Chester County Hypnosis

Most of my clients are familiar with the term “subconscious” and generally believe that it’s a spooky place deep inside your mind that holds all your deepest, darkest fears and inhibitions. This is a place where there is constant turmoil, repressed urges, dreams, taboos and fantasies.

Pierre Janet, the famous French Psychiatrist is credited with the term, which has now become almost extinct in usage in modern psychology. Janet was also one of the early teachers of Hypnosis in Psychiatry and trained at the Saltpierre under Jean Marc Charcot and was a colleague of Freud’s; some credit him as the Father of Modern psychotherapy, instead of Freud.

The Saltpierre school of thought worked under the premise that hypnosis is but a form of hysteria, which is somewhat understandable since hysteria seemed to be very much a part of everyday life back then.

Today, we hypnotists, not being the theorists that psychologists are, consider the subconscious as any of our human processes that exist below the level of our ordinary awareness. Some of us further separate that into the “subconscious” and “unconscious” which reflects on the workings of our body and nervous system. A good everyday understanding of it would probably be to say, “All of the stuff we do, that we don’t actually do”. That would include our beating heart, to a lesser extent our breathing and the mental concepts that guide our operation in daily life.

Say for example you see a fireplace with a nice warm fire going on. It makes you feel warm and safe. However, you won’t go over and put your hand right into it, the thought would never occur to you, why, you would, of course, burn your hand. When we are small children, we might do exactly that, usually only once or twice, before we learn that while fire is warm and comforting, more is not necessarily better there.

As we become older, we often forget the incident but remember the lesson. We don’t stick our hand in open fires, we don’t even think of doing it. We don’t have to think about it, it just is an operational guideline anymore to us. Same thing with, hopefully, running out in the street before looking both ways and playing with dry cleaning bags around our heads. They’ve become generalizations to us that we operate on below a conscious level, we don’t have to sit and think and reason to come up with those guidelines, they just “are”.

And that is what our subconscious does for us, it runs our daily life, much as an assistant would handle all the mundane details of an important executive. Now, the primary task of this assistant is to keep us safe. That is the main goal, protection and safety.

I read recently how De Boeff (European psychologist of the early 20th century) believed that man had developed this “assistant” through evolution to satisfy the need for it, where most animals today exist solely on the conscious level. When you look at a squirrel, everything about his existence is right on the surface, beating heart, search for food, everything. He lives in the moment, to his peril.

When we, as hypnotists deal with the subconscious we don’t deal with the dark, hidden labyrinth of mental dungeons that we imagine. We deal with something that resembles a 10 year old child. Literal in interpretation, unable to reason or deduce, but always there to protect us and make us safe.  We must be careful to be be simple and succinct in our words, be precise and completely understandable without coloring our words with colloquialism, innuendo or hidden meanings.

We don’t really get involved in the “why” as much as psychologists do, we don’t have to and don’t really want to. We deal with the subconscious in the place it lives, under the surface and below awareness. We deal with the misdirected generalizations we have acquired over our lives and try to bring them to a conscious level and create new generalizations we desire.

For example, if you were dangled out an upstairs window as a child by a bully, you’d most likely have a fear of heights. You might also be afraid of air travel. That has absolutely nothing to do with being dangled out of a window by a bully, but the 10-year old sees no difference. Height=Fear, regardless of the method, if we go up, we won’t be safe. Through Hypnosis, we can bring reason and clarity to our subconscious and allow ourselves to now generalize that the window and the airplane are two different experiences and have more differences than similarities. We can now believe that air travel is much safer than being dangled out of a window, in fact, it’s quite different and much safer.

Now this person can fly fearlessly and travel the world and have a greatly enhanced life-experience, thanks to hypnosis and the subconscious. And, it was not a matter of dealing with somewhere spooky, it was all done by explaining to the 10-year old assistant, their protector, that it was acceptable.

Tags: child, conscious, deboeff, fear, fear of flying, French Psychiatrist, Freud, hypnosis, hypnotism, hypnotist, hysteria, jean marc charcot, mind, pierre janet, Psychiatry, psychologists, Saltpierre, subconscious, unconscious

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under hypnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.