive. But I felt compelled to leave them there and go into the building. Inside the building I got lost in a confusing mess of different rooms, stairs, lifts etc. While trying to find my way out I realized that the couple in the bed were going to be stoned to death. I thought that I had to get out and stop it but I couldn't find the way out.

      Eventually I did get out and back to the place but the crowd had gone and there was just a huge pile of rock there. I thought to myself' 'well, there was nothing I could do about it really, it is not up to me to interfere in other people's cultures' and I went on my way.

      Analyzing weird dreams

      This sort of dream is full of violence and feeling trapped and is the exact opposite of a 'sweet dream'. However what the dream represents is two parts of my mind. One part is not longer useful to me in living my life: old ideas, self beliefs and outdated rules. That part is represented metaphorically by the couple in the bed. I suspect they were 'Indian looking' because that represented 'foreign' in my subconscious.

      The other part of my mind wants to get rid of those old beliefs, feelings or whatever: represented by the angry crowd. I got lost in the building as a metaphoric way of not interfering consciously in the cleansing process.

      It only through this type of dream that you make changes in your mind and learn and mature. The person who first came up with the wish for 'sweet dreams' didn't know what they were talking about.

      Open post
      Nervous Bowels

      Nervous Bowels

        Many people have Nervous Bowels. This client was a lovely woman, elegant, composed, and with a terrible secret. She gets immediate diarrhea every time she has to meet someone.

        It is not uncommon for people to get shaky bowels whenever they think they're going to be judged. It happens to sportspeople just before they have to perform. Entertainers get it before they go onto the stage. Most people feel some sort of unpleasantness in their gut in the face of a stressful situation.

        Living with nervous bowels

        In this case the client had been pretending for years. She had a high level position in education and was widely respected for her skills. But she had been hiding the need to rush to the toilet every time she was introduced to someone. After some questioning, it became clear that this was not a normal case of stress induced diarrhoea. This woman could happily address the groups of people. She  had no problem with public speaking. She could facilitate small group meetings, and do it very well. Interacting with two people was OK also. But the prospect of talking to just one person sent her running for the bathroom.

        After some investigation I discovered it was really about the fear that she would have to leave the other person alone. In her mind, this was unacceptably rude. So her fear was that she would be called away to something else and have to leave the other person on their own. It was really about what that other person would think of her for doing that.

        I tried to get to the cause of this. She said she had a great childhood. She could find no reason for this anxiety. The only worry she could find was that she was very nervous about her own parenting skills. However I could not find any direct cause for why leaving one person alone should generate these feelings.

        Treating nervous bowels

        I decided to use metaphor therapy on her feelings of anxiety. I asked her to put yourself into the position of being forced to speak with one person. The objective was to get her to go into the state so that I could work directly on the feeling. She tried and could not get into the feeling without being there.

        So I put her into trance. I did a simple metaphor therapy about allowing her unconscious mind to search for the source of the feeling. Her unconscious mind found the source of the feeling and pulled it out of its hiding place. Then her mind took that thing and broke it open. The contents turns to liquid. I told her the liquid was pouring down inside and leaking out through the soles of her feet until it was gone.

        Clearing the problem

        This metaphor triggered something, because she started crying. I use that to associate into her feeling of distress. I then asked her to focus on the feeling and describe what object it most resembled. She told me it was like a brown ball full of moving clouds of black. I worked on this representation and got her to shrink it. She was able to shrink it until it was the size of a golf ball. But she was completely unable to get it to go any smaller.

        From experience, I know that this is her unconscious mind resisting my attempts to get rid of it. So I changed the metaphor.  I asked her if she had ever sliced a tomato. Slicing a tomato is something that everyone has done. It is easy and familiar. The moment that I said it, she was no longer stuck. She told me that she was now able to slice the golf ball. I then told her to think about dicing vegetables or something like that, as she got rid of the thing completely and she got rid of the thing completely.

        I have no idea what the origin of the problem was, and neither does she. But by using metaphor therapy we were able to get rid of it completely.

        The origin of her nervous bowels

        After talking about the process and the outcome for a while, I asked again about her upbringing. Now that her unconscious mind had removed whatever it was, she told me a different story about growing up. It turned out that she had a not so good childhood. She had an adopted older brother who caused problems in the family and bullied my client. Her mother expected perfection, that my client felt she could never deliver. Her mother was into Guiding, and loved rules, and discipline, and expected nothing else from her children. I suggested that she didn't have to look very far to find the source of her anxiety, and she agreed.

        Open post
        retraining-unconscious-beliefs

        Retraining unconscious beliefs

          I had an email from a therapist about retraining unconscious beliefs.

          I have a client who is limited movement in her left side from some childhood illness, yet when I do ideomotor questions she always responds with her left hand. She has shown me out of trance how little she can move her finger....basically she can't.

          What can I do with this, what does it mean?

          Retraining unconscious beliefs

          If I understand you correctly, the client has limited voluntary use of her left hand but can use it in trance. I believe this means that she has been told by somebody long ago that she is not able to move that hand. She has believed that, and still beliefs it. Therefore she has not been able to move it.

          Put her into trance and get the bad hand working with ideomotor suggestions, just as you have been doing. Then, still in trance, get her to open her eyes and see the hand moving. Ask her to confirm that it is moving, that it can move. This should be a revelation to her unconscious mind. It will cause her mind to rethink what it can do with her left side.   Suggest to her that because she has witnessed this, it means that she can now begin to exercise that hand until it becomes fully functional again.

          Other techniques for Retraining unconscious beliefs

          You can also use other techniques. For example, when she in trance and after moving the finger, ask her if you can talk to the unconscious mind. If she agrees, ask her unconscious mind if it will agree to giver her back the power of movement. Stress that this has to be done gradually and carefully, at the right pace for her. If not, ask the unconscious mind why it it is restricting her movement. You should be able to persuade it to allow her to get back full movement.

          Another technique would be to take her back to the initial event. Find the scene where she it told or concluded that she cannot move that side. Then use Inner Child work to re-imagine the event and give her a way to be able to recover the movement she lost.

          Open post
          cycle of addiction

          Cycle of addiction 

            Cycle of addiction

            The cycle of addiction explains why people cannot stop smoking. But it does not explain why smokers who abstained for many years suddenly start again. I had a client today who has got me re-thinking  everything I know about smoking. 

            This client smokes 25 to 30 a day now but was able to give up for a year. He started again about twelve months ago after a breakup with his long term girlfriend. He came to see me because a few weeks ago he broke up with the latest girlfriend as well and had started smoking really heavily.

            I suppose the simple answer is to learn to keep his relationships going. That is not likely to happen, but it got me thinking about why this would start him smoking again. It is well known that stressful events trigger smoking in current smokers, and often make ex-smokers start again.

            Cycle of learned behavior

            The basic psychology of learned behaviour is CUE-RESPONSE-REWARD. The person gets stressed, lights up, and then feels better. That is the cycle. The addiction comes when the cycle changes to CUE-ANTICIPATION OF REWARD-RESPONSE. The smoker gets a stress cue, immediately thinks of the reward, wants the reward, and then lights up to get the reward. If the smoker does not get the reward, that is, if the smoker does not immediately light up, then the lack of expected reward turns into a craving aimed at making the person do the response. If the smoker does not get the response the result is either anger or depression.

            Most smoking therapies focus on the CUE: teaching the client how to ignore the cue. Some focus on the RESPONSE: change how the smoker behaves, suggesting other things to do instead. Some focus on the REWARD: changing the effect of smoking into a bad taste instead of the reward.

            But the smoking problem is really in two parts: stopping smoking, and not starting it again. The time between these two points can vary from five minutes to five years.

            Is stopping smoking actually a two step process?

            But this analysis got me thinking. If the smoking is the response to cue, then you have to look at the cues. The cues are well known: time of day, finishing a task, having a break, getting away from a stressful situation, eating, drinking, after sex, and so on. These are the cues for the current smoker. They are not the cues for the past smoker. The ex-smoker goes through all of these without smoking. So what is different that makes an ex-smoker into a start-again-smoker?

            My clients tell me that it is almost always some sort of stressful life event. Every smoker gives up before having the next one. Most smokers don't want a next one, so they are in effect forced into it in order to deal with their stress (which may be purely internal). The required level of stress for some people is trivial, and for others it is high. For successful ex-smokers the required level is very high, so high that they don't start again ever. For others there is some level of stress they cannot deal with, some level that will trigger the smoking behaviour again.

            If that is the case then would it not be better to teach the client how to deal with life event stress as part of the therapy?

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            multiple personality disorder

            Multiple Personality Disorder

              The origin of multiple personality disorder

              This week I have been reading an extraordinary book about another extraordinary book - "Sybil". Sybil was about a young woman who had been so horribly abused in childhood that she escaped into fantasy. She created sixteen different personalities, most of whom knew nothing of the other personalities. Sybil could do things in one personality and be completely unaware of having done it when she was being dominated by another personality. This was the origin of  Multiple Personality Disorder.

              Sybil sold six million copies, and was turned into a successful film. On the way it created the entire industry of finding and wrestling with multiple personalities. Therapists all over the world discovered that their clients too had multiple personalities, and some made stellar careers from studying multiple personalities. Multiple personality became firmly fixed in the public mind. Dissociative Identity disorder became a standard psychiatric term.

              It turns out that Sybil was a complete fabrication designed simply to make money from a gullible public. The book was written by an unscrupulous therapist and  a sensationalist journalist. It set out to shock and titillate in order to sell the maximum number of books.

              Repressed memories don't exist either

              Multiple Personality Disorder has been totally discredited. But the history of psychotherapy is filled with disorders that don't exist, and that say more about the therapist than about their clients. Everyone accepts the reality of repressed memories. Except that there is no evidence for anyone anywhere ever having repressed anything. I have had people challenge me on that statement, but none have ever been able to point to any concrete evidence of repressed memories, other than stories.

              The same thing happened with the whole recovered memories of sexual abuse in the 1980's. Thousands of therapists discovered that their clients had been horrifically sexually abused in childhood and had forgotten all about it for fifteen or twenty years. Except that it never happened. Hundreds of innocent men went to jail for imaginary offences.

              The same sort of thing surfaced briefly about demonic possession, until rational people demanded that the sanity of the therapists be measured. Then the whole thing gradually went away. Until a few years ago, homosexuality was listed as a psychiatric disorder.

              And there is the Alien Abduction thing. How anyone can take these stories seriously is beyond my comprehension.

               But then, given that millions people contact fortune tellers, believe in spirit guides and go to shows where mediums contact the dead for them, perhaps these things will always be with us. 

              Open post
              Perfect childhood problems

              Perfect Childhood problems

                Yo-Yo Dieting

                I had another interesting client at the weekend. She told me "I am tired of sabotaging myself". This woman was heavily overweight. She told a familiar story. She could not control her intake of food. For years she had been yo-yo dieting. Her weight drops by ten kilos, and then thinks that she can now do what she wants to do, and goes back to eating.

                Eating problems are always due to unhappiness, so I always start by asking about the client's upbringing. This client said that she had been spoilt and gets on really well with her parents. Every time a client tells me they had an idyllic childhood, my heart sinks. I hear warning bells go off in my head. Anyone who had a perfect childhood would not be sitting in my office. I know they are lying to themselves, so I start probing.

                Perfect Childhood Problems

                Soon the client was telling me that her strongest memory from childhood was her brother going away to boarding school. She was left feeling devastated, empty and lonely. Then it turns out he went to boarding school because their parents went overseas for three months. Oh, and she was placed with a couple who mistreated her and she was terrified her parents were never coming back. Oh, and yes, the parents went overseas nearly every year, and parked the kids with couples they hired to look after them.

                And when they were home, the parents had freezing silences and sulks that lasted for days. And her sister has anorexia. And her brother was always the favorite until he stopped doing so well at school and he got rejected. And she was sent away to boarding school. And she is terrified to this day of being abandoned, of not having anyone, of not being good enough. She has to be constantly pleasing people, making other people happy. Apart from that it was a perfect childhood!

                It is always amazing how people can refuse to examine their own life. It is so easy to convince themselves that everything was lovely, because the truth is too painful to contemplate.

                Open post
                subconscious or unconscious

                Subconscious or Unconscious difference

                  Subconscious or Unconscious. is there a difference?

                  Recently I have been revising some pages I have not looked at for a while. I noticed that sometimes I use the word 'subconscious' and sometimes I use 'unconscious'. I realized that I do not actually know when to use subconscious or unconscious. On looking into it, I discovered that no one else does either.

                  Consciousness is an emergent property

                  There are no shortages of definitions or prescriptions, but there appears to be as many different meanings for these words as there are people writing about them. Almost all of the meaning assigned is based on metaphor, or arguing by analogy. There appears to be virtually no scientific agreement on either term. The basic problem is that "consciousness" itself does not have a clear definition. If you dissect a brain you will not find "consciousness". Consciousness is an emergent property.

                  This is the same as your voice. You make the voice with your breath and the muscles of your throat. But you cannot investigate the voice itself. It is an emergent property. Your voice is not part of your body. In the same way, consciousness is not part of your brain. Therefore, trying to be exact about subconscious or unconscious is not possible. If you don't know what "consciousness" is, then you cannot really know what its opposite is.

                  According to Wikipedia, when used in general conversation the words subconscious or unconscious are interchangeable. You can use either of them to refer to the causes of behavior you are not aware of doing. For most purposes this is good enough.

                  Subconscious or unconscious

                  The term unconscious was introduced by Freud. He regarded the unconscious as a part of the mind in which primitive drives, demands, feelings and memories exist. The unconscious is different from the conscious because no amount of introspection, no amount of thinking, will allow you to access the contents of the unconscious. He believed that the contents of the unconscious could be hinted at through dreams, hypnosis or free association.

                  In psychology, the term subconscious is used to refer to whatever part of your consciousness you are not currently paying attention to. Psychologists today do not really accept Freud's view of the non-conscious part of the mind. Even the term "mind" is contentious and difficult to define. Modern psychology tends to avoid addressing or studying the "subconscious".

                  So the best technical definition would be at the unconscious is totally unknowable, while the subconscious is simply that part of the brain's normal function that you are not aware of at the moment, but which you can become aware of if you direct your attention to it.

                  Open post
                  Negative Suggestions

                  Negative Suggestions in Hypnosis

                    Negative Suggestions are not not good

                    I was talking to a student recently who was going through her hypnosis training. She was very concerned about not saying 'not'. I told her to relax and just speak normally to clients. There is a huge amount of nonsense talked about not using negative suggestions in hypnosis.

                    I don't think it matters if you use negative suggestions or not. Some trainers tell their students that if they tell the client to 'stop smoking' all the mind does is to hear the word 'smoking' and not the word 'stop' and it puts the idea of smoking into the client's mind.

                    Do not think of an elephant

                    The evidence for this is always the NLP example: 'Do not think of an elephant'. The point is that of course the image of an elephant comes to mind. NLP teaches that the mind does not notice the word 'Not' and only acts on the thing that comes after the 'not'. The theory is that a negative suggestion emphasizes the thing mentioned.

                    But if that was true, then the word 'not' would apply to 'think' rather than 'elephant'. If the 'not' was operating as NLP theory says, you would stop thinking. Of course that doesn't happen. The sentence 'Do not think of an elephant' gets parsed as a whole unit.

                    Even as it being said, the language processing part of your brain is trying to make sense of the whole unit of speech.  In fact while the stream of words is being heard, processing is continuously redefining the sense of the sentence. Think of the times when you have only realized what somebody said long after they had said it.

                    The sentence is evaluated as a unit. That is why you get confused by long rambling sentences. After the sentence has been evaluated, the core idea of the sentence is what remains. The actually words are largely ignored. The 'elephant' comes to mind because your mind is waiting to hear what comes next about that elephant. The image of the elephant stays in your mind because your mind is waiting to hear if you are going to feed it or shoot it.

                    Do not think of an elephant is oversimplified

                    The NLP view on negative suggestions is very simplistic. It does not reflect how the mind actually processes words. A moment's thought will show that if that was true, all hypnotherapists would be out of business. Because all you would have to say is something like 'Don't lose weight' and the client would give up overeating, or say 'Do not eat healthy' and the obesity epidemic would be over. Or how about 'Don't stop smoking' to have all the world give up smoking instantly?

                    The whole negative suggestions theory about 'Never say Not' is overdone in my opinion.

                    Open post
                    smoking crutch

                    Smoking Crutch

                      My client yesterday reminded me that over the years I have come to recognize various categories of smokers. This man I would classify as using smoking as a crutch. I wonder if other therapists would agree?

                      This smoker was very defensive about his smoking. On a scale of one to ten he only managed a seven on wanting to give up. One a scale of one to ten about how much he believed he could give up he said ' a two and a nine'. He was clearly conflicted about wanting to stop.

                      Smoking to avoid thinking

                      I asked how he felt on a plane when he couldn't smoke for three hours. He said he won't go on a plane because he would have to be hours without a cigarette, and couldn't accept that. It was an issue with his wife: she wanted to go abroad on holiday and he had never agreed. He told me that he used to wake up in the middle of the night, just so that he could have a smoke.

                      Every night, he makes sixty roll ups for the next day. That way he will have one ready instantly all day. He cannot imagine voluntarily being without tobacco in the house. If he had no tobacco, even if he had some smokes to hand, he would have to go and get some. Even it meant an hour's drive or more. He says that he smokes when he has nothing to do, or when he isn't sure what to do next.

                      I spent a long time trying to find out what he was getting from smoking. But he wouldn't or couldn't go into his reasons. He was very hard to get into, although a very pleasant man. He would rather talk about his opinions or experiences than delve into his own emotions. His father  had been very distant. I asked him if he ever got a hug as a child and he couldn't answer.

                      Smoking Crutch

                      He appears to be the type who smokes for something to do. I think that he needs to always feel that he has something to do to stop his mind coming up with some awful feeling. I think he has a deep childhood issue with having to do things in order to get love. But I could be wrong.

                      I think that smoking is something he does because it guarantees him that whenever that feeling of doubt comes up, his feeling of self worth, he knows he can avoid facing it, because his cigarettes are there to give him an instant distraction.

                      Maybe I am reading too much into it, but I have spent several hours thinking about this man and his behavior. I am getting more and more convinced that smoking is not simply an addiction. For this man it has been a psychological crutch for him all his life.

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