Cal: Hello everybody, Cal Banyan here. Cal Banyan's Hypnosis Etc, once again with Meredith Locher, where we talk about hypnosis etcetera and some other things, but mostly about hypnosis and hypnotherapy, things related to that kind of stuff. And this is like, gosh we've had so many podcasts, this is like 360. Three hundred and sixty, I think this is the 360th one. What does that mean? We've done the full circle, 360 degrees. I'm kind of excited about that.
This also happens to be Meredith Locher's 225th podcast. I'm so excited; I'm kind of celebrating that in my own mind and let me tell you about Meredith Locher in case you've never been on our podcast before. Out of these 360, she's done 125 of them and she is a one percenter, a hypno one percenter, among the best of the best in the profession. She has a very successful hypnosis practice in Los Angeles. If you're in the Los Angeles area, that's where you need to go. She will help you transform whatever needs to be transformed in your life and let's see, what else. She has a master's degree in psychology. I'm trying to get her to be an instructor, I think she'd be a really great instructor, but, you know, a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do. How are you doing Meredith?
Meredith: I'm doing so good, and just to be clear everybody, because Cal, the first time, said 225 and while that would be amazing, I've done 125.
Cal: I'm prognosticating that you're going to do another 100, at least.
Meredith: You never know.
Cal: That's right.
Meredith: You never know. Thank you so much. So, Cal is the reason that I'm even here and doing this. He is the reason that I get to help so many people in Los Angeles. He was my trainer; he is the one that trains the best in the profession. He created a system for change really for practically any issue that a client would come to you for 5-PATH and he also brought to us 7th Path Self-Hypnosis, he's written many books, he teaches classes here in Tustin, he sees clients here in Tustin as well. I've sent my own family to him and I'm trying to get my mom to come in to see you, sometime she will. Cal Banyan, thank you so much.
Cal: Hey, I'm so honored to be a part of it and each podcast we do, once it gets published it goes out into the blogosphere, the hypno forever internet and I talk about this all the time, but I know 100 years from now, they're going to be watching these videos, they might be commenting on our hairstyles and how funny it looks but they'll still be learning something because hypnosis is evergreen. If you're interested in people, if you're interested in changing your life, changing the life of others, hypnosis is always going to be a powerful tool to do that. So, what are we going to talk about in this episode, Meredith?
Meredith: Other than that, I hope we're going to be dressing like The Jetsons in the future when they're watching these podcasts?
Cal: I want to be Elroy, I want to be the dad, I want to be Elroy. He had all the best toys and he had that dog.
Meredith: I know. Hey I want to be Elroy.
Cal: We could both be Elroy, Elroy One and Elroy Two. It's the future.
Meredith: The female Elroy and the male Elroy.
Cal: That's right; you'd be the Elroy-ette.
Meredith: So, today we're going to talk about age regression, not progression, regression. One of our favorite topics. One of the most important, in my opinion, just my interesting point of view, one of the most important phases of our five phase process, it happens to be phase two in 5-PATH and we've got kind of an array of questions about age regression, so would you like to dive right in, Cal?
Cal: Let's do it.
Meredith: So this particular person would like to know, what do you do when it seems suspiciously like a client is trying to stick to a theme? For example, they come in for something food related, weight loss related and they're regressing to only food related times. Now, mind you, for those of you who haven't done a whole lot of age regression, often the case is that, you know, because you're regressing, if you're doing an affect bridge and you're regressing off an emotion, you're going to get kind of a variety of events. So often it's going to be all over the place, all different kinds of things although there may be some things that are similar. But this particular hypnotist has a client who seemed to have been trying to be very linear with her age regression. So Cal, do you want to talk about that?
Cal: A whole bunch of things are going through my mind as you're talking about this. One is, preconceived ideas that clients can bring in, like they think they know the cause or they're rejecting the emotional component of the issue and I understand that hypnosis is not fragile. Hypnosis is not fragile, which means at any time, well it means a lot of things, but with regard to this issue, at any time I can say "Open your eyes, look at me." And I'll talk to them, so they think they might be out of hypnosis while I do that, but they're still in that very suggestful phase and just talk to them about, “you seem to have the belief or understanding that we can only go to those situations that are related to food, but the cause of this may not be related to food at all. We don't know. So you got to understand that, for example, if I'm telling you to follow the feeling back, you have to be open that it could go to other places. Now I'm not saying that it will, I'm not saying it's not, but are you ready to accept that?†And if they say “yesâ€, then I say "Good, close your eyes" and I just proceed.
If they say "Oh, I don't get it," then I'm going to have to talk to them about it because I cannot let the preconceptions of the client throw us off, or keep us off from finding the true cause. And I'll just talk to them, talk to them until either they will accept the idea or that I will not work with them because these preconceived ideas will completely and totally undermine what we need to do. And sometimes, I just say, you know, "Who's the hypnotherapist here? Who has the training, who has the experience? You've got to understand that you need to follow my instructions."
Now here's another thing, is that, I have that issue come up much less frequently now that I do more Time Tunneling Techniqueâ„¢ than I do Affect Bridge which are two techniques for doing age regression to cause. Now once I started doing the Time Tunneling Techniqueâ„¢, I find that because we are so, not just emotion based, like the feeling that's causing the problem, but when we do Time Tunneling Techniqueâ„¢, we have them say where in the body they're feeling it.
For example, the chest, and so there's always an emotion and feeling component that come together and when we have them hook into that feeling in the body then it is being generated by the emotion but it's felt in the body. And when we have them mentally go into that tunnel, they tend to stay with the feeling more than any kind of preconceived ideas they have about the cause and the feeling or events that should be visited because it is actually very rare that the cause of, for example, of overeating, or any too much behavior. Eating too much, drinking too much, working too much, smoking too much, whatever it is, has something to do with a substance or even that behavior, what's really going on over and over and over we discover, as I talk about in the book, The Secret Language of Feelings, is that there's a feeling inside them that is painful and they are trying to manage that feeling by distracting themselves with something else. Drinking too much, working too much, whatever the too much behavior is. And so we must pierce through that misconception so that we can get to the cause of the problem. Do you want to add to that, Meredith?
Meredith: Well, one thing that I really want to add is that we did three podcasts on Time Tunneling Techniqueâ„¢, so if you want more information about that, you can go to podcast number 211, 212 and 213. We did a long series on age regression, so if you need more background, more substance, more experience with age regression, podcast number 108 to 114 will help you with that.
Cal: Awesome. Now, also, I’m always writing notes if you catch my head kind of turned like that. We will put links to those podcasts right below. That's another reason you should be watching this on CalBanyan.com. All right, good. Anything else you want to add or are we done with that?
Meredith: I think that we are done with that. I can't think of anything else I want to add to that one.
Cal: Can I have just a minute?
Meredith: Yeah.
Cal: I just watched a video, a fellow named Charles Krauthammer. A Pulitzer Prize winning writer and just a really smart guy. He just wrote a book and so he's been on the circuit and it brought to my attention that he's done a video where he's talking about his book and his background and stuff like that. He talks about, now Charles Krauthammer, besides being a really smart guy who's in the political arena and his really more conservative viewpoint, but it doesn't matter what your politics. He is a medical individual; he was a medical doctor who was a psychiatrist, who then got into doing political commentary. Brilliant, brilliant man.
And he talks about, and whenever I see people like these who are doctors, licensed psychiatrists, and they start saying good stuff about hypnosis, I like to bring it to everybody's attention. And he talks about while he was practicing medicine that he studied hypnosis and some of the amazing things that he was able to do with hypnosis that he saw people do with hypnosis. So here is this really intellectual giant with his background in medicine and psychiatry validating further the use of hypnosis.
One of the things he really talks about that amazed him was burn victims. One of the most excruciating things, painful events, in the recovery from serious burns is changing the bandages and he talks about how he was, for his convincer, I think, was that he saw another physician use hypnosis combined with placebo to, according to his story, is this other doctor would hypnotize someone and then tell them when you drink this liquid, it will cause an anesthesia effect and your whole body is going to become free of any discomfort or free of pain or whatever, I don't know his exact words. And then they were able to peel these bandages off this burn victim with little or no pain.
Now, I said placebo because it's kind of an unusual technique where someone hypnotizes someone and then tells them when they drink a fluid, which in this case was just water, that it would have a medical effect, in this case, I believe it was anesthesia or analgesia. So that's kind of interesting. So I wanted to squeeze that in, we didn't want to do a whole podcast on it, but Charles Krauthammer and his new book and he is a doctor who validates hypnosis. All right, please proceed.
Meredith: I can't wait to read his book. Check that out. Good, so here is another question about age regression, and I think this will benefit a lot of people. This hypnotist had a client who she regressed off, in general, the feeling inside that the client just didn't like and followed it back and back and back and it was all very consistent, she said, and I'm sure by that she means consistent with what she normally experiences and would normally expect of an age regression session and, you know, consistent with the problem. And all the way back to before this particular client incarnated into their body, and they went far enough back where he felt safe and secure. She then goes on to say, "I still don't believe we found the initial sensitizing event from how he felt at the end of the session. What do you do if you can't find it? This has happened to me a couple times, informing child went well, future pace went well, but he seemed to not feel great upon emerging. Thoughts?"
Cal: I have questions about this question. So they weren't able to find the ISE but they did inform child work, and then when the session was over, there wasn't good results? Is that what's going on here?
Meredith: Yeah, basically the client was emerged and didn't feel that lightness that a lot of times clients seem to feel, so I don't even think, it doesn't sound like she even waited to see if there were actual results in affecting the behavior. She was kind of using the way the client felt after the session as a guide to determine whether she had found the ISE or not.
Cal: Okay. This is kind of a hard question to really get my mind around so let me just say some things that I think will help. One is, you've got to find an ISE. ISE is Initial Sensitizing Event. Age regression work is really about, at its highest level, finding the causal event, then going before that event, giving that individual what they wished they would have known then so they can go through that ISE without being negatively affected by it. And people will sometimes, while you're going back in time, you know, maybe your client is 40 and you go back to when they're 20 and then you go back to when they're 10 and then you go back to when they're five and four and three and two and so on, until suddenly you're before the event.
They want to avoid that ISE and they skip over it and they go back to an earlier time, and in this case, they're talking about going to a time when they feel good before coming into the body. And that's okay, I don't have any problem with that, but we've got to find the ISE, so what I will do is I'll use some kind of verbiage like, and now you move forward," until that feeling of however they described, safety and security, begins to slip away. So I count from 1 to 5, and you come to the very first time that you felt whatever feeling they described was associated with the problem.
For example, usually the age regression is some kind of fear. Here we go, one, fear's about to come out, two, three, there you are at the first fear and now we've got a possible ISE and how do we test it? Well it should be earlier than the other events that you visited in the age regression where the fear existed, so it should be earlier than those events. Then we would go through the same procedure that we do to verify an ISE.
For example, we ask them if the feeling is new, then also we give them the opportunity to regress further on that feeling if there is an earlier time and so on. And in previous videos that Meredith mentioned on age regression, I talk about how to validate an ISE. So, then we can identify the ISE and validate it.
Now, here is where a lot of people make a mistake. They'll do age regression and then the client doesn't come back or the client sometimes feels worse. This is a huge problem and so you must, for the client, get them some resolution. They must feel like something, and not just feel, you need to actually do something significant, because this is an expansive process, it can be a painful process and we need to have something to show for it. So normally we go find the ISE, we go then before the ISE, we do the informed child work, have the child see things differently, more accurately based on the perceptions of the adult and the hypnotherapist working together with the adult, run them through the ISE, and there's usually this big relief. This big change, a switch that happens.
And then we go further, 5-PATHers, we're the only ones that have it, have this segue and that's where, what we do is in the age regression section, we have the client, in the regressed client put an ending on these two sentences, "I've changed because now I know…" and "I've changed because now I feel..." Now, what happens is they're telling you what the inside was when they say, "I changed because now I know..." And they tell you the shift that's happened inside of them when they say, "I've changed because now I feel..."
For example, if we were regressing on fear, now they feel safe and secure or confident and so now we know this benefit has happened and if they can't express that then you're not done with the age regression. You need to do more Informed Child Work or you need to do more regression if you can't do that and you do that until you can get "I've changed because now I know, I've changed because now I feel..."
Then, what we want to do is do Direct Suggestion Work that is tied to the change, it's so powerful, this is why 5-PATH, and really, at the highest level age regression type work and insight work done on forgiveness and parts work is so powerful and so life-changing is that, we will have this insight. The insight puts the subconscious mind into not just a heightened state of suggestibility, which is hypnosis, but a state of hyper-suggestibility which I define as the receptive state where you can give them a suggestion that will last a very long time, even lifelong.
Now, what happens is, when they say, “I've changed because now I know.." and "I've changed because now I feel…" then you say, "Okay, now that you know this and you feel that," this is the segue, "you could accept these suggestions more powerfully than ever before." And we attach the suggestions that they came in for, the shift that they changed for, to the insights that were made. And this causes such an “ah-haâ€, an epiphany, an insight, it's such a relief that they're going to feel good when they get done with regard to the issue you worked with.
Now, 5-PATH is a five phase system. Phase one, preparation testing of the client, Phase two is age regression, Phase three is forgiveness of others, Phase four is forgiveness of self and Phase five is parts mediation work where we work on secondary gain issues if they're significantly strong enough to continue to drive the problem. Now, you might go in and, with the age regression, remove the fear that was the primary cause of the problem, but now that they've done that, they recognize or the feeling has come up called, anger, so they may have got a great release or shift when it came to the fear. But other emotions can come up causing them to not feel good about that.
So on one hand, they're very excited, the fear is gone, they've got this insight, they're feeling good, they're accepting the changes we came in. But on the other hand, they're kind of angry about how someone treated them in the past that caused them to have this problem. In fact, they might even have some guilt or anger at themselves but that's why it's a process. We don't do one-hit wonders, but they need to recognize that they've had some powerful change happen and they will come back and they will recognize that they did some good. If you do this kind of work, they will come back because nobody has helped them at this level. Yes, it might have been painful.
Yes, it might even have been a little embarrassing to visit these kind of icky places in their past, sometimes even terrifying places in their past, but when you're able to do the work at this profound level, this insight level, they will come back in a vast majority of cases, so that they can continue to do the work because you're the only one that's really been able to help them at that level. How's that, Meredith?
Meredith: It's wonderful. And I think it's helpful to add that, while the client might feel relief and they've had a release, it doesn't mean that every client is going to jump out of the chair and be in their most joyful state. You know, sometimes clients are still processing what just happened. It's speed therapy that we're doing. It's a speed therapeutic intervention that they just did with themselves. So some people are tired from the focus that that session took, some people are still kind of going "Whoa, that was a lot and I can't believe I just experienced all that," and they're still kind of trying to wrap their head around it basically, you know.
So there's a whole lot of different reactions that you're going to get from clients and just because they don't come out of the hypnosis wanting to do a dance and sing a song doesn't mean that they didn't get an amazing result that will affect the behavior that they came in to affect or the feeling that they came in to resolve. So yet another time to let them go out into the world and then to find out how the work, you know, how it happened after the fact, what happened after the fact. Yeah?
Cal: Yeah.
Meredith: And we have to wrap it up, so, oh my gosh, we could spend forever talking about this subject, and happy to do so. Please continue to send in your questions. Meredith@yourpathhypnosis.com, post them down there on CalBanyan.com, put them into ourhypnospace, the Ask Cal Group, put them onto Facebook, the Hypnosis Etc. page. There are so many options, looking forward to interacting more with all of you and bringing you all to that space where you can consider yourself one of the best of the profession. This is Meredith Locher, signing off.
Cal: Thank you, Meredith. And you are one of the best in the profession and we thank you so much and have gratitude towards you for being with us for 125 sessions. I'm mentioning this for our audience because she's going to slow down a little bit with regard to how many times she comes to our center and does these podcasts in the future, at least for awhile. She's very, very busy in her own practice.
I mean, poor Meredith, she's got to come with topics and questions and drive through Los Angeles traffic and everything to get down here to Orange County. It really takes about a half a day, sometimes longer to come here and give what she gives, so just a huge amount of gratitude to Meredith. And to all you folks out there, I'll see you at the Solid Gold weekend, that's February 15th through the 16th, 2014 and I'll see you in class either on January 27th, July 14th or October 13th, 2014 and then, we can do great things together. Alright, this is Cal Banyan signing off.
Copyright 2013 Calvin D. Banyan . All rights reserved.