A person on Quora asked this rather important question and this is how I answered it: 

I am going to answer this from the perspective of having been on both sides of the couch and being a hypnotist and neuro-linguistic practitioner so I have a different paradigm and different techniques to use than a conventionally trained therapist:

First, there is no growth without the trust between you and your therapist being created. You do this by allowing your therapist to demonstrate that s/he is capable of holding your confidence. You may start with less deep issues and build up over a span of time.

Understand that the therapist can only help you to the point where you are willing to be open and honest. I tell my clients that it is ONLY when they tell me everything that needs to be cleared that I can indeed clear them of their issues – as a hypnotist and neuro-linguistic practitioner as we use different techniques inside the subconscious mind that allows us to achieve this goal.

Any therapist that is worth working with is there to help you which means leaving the judgments for someone else to make – that isn’t inside the job description. Therapists will indeed give you new perspectives in how to understand events or communicate more effectively if they have any ability in the field, but that is much different than being judgmental. One has a negative tone while the other is truly helpful guidance.

So, how do you overcome this need to edit or take back words? You say your truth and let it go. You may find that you are able to get much more help in this fashion then worrying about what your therapist may be thinking of you, for this would be the most likely reason why you would be worrying about such things in the first place.

This was a question from a person on Quora and this is how I answered it: 

This is an interesting question.

Therapy is about helping people to discern what is necessary to make their lives happy and fulfilled. In so doing one will necessarily need to focus on the patients’ emotions, wants, and needs.

However, for therapy to actually work, the client needs to focus on how it is that their own thoughts and behaviors are creating the issues that they have employed the therapist to help them work through. Because no person is acting in life as a singular entity. Communication needs to be learned to better interact, behaviors need to be shifted to no longer cause the problems, and in so doing the needs and wants of the client can be achieved.

Too often in therapy, too much time is spent on going over and over the same old stories – the stories that the client has created to make sense of the problems being experienced. However, one needs to understand that just because we may have a story, does not make that story true. Our unconscious mind is very good at deleting information and in so doing distorting those memories, so one needs to be able to reframe the occurrences of the present based on what is actually happening, not the story as to why it may be happening.

This was a question from a person on Quora and as is usually the case, I had a very different take on this question than those who state endlessly that people will never act against their moral code. Here is my answer to that question: 

As usual, I have news for you all!

Though it is quite right that someone seeking clinical hypnotism to heal will not do something against their moral code – they will pop out of the hypnosis most likely or just refuse, and volunteers in stage shows will refuse to do the act requested if it is against their moral codes, there are plenty of times in human history when people did many terrible things against their inherent moral code.

We have something going on in the Western World called ‘mass hypnosis’ presently, where opinions are being stated as facts, medical and researchers who go against the narrative are being censored (being deplatformed) where people become part of the ‘in group’ while foisting terrible statements against those who have made a different choice for themselves based on their own medical histories – which is a personal and individual situation for each of us – people with chronic health issues have different needs than those who do not. People with a history of cancer, MS, etc have different requirements than those who do not. So, we can’t assume that we know what is correct for anyone else because we don’t know their health history.

Hitler was able to use his charisma and outcasting of anyone who wasn’t a part of the population he considered the ‘supreme race’ with many people taking part in inexcusable behavior. Most people do not realize that the Germans thought that they were winning the war, even as they were losing, as Hitler never allowed the truth to come out. This was easy to accomplish because the war was happening in the surrounding countries not in Germany proper so the Germans had no idea what was really going on during that period. When the Versailles treaty came out with all the war reparations being placed on Germany causing hyper-inflation – and the country itself split in two weakening its power, the average German citizen realized the reality of what happened to their country.

Anyone who remembers the story of Jonestown remembers Jim Jones, a white minister who preached unconventional socialist and progressive ideas to a predominantly African-American congregation called the Peoples Temple. At the height of its popularity during the 1970s, it had over a thousand members. By 1977, Jones had grown paranoid from the media scrutiny over the Temple’s suspicious activities, so he and his numerous followers moved to an agricultural settlement (a.k.a. Jonestown) in Guyana, the remote country east of Venezuela.

U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in November 1978 being concerned for the people who were a part of the Jonestown. Ryan was shot to death along with four other people by Temple gunmen at an airstrip after he checked it out. After those murders, Jones commanded his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch, starting with the children first. In all, there were over 900 who died in Jonestown, including Jim Jones, who with a gunshot to his head.

Learning:

When we are repeatedly told the same information it goes into our unconscious mind where it becomes as good as ‘fact.’ It is in this way that many terrible events have happened throughout history because people did indeed overrun their moral values as a result of these occurrences.

A person on Quora asked this most helpful question. Here is how I answered it: 

I love this question because I had an anesthesiologist (an MD whose career is that of putting people to sleep for surgical procedures) came to me at the age of 61 after having all of the physiological conditions ruled out including sleep studies of him. At that point he realized that this had to be something in his subconscious mind so employed me to help him get rid of the problem.

The source of the problem after doing regression to cause – meaning I regressed him back in time to all the times his sleep was interrupted, was that of having his sleep interrupted so many evenings during his 3 residencies of which anesthesia was the last. His subconscious mind kept him waking up because it had been trained to do so every time he was called into work during his sleep time.

I cleared all the events that his subconscious mind brought up in one 2 1/2 hour session. He came up for a follow-up the next week stating that he had slept through the night 6 of the seven nights and requested a reinforcement recording in case he needed it.

I had another client whose wife called me because he was waking her up every night to sleep eat (he was totally unaware that this is what he was doing as he was asleep during the evening eating escapades. I regressed him back to find out why he was sleep eating to find out that sadly 25 years previously he had lost a niece and a nephew in a freak accident and he was filling the ‘hole in his soul’ with food at night. We cleared that out and then I had him have a conversation with the kids while in trance, and though they did not respond to him during the process, he never sleep ate again as proven with the wife letting me know that this was the case. Again, it was one 2 1/2 hour session to heal his problem of ‘survivor’s guilt.’ I have no idea why it came up so late after the fact, however, it did and needed to be cleaned up.

So, the bottom line is that there are many reasons that the subconscious mind wakes people up in the middle of the night and our job as hypnotists is to help the client enter their subconscious mind (really the amygdala and hippocampus of the brain as we have learned with brain scans) to help them access that material and help them to heal using the various techniques that we have to allow the healing to occur.

Many thanks for a fascinating question to answer for those who may be dealing with a similar problem and still have no idea in how to find relief.

3 reasons why a client will not allow themselves to be hypnotized.

1. Fear of being hypnotized – which can be taken care of 98% of the time by experiencing it without any suggestions, just a chance to feel what it feels like to be more relaxed than you’ve ever been in your life before.
2. Lack of trust in the hypnotist – which means that one needs excellent rapport with the person that they are employing to hypnotize them.
3. t is very important for the client to truly want the outcome that they are coming in to be hypnotized to clear. For example: If I have a person who says they want to stop smoking, but it isn’t they that want it, but perhaps their parent or spouse, it isn’t going to work. It also won’t work if a doctor tells them that they have to stop smoking as evidenced by many prospects who called for smoking cessation who were on oxygen due to emphysema who never followed through. So, the desire for the outcome is most important. Because, though I am an excellent hypnotist, I will fail if I have a client who just isn’t interested in stopping the habit or is feeling more safe holding onto the problem than finding out what life is like without it. So, my job is to only hire clients who are ready to make the change “now” and are willing to do whatever it takes to do so. Anything less will not work.

Not long ago I had women 52 years old call me because she knew that the trauma that she experienced from her youth was getting in the way of her current quality of life. Her fear of being hypnotized is what she said kept her from going forward. However, what her fear most likely was, was not knowing who she would be without all these issues she had been dealing with all of her life. It can be very scary giving up what you know and are used to for something that is unknown. In this case, I did what I could to educate her, but realized that she wasn’t ready to move forward, so I let her go knowing that she wouldn’t be a good hypnosis candidate. One never wants to force a service on someone who isn’t ready, ever!

This is an excellent question that a person on Quora asked so you have the benefit of learning from that answer.

 am a certified trainer of hypnosis: Right before you go to sleep you are in a hypnotic state. So, if you play an affirmation as you fall off to sleep it will become a suggestion to your subconscious mind. Now here’s the real deal: the affirmation has to be something that you can realistically accomplish or it will not work. The subconscious mind will not take unrealistic suggestions.

You can also play your affirmation loop right upon awakening as you are in a hypnotic state at that time as well.

Do make sure that whatever you are programming your mind fior is safe and appropriate for you meaning that it is positive for you and the world at large.