Hypnotherapy Blog

So much of what falls under the banner of 'mental health' is actually a matter of feelings. Thoughts and feelings require completely different approaches to change them – so different, that they are in effect different species. You cannot reason with feelings. They are more or less irrational. Whenever you believe you have reasoned with a feeling, you have merely suppressed it. What feelings want is to be felt. They are messengers. They need to understand that they have been received and understood.

Consider the archetypal dread tyrant, prone to throwing messengers into the deepest, darkest dungeon if they dare to deliver him an unwelcome message… Ignoble and unenlightened behaviour, you will no doubt agree. And yet this is what people do all the time when their internal messenger tries to deliver a feeling-message which they do not want to hear.

Everyone has a whole range of defence mechanisms and strategies to avoid their own upsets. These include hiding the upset (suppressing and repressing it; walling it off as a separate personality), distracting yourself from your upset (layering it with other feelings, or rationalising), projecting your upset onto others (through blame and resentment), or running away from your upset (such that when you encounter it, you unconsciously shy away from it and slip into a different train of thought).

All journeys are stories. All stories are unfoldings. To travel is to change. To change is to communicate.

We all know that the acorn contains the oak tree within it – albeit in potential form. In the same way, a question contains the answer within it. The two are coeval – it is just that one is apparent and the other latent.

The lower (or rational) mind can struggle with this concept, until it is allowed to play with the idea for a while. The purpose of the acorn is the unfoldment of the tree, which in turn creates more acorns. The purpose of the question is the unfoldment of its answer, which in turn creates more questions.

Answers are specific to the essence of the question. Two acorns may seem alike, but the unfolding trees will be unique. A question requires different answers depending on who is asking.

In a previous article, it was stated that "Our being seeks to quarantine any unreality that develops within our internal model – to separate the unreal part of the self (or the model) from the rest – this is the creation of a persona... From that moment, the persona remains bound up with the unreality that created it. It remains 'stuck' in that unreality – that is, stuck in the past."

We can think of your hived-off personalities as prisoners. A part of you becomes trapped in upset which it is currently unable to resolve. This happens to us all the time, when we do not have (in the moment) the resources (tools) available to fully integrate an experience. To contain the upset, that part of your psyche is walled-off from the rest. It is imprisoned. It is sentenced to live with its upset until its eventual liberation and rehabilitation. In the meantime it is kept more or less out of sight and out of mind. It is locked into your subconscious. But it does not stop feeling its upset.

We do not perceive reality as it actually is. We perceive everything through the filter of our internal model of reality. We have all got different models of what we think reality is, so we all perceive reality differently.

Our being seeks to quarantine any unreality that develops within our internal model – to separate the unreal part of the self (or the model) from the rest – this is the creation of a persona (or personality; from the Latin for 'mask'). From that moment, the persona remains bound up with the unreality that created it. It remains 'stuck' in that unreality – that is, stuck in the past. The unreality gives it definition and form.

Reality is in the here and now. Whenever you step out of reality, even for a moment, you invite a vampire into your home (i.e. into your mind).

When we start falling into habitual trains of thought (or behaviour), we are no longer paying attention to what our real self (our present self) wants to show us (which is the way out).

"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

We’re all trying to make sense of our experiences. To that end, we’re all model-makers. Within our minds, we create a representation of our worlds, embodying (trying to knit together) all of our experiences, including physical, mental, emotional, spiritual…

If you didn’t already know, that model world within your mind is the world you inhabit almost all of the time. This is your “Matrix”. You do not live in the “real” world. OK – the world you inhabit is “real” in the sense that if you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world – but beyond that, it’s only a simulation, a simulacrum, a model. It’s amazing, but it’s not really real.