Cal Banyan: Wow! Hello, everybody, this is Cal Banyan, Cal Banyan's Hypnosis, Etc. I'm back with Erika Flint and she's got a topic for me today. What do you do with these folks that, and clients who come in with or have these, like repetitive thoughts that they just can't get out of their head the things they’re thinking about or people they're thinking about, and she's had some questions for me. We’re just going to have fun with it.
All right, let me introduce you to Erika. Erika is our co-host from Bellingham, Washington. She's an up and comer in the profession. She comes, she's just gone full time in that profession after being in love with hypnosis for a while, but then, she started getting into 5-PATH and discovered hypnosis that works. She became a true believer. Now, she's writing, she's speaking and she is the new President of the Bellingham National Guild Hypnotists Chapter. How are you doing there?
Erika Flint: I'm doing great, Cal. What, I, you know, what I really wanted to ask you or we can talk about today is, can we help clients who are obsessively thinking about things. It's another person or sometimes it's about themselves, and so that's the idea that I want to explore here today.
So first, before we get started, let me tell everybody about you. Now, Cal Banyan is the hypnosis celebrity and not just because all of these wonderful and free-training videos that he's done for many years, but, because he's received almost every single award and recognition in the profession which is amazing, I think. And he's written some really awesome books. One of my favorites is “The Secret Language of Feelings,†and he's also been on television. He's been on radio promoting hypnosis and hypnotherapy. He's the trainer of some of the best in the profession, basically. I learned from him and . . . I’ve just learned so much from you, Cal, so I'm just really happy to be here today to learn some more from you.
So let's get started right away. What I wanted to talk about is what do we do? So let’s start at the beginning. Your client comes in, pre-hypnosis interview and they are just so thinking obsessively. So they were pitying themselves and they are just so focused on . . . I'll give you an example. I've had a client who was divorced and she could not stop thinking about her ex-husband, all right? So she is kind of stuck in this obsessive thought and she's kind of looking at the wall, and she's talking about him. She's kind of scattered. I can really tell that there is some, some level of just kind of this looping, kind of thinking going on in her mind. So, I was wondering, what would you do to help a client who presents them? So, they walk in the door exhibiting that type of behavior.
Cal Banyan: Okay, that's a really interesting topic. And, as you're talking about this, someone may go in two different angles at once. So we start at the beginning and that is . . . there's really two kinds of ways this manifests. One is thinking about something or experiencing some kind of symptom over and over, again because it's a distractor. Then the other is that it's an emotion that is just seeking to be resolved. Now, in this situation, you're talking about, there is, there is either fear or there is a guilt or there is an anger that is seeking to be resolved. In the first example though, and like, for example, I've worked with tinnitus and also with pain and what in those cases, the person continues to feel the symptom or that might even be a thought like you're talking about or they just think about, like numbers, like some people count or think of numbers or things like that. And with that, it is a distractor.
It's exactly the same way as I explained in the book, The Secret Language of Feelings or I explained on the website thesecretlanguageoffeelings.com. And, as a distractor, what happens is, they have a feeling inside themselves that they don't like, fear, anger, guilt. And they take their mind away from it just like the drinker drinks or the smoker smokes as a distractor, take their mind off the feeling inside them that they don't like. Well, some people would do it mentally and it's not purposefully, but it's a strategy the subconscious mind will do.
For example, with tinnitus, you know everybody, when you think about it, you can focus on this ringing in your ears, but you could just start thinking about it and the person is experiencing tinnitus. In many cases, the cases I've worked with, it is in the subconscious mind, it would rather focus on this kind of harmless ringing in the ears than focus and deal with the fear, anger, guilt inside of them. And there's this old rule of consciousness and that is, that what you focus on, becomes bigger. And it's funny, because as I'm talking about this, this ringing in the ears that’s like the volume is just going up, up, up in my head, but I know that as soon as I start talking about the other aspect, it'll start to go away.
So I work with tinnitus or I work with this other kind of, just kind of obsessed with these ideas or repetitive thoughts as a distractor, so that's category one. And, category two then is the unresolved emotion and it is the emotion, the fear, anger, guilt. These are the three emotions we work with so often and not exclusively, but so often, and it's saying, "Let's work on this. Let's work on this," because emotions are pure drive. They're there to motivate you to do the sometimes difficult things you need to do to fulfill your needs, wants or desires, in either case, I'm going to teach them to do 7th Path Self-Hypnosis. They do it in between sessions and they have something that they can do after our sessions are done to work on their issues. And then, also 5-PATH, it worked as a universal approach that works in either case. How's that for starting off there, Erika?
Erika Flint: Well, I love that answer, Cal, because I hadn't, you know, I don't know that a lot of people realize that the obsessive thinking could be a distractor, and so that is very interesting. And as you were talking about ringing in the ears, I could notice mine as well. So you're right. What we think about tends to grow and so that's absolutely true. Now, would you say that to your client? Like what you said that you believed that it was . . . they were using the thinking kind of as a distractor. Do you share that with your client? Do you share that piece of insight or do you just start like, when they come in like the pre-hypnosis interview, what do you say to them at that point?
Cal Banyan: Yes, just like I would, if someone was coming in for stop smoking, or eating too much, or drinking too much, or working too much, or exercising too much, these too much behaviors, I show them a 20-minute video. When people come in for the first time, clients come the first time, they watch one video “The Truth about Hypnosis.†It's me explaining hypnosis, removing fears, misconceptions about hypnosis so they can quickly and easily go into the deep level of hypnosis, but the people that come in for too much behaviors, I show them another video of me explaining how distractors work.
And, so they would watch that video and then when they get in, I will talk about this and say, "This is not something you're doing consciously and I just want you to be opened to the idea that you know, the protective part of you is doing the best that it can, doing the best it can to kinda save you from some kind of you know, emotional discomfort or pain and, I mean . . . I was just talking to a potential client about this yesterday on the phone and he's tried everything for tinnitus and now, guess what? We're going to do it done, I think. So he's going to come in and hope he's going to come in. I believe he's made appointment and he's going to head up from this level. I'm going to head with it right at front.
And you know, one of the cool things about being hypnotists, is that people don't come to us first. They come to us last and then we can provide them with something that's different. A perspective that's different from everything else. You know, we're not saying, "Here you got to have this pill," or, "There's something neurologically wrong with you," because the pill didn't work. They went to the neurologist. The neurologist couldn't find anything. So now, we can hit them with this other perspective and we can say, "You know what? I'm an expert with the subconscious mind and the subconscious mind is doing what it thinks is best for you." So, let's just be open to the opportunity, the possibility. We won't know until when we get in there that maybe this is something the subconscious mind is doing in order to protect you. How's that sound?
Erika Flint: Yeah, I think that's wonderful and I think that providing that hope to clients and saying, "Hey, you know what? I think this is going to work," and, "I'm an expert in this, and this is how we can do this." I think that's wonderful. Now, one thing that I do share with my clients, which is what you'd already mentioned is you know, what we think on grows. What we think about grows. So I'll ask him, "How do you want to feel?" Right? So if they come in to my office and they're sitting there, and they're kind of going on and on about the obsessive . . . They’re kind of exhibiting you know the behavior, the obsessive kind of thinking behavior right in front of me. I'll ask him. Just to ask him a question, "How do you want to feel?" "How do you want this to be?" and that kind of distracts them for a minute and gets them to think about something else.
And so what I'm trying to do is get them to start thinking about how they do want to be, because it's not just the obsessive thinking. It's the stress that comes along with that. It's not like they're obsessively thinking about good things in particular. They're obsessively thinking about things that I'm causing some level of negativity in their lives or some level of stress in their lives, so what I want to do right up about this you know, so how do you want to feel? And how can we get you to start thinking about that instead of the obsessively thinking about these other things that aren't helpful for you and that's just kind of you know in the first session type of the thing before we were able to get down into kind of the deeper layers of things. What do you think about that, Cal?
Can Banyan: Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable approach especially for, like in the first session you're going to get in to direct suggestion only, and not going to get into the uncovering work that's done in phase 2, 3 and 4 and even 5 or 5-PATH. And to get them to understand that, that what you're focusing on grows bigger and that what you're not focusing on, you know tends to go away or fades, so I think that's really a good way to start.
Hey, as we’re talking about this, I was doing at my computer monitor right in front of me, and I was looking at one of my inspirations for understanding the symptomology as a distractor, is Dr. John Sarno’s book, what an inspiration, cause I have the ideas, teaching the idea before that, but it confirmed, is Dr. John Sarno’s “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection†and he works with people who had chronic back pain. They had surgeries and all these different things, and nothing worked.
And he simply start talking to these individuals, I heard, particularly men, about whenever you feel the pain, ask yourself, “Could there be an emotional connection here? Could this be something that is distracting me from some parts of emotion inside?†And that puts him in a loop to where no longer does the back pain serve the purpose as a distractor for the emotion, as every time you’d get the back pain you say, “Gosh, what could be the emotional cause?†Thousands of individuals, through just that concept, and they very much reinforces the idea that these symptoms or these thoughts can just be a distractor. Cool, keep going.
Erika Flint: Well, that’s just fascinating what you just said, and I love that. One thing that came to mind when you were talking about that is that we can provide our clients another way to think about things, right? And sometimes, clients will come to us and they’re very emotional. Sometimes, they come to us and they’re very thoughtful, right? These clients sometimes is both but, sometimes, you’ll definitely have people who are just really thinking and over analyzing and trying to basically, in their mind, they are trying to solve a problem with their cognitive thinking with their conscious mind.
And so, a couple of things come to mind when you just said that. One is, giving them another way of thinking about things, right? So you’re adding in instead of just when you’re thinking about that back pain, you are now thinking, “What’s the emotion behind it?†That’s another way of thinking about things, but as hypnotists, we can also give our clients different ways besides that to think about things as well, and we can do that in hypnosis. One thing that comes to mind for me, really, is basically the idea of getting rid of some negatives, negative self-talk, right? A lot of the times, what you’ll hear people doing when they share with you, “Well, what are you really thinking? Tell me exactly what it is you’re thinking in your head. Just talk out loud like I can hear you.†A lot of this is just negative self-talk.
And one thing that I will ask my client, if I believe that they’re doing a lot of this negative self-talk, is ask them if they would ever say those types of things to another person, for example, most people would say, “No.†So we’re always harder on ourselves than we are on other people but that’s just people thinking in a different way, right? So they’d take a step back. Another thing is when we talked about the secret language of feelings, I don’t know that people are really taught how they should be thinking about certain things. And as I notice, we can give them this other ways of thinking, so I think that can be really beneficial for this people that are kind of caught in this obsessive thinking. I think there’s only one way, and that’s it. So what do you think about that, Cal?
Cal Banyan: Well, yeah, and so what we really do is, now let me take this to a more comprehensive level. We really have two things going on as we work with these individuals, be it that they have the unresolved emotion that’s causing to constantly think about their ex-husband or whatever it is, or the person is just having compulsive thoughts or symptomology as a distractor, and that is, we do two things.
One is, we’re going to start suggesting, like you’re talking about different ways of thinking and being their own thought police and that kind of thing. And this can be done both in just instructional at a desk but certainly, in certain cases, we understand that the power of reinforcing that through direct suggestion hypnosis and then, which we get into this like phase 2, 3, 4, 5, age regression, age progression, forgiveness of others, forgiveness to self, parts mediation work, they’re all the different phases of 5-PATH.
Then, what happens is we go after the cause in the subconscious mind, that unresolved emotions, or that unrealistic or that emotion that’s not based in reality so that we can neutralize it. Then, what happens is we do the segue; and then it is with segue for the resolution or neutralization that happens in those insight techniques to them, the direct suggestion of thinking about things differently, and be your own thought police and that kind of thing. I don’t think there is anything in the world of hypnosis that meets that level of comprehensive work with these kinds of clients. What do you think?
Erika Flint: Yeah, absolutely. And so the insight that we use that we help our clients achieve using the insight therapy, things like regression and forgiveness, that can actually just remove the emotion that might be driving some of this thinking behavior in the first place. And, one other thing that I do like to save my clients who are talking so much and trying to solve these problems with their thinking mind is that, you know what, we’ve been trying for quite a long time here to solve this problem with your thinking mind, just trying to figure it out.
Let’s do some hypnosis and see what comes up in hypnosis using the subconscious mind because what you’ve been doing thus far hasn’t been successful, so let’s go do some hypnosis and see how that can help us. That is what takes us to the underlying emotion, and to the underlying cause, and the insight, and bringing them to the segue, and teaching them that new way to be thinking about things using the suggestion. That’s wonderful, Cal. Thank you.
Cal Banyan: Okay, I think we’ve given a really good overview of what to do with that. Let’s just have you wrap it up, and we’d be done for today.
Erika Flint: All right. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. My name is Erika Flint and I’m really happy to be here today to share with you my thoughts on hypnosis, and I love being on the show. I hope you come back and join us for more episodes. I’m just very grateful and happy to be here. Thank you, Cal.
Cal Banyan: Okay, give them your website.
Erika Flint: My website is cascadehypnosiscenter.com and I’m up here in Bellingham, Washington.
Cal Banyan: Awesome. All right, Cal Banyan here. Want to see you in class. We’ve got an October class coming up. I’m looking at my calendar right now, starts on the 13th goes to 24th, weekend off in the middle. We’ve got a Feb/March class coming up, starts on Feb. 23, 2015. If you’re watching this somewhere down the road, like 2016, just go to CalBanyan.com, click on Hypnosis Training and see what’s coming up. Oh, and by the way, remember, you can take our classes, our certification courses; you do 10-day certification course or the Week of Power - Advanced Hypnosis Course for people who are already certified online, live online. Isn’t that true, Erika?
Erika Flint: That’s right. That’s how I did it, Cal, and I loved it. It was great. There were four of us online and we had a great time, and we could . . . It was just like we were there practically. We just didn’t have to drive there in the morning or fly.
Cal Banyan: That’s right. It’s like having the best seat in class from your own home or office.
Erika Flint: Right, right. You also have your own kitchen and bathroom.
Cal Banyan: That’s right, you never have to wait to go to the bathroom. All right, Cal Banyan signing off.