I was going to call it positive thinking but there's way too many videos on that. And your imagination is far more powerful than your logical mind that thinks it's doing the thinking.
Now it's really this simple. Hypnosis, the change work that I do is really this simple. Somebody comes in and they're imagining something and they're always imagining the problem because when they come in, into my office, the problem's not there.
If they're getting over a heartbreak, their partner is not in the office with me. If they're dealing with some kind of panic attack every time they're in front of large groups of people, they're not there but they can feel it when they're in my office. If it's insomnia, if it's anxiety, they can do all those emotions even though the stimulus is not present at that particular moment.
They have an overactive imagination. We all do. Our problem is never quite the problem. What happens is a trigger happens in our life at some point and if then, what happened? Probably when we're younger but it can be later on in life. And it may just happen one time.
But we start to ruminate, going over and over again and we start to bring that past and all those negative emotions into the now and pollinate our future or toxify our future if you will. So, really, what hypnosis is and change work is essentially when people come to see me, they're imagining something, okay, catastrophizing something.
They're imaging something going horribly wrong and they're feeling bad about it, they forget that they're imagining, they think it's real and it starts to become real for them, they start to feel the shitty, horrible, negative feelings for it just because they forgot that they're imagining this. And really, what I do in hypnosis is I get people to imagine, take the same mechanism they are doing to create the problem unconsciously.
I'm not suggesting that most people sit around choosing, "Hey, I'm going to imagine a bunch of bad shit's happening in my life and catastrophizing it at, say, 6 pm on a Thursday evening." I'm not suggesting that most people do that. But most people forget that they're imagining, they forget that they're thinking and actually feel that it's actually happening in that moment.
So what I help people to do is imagine that they're the person they need to be in order to do what they need to do to get what they need to get. That's it. It's not about positive thinking, it's about imagining who you would need to be to do what you need to do to get what you need to get, to have what you need to have, to be who you want to be all comes back to being that. So essentially, hijacking that mechanism that they've been using, that you've been using, that I've been using, for years and years and years, to keep us stuck, and using the same mechanism, rather than it be the problem itself, to turn it on its head so to speak.
So that problem then starts to become the solution. So they habitually start to imagine being the person they need to be in order to do the things they need to do to have what they need to have to be who they want to be to a point where it becomes non-volition, they don't feel that they're doing it deliberately with volition, with conscious effort.
To the point where they forget they're imagining and it just becomes their new normal. That's what hypnosis is. That kind of change work that I do and that's what's far more important than positively thinking. It's positively imagining who you need to be to get done what you need to get done to have what you want to have to be what who you want to be.
It's about tapping into that imagination. Not the intellect or all the reasons you know why you should change, how's that working out for you? You know every reason you should change, but you're not changing, right? Because you need to imagine being that person that you need to be to overcome that issue, to have what you need to have, to do what you need to do.
Do you have a sense of non-volition to a point where you forget that you're imagining and it becomes your reality? Because that's what you've been doing to the problem, with your problem up until that point. Again, we're just turning it on its head and utilizing that same mechanism, but for good, to take you where you need to go. This is what I call positive imagination.
Always Believe,
Luke Michael Howard CHT
Clinical Hypnotist
