Exploring Trance | Adventures in hypnosis

How to make affirmations work

Published February 8th, 2012 in Self-help tips.

A suited, booted, clean-shaven guru bounces up and down before you, his eyes wide with passion, his trembling fist thrusting skywards, his voice roaring: “You create your own reality! As you see it, so it shall be!” He then commands you and your fellow seminar attendees to rhythmically chant, in unison…

Affirmations are good!
Every day in every way I will say more and more affirmations!
We are all individuals!

That’s essentially been my default (and pretty prejudiced) view of affirmations for quite some years.

They’ve always made me think of Carolyn from the film American Beauty, who begins her working day by plastering a smile over her desperation and angst, and then starts incanting “I will sell this house today!”. At the end of the day, after the house remains unsold, she crumples into a sobbing heap.

There are good reasons to be sceptical of affirmations. A 2009 study in Canada found that if people with low self-esteem repeated the mantra: “I am a lovable person”, it only made them feel worse.

We instinctively find cognitive dissonance troubling, and if you have a strong feeling of dislike for yourself, and then you dutifully repeat the words “I am lovable”, the glaring contradiction between the words and your experience is only going to create a painful inner discord.

So why on earth have I titled this post “How to make affirmations work”? What can I possibly say in their defence?

Well, first of all, that same Canadian study showed that if people with high self-esteem repeated the phrase “I am a lovable person”, it made them feel better. Wait. Don’t laugh. That’s not just a trivial observation. In their case the affirmation drew their attention to a positive quality about themselves that they were open to believing – it emphasised and highlighted that part of their self-concept.

Now being English, I find that talking about my strengths makes me squirm, and I live in a culture that traditionally frowns on boasting (at least it did, until the rise of The Book of Face).

But in my hypnotherapy practice I find it’s very healing for someone to be given space to acknowledge the things they do well, and that they have a whole variety of positive qualities and personal strengths.

I don’t mean that I tell my clients to repeat “I have positive qualities” twenty times. I mean that I discuss the specifics of how that person has, for example, raised children, been a good friend, made a living, and followed what they believe in.

It’s sometimes very helpful to remind yourself of all the pieces of evidence in your life that you can, in fact, do plenty of amazing, wonderful things.

And that last sentence, just there, is the “affirmation” in the therapy session. It’s the conclusion that summarises all the positive evidence of what they’ve achieved in their life.

In a nutshell, affirmations strengthen and emphasise things we already find plausible.

If I repeat “I can fly a plane” over and over, it feels absurd, because I’ve no evidence that I can. An affirmation with no evidence to support it feels as unstable and foundationless as it is.

But if you take the time to gather several pieces of positive evidence about your ability to do something, an affirmation can then summarise that evidence as a single thought.

So if you’re about to give a public talk, and you have a terrifying, prophetic vision of yourself drying up the second you take the stage, choking on some water, and then fleeing the room making a high-pitched wailing noise, then it’s unlikely to help if you begin a staccato, rapid-fire inner monologue of:

I-can-do-this-I-can-do-this–I-can-do-this”.

That’s only likely to add to your sense of nervousness.

But if instead you sit in an upright, balanced posture, take several slow, deep breaths, remember the feeling of comfortably chatting with a group of old friends, and then in a calm, firm, encouraging tone of voice, tell yourself:

“I can do this. I really can”.

…that’s much more likely to crystallise your focus and determination to get up there and give it your best.

So, instead of treating affirmations as a set of magic words that will change your beliefs if you just conscientiously repeat them enough, I’d suggest using them as a way to summarise several positive memories you have of succeeding at something.

After all, in this post-modern age, when the internet is saturated with millions of contradictory viewpoints, each of them being screamed out in CAPSLOCK across the virtual wild west, it’s not a bad idea to stop every now and then and remind yourself who you are, and what values you want to live your life by, and then to crystallise those core beliefs with a single thought.

So to use affirmations well, try making a solid, convincing case to yourself, like a lawyer or a barrister would in court:

1. Sit upright and breathe calmly, as if you were an attentive jury-member ready to listen with an open mind.

2. Then review several positive memories to serve as evidence for your case. If there are a few counter-examples of times you didn’t succeed, that simply means you’re human, but your job here is to collect specific examples of your strengths.

3. Then make a closing statement or affirmation to tie all that evidence together.

The affirmation will then function as a reminder, a mental shortcut that will take you back to that state of calm determination when you need it.

If you’d like to explore this approach further, take a look at the hypnosis download “Self Talk Coach“. As head scriptwriter for HypnosisDownloads.com, I co-created this session to help you talk to yourself in a kinder, fairer, more supportive way.

Mindfulness Part 1 – Witnessing

Published February 2nd, 2012 in Free hypnosis downloads.

Mindfulness is a form of meditation where you bring your awareness into the present moment, without getting lost in your own thoughts, feelings and judgements.

It has its roots in Buddhism, but over the last few decades it’s been increasingly recognised in western psychotherapy as a very helpful technique for dealing with problems like anxiety, depression and chronic pain conditions.

I’ve been practising mindfulness for several years now, and I often use it with my hypnotherapy clients. It’s a technique I highly recommend learning if you’d like to feel calmer, more compassionate towards yourself and others, and less prone to getting lost in worries, regrets, and impulsive behaviours.

Here’s the free meditation mp3:

You can also download this mp3 to your computer by right-clicking on this link and choosing “save link as”.

You may also be interested in my latest album, The Hypnotic Holiday.

This was my second collaboration with Alan Whitton, and I think it’s a remarkably effective way of learning how to deeply relax your mind and body.
£9.95 ($16 approx)

Hypnotic metaphors for self-confidence

Published March 5th, 2011 in Hypnosis demonstrations.

We humans have a hunger for stories, whether they are epic novels, TV dramas, or a piece of juicy gossip about Geoff the milkman. They’re in our nature. Throughout the history of civilization, stories have been an essential tool for passing on cultural wisdom, and for enriching our hearts and minds.

So it makes sense that stories can help you deal with personal problems, because a story can point you towards different, more helpful perspectives on life.

The brilliant, innovative hypnotist Milton Erickson M.D. was renowned for treating some of his clients purely through hypnotic metaphors, disguised as a series of apparently irrelevant anecdotes. After hearing his stories, Erickson’s patients would often notice changes in their thoughts and feelings happening “as if by magic”.

As an example of hypnotic metaphors in action, here’s a video clip from a workshop I taught in 2010. The student in the video was wanting to run her own trainings, but she was held back by an anxiety about public speaking.

(Unfortunately, the quality of the footage is far from perfect, but I hope you’ll still find it a valuable demonstration).

If you’re new to hypnosis, you may find it interesting to see how hypnotic suggestions can be conveyed indirectly simply through telling stories.

Notice that there is far more to hypnotherapy than the Hollywood cliché of putting someone into a mysterious, zombie-like state and then commanding them to do something. Hypnotherapy can, in fact, be a very respectful, creative, empathetic method of creating inner change.

If you’re studying hypnotherapy, or if you’ve trained in this field, I hope you’ll find some useful distinctions in the video too.

The primary technique I was demonstrating is “multiple embedded metaphors” (sometimes called “nested loops” in NLP).

If you pay attention to the order in which I tell the stories, you’ll notice that some of the ideas and metaphors are “sandwiched” within other ones.

This tends to make these central metaphors more difficult to consciously recall, which discourages over-analysis in the listener, and promotes direct emotional engagement with the stories.

Also, rather than using any lengthy, pre-planned metaphors, I was keen to demonstrate to the group that they could draw upon simple, everyday examples and anecdotes from their own lives to evoke therapeutic change.

With practice, you can do this completely on the fly, so that you find yourself effortlessly coming up with stories that fit the situation at hand. This gives you a very elegant way to communicate therapeutic ideas.

If you’d like to master this technique, I highly recommend the book “The Answer Within” by Lankton and Lankton. It’s available from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (US).