Hypnosis as a Conditioned Response

Hypnosis can be understood as a conditioned response. When something happens in your life that makes you believe in a particular version of reality, you become conditioned to perceive, think and behave accordingly to what you believed.

A traumatic event, persistent influence of a parent or even something that someone said to you in a very powerful fashion can become your hypnosis. It can program you to think, feel and behave in a very specific way.

Your thought programs installed in your mind as a result of some form of negative conditioning, force you into all kinds of unwanted spontaneous hypnotic responses.

Hypnosis, understood as a conditioned response assures that, you begin to respond to certain stimuli, events, people or situations in a totally spontaneous, automatic way.

Even though you don’t want to respond in this way, you find yourself powerless to stop your behavior.

I see a lot of people who start experiencing fears, anxiety and panic attacks, seemingly out of nowhere. These are the thought programs that suddenly awakened from a long sleep.

Installed, sometimes decades ago, and being suppressed all this time, they suddenly burst into full operation, bewildering a person by their strength and crippling effects on life.

Victims of such suddenly awakened programs have no idea why they feel and behave the way they do. Sometimes it takes a considerable effort to uncover the origin of their behavior. They actually behave as if some form hypnosis were applied to their minds.

One of my recent clients, upon successfully completing her studies, informed her stunned teachers that she was not going to take her final examinations.

She actually did not take her exams. because a thought program installed in her mind during her childhood was telling her that “I was not Worthy of Success in Life”. Can you imagine a more horrendous nonsense? And yet it happens all the time!

Another client of mine, a pretty young woman, looked like a skeleton and yet her thought program was telling her that “I am Fat” and, therefore, should eat even less than she did. What incredible deception played on one’s own self!

My mother’s twin sister developed a thought program in her forties, telling her that “A Human Being Should not Live Beyond the Age of Sixty” simply because (as she used to say) it is the age when we become ugly, clumsy and sick. She committed suicide at the age of sixty! This is how self-induced hypnosis creates tragedies in human life.

Recently I have met a very pretty twenty one year old Japanese girl who has told me the same thing. She is planing to kill herself at sixty because “I am Not Going to be Pretty Anymore”.

For 20 years now, I have been helping others to become free from their own sick selves. To this day, it boggles my mind that our thoughts – not the knives and bullets – are the deadliest things in life.

In my practice I meet mainly with people who have lost control over their lives. They are like a driver who has lost control of his car and is desperate to regain it.

Thought programs – telling people that they are fat, when, in fact, they are walking skeletons; that they must die at the age of sixty; or that they must fail exams because they are stupid – are intensely hypnotic in nature.

Just as during a stage hypnosis show, a hypnotist can suggest to a person all kinds of nonsense; our thought programs also “suggest” to us all kinds of lies about ourselves.

Because these “Lies of the Mind” work on us just as hypnosis does, the best way of dealing with them is also hypnotic. I use hypnotic techniques with or without a trance.

The fact is, most people need to be de-hypnotized rather than hypnotized from all kinds of deadly, conditioned thought programs running in their minds.

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