The reason it’s so effective lies in the extreme power of our unconscious mind, which stores all the memories, beliefs, habits and behaviours we’ve develop since birth. Prior to us responding to any external stimuli, we automatically access our unconscious and use its stored data to analyse how best to respond. And given our unconscious is primarily concerned with keeping us safe, well and happy, it usually provides us with good information to help us respond in the most helpful and resourceful manner.
However, as a result of the way we learn, from time to time it also stores and provides us with poor information, which results in many of life’s problems. You see from birth we learn by modelling other peoples behaviours and beliefs (many of which can be unhelpful), and we also place significant prominence on our own emotional experiences (again a lot of which can be negative) and both these conditioned and learned responses stay with us over time.
Hypnosis is an amazing tool that can help clients affect change in the most natural of ways. The subconscious mind is where everything you have learned is stored, like your habits, emotional, skills.
A really simple example might relate to a phobia of bees. We are not born with an inherent fear of bees – far from it; we are born with a naturally positive curiosity for all things within our immediate environment. A fear of bees can only be developed in one of two ways: either we see other people’s fear and model our response accordingly (a conditioned response); or we have a scary experience ourselves that becomes the prominent information stored in our unconscious (a learned response) and as such, fear becomes our unilateral response to bees. Make sense?