Cal: Hello everybody. Cal Banyan here. Cal Banyan's Hypnosis, Etc. with, let's see. Who have I got? Brenda Titus. You know what? I'm so excited to have her here today because she's got an excellent topic. What's the topic?
Brenda: Ooh…today we are focusing on, as I call it, "Keep Calm and Carry On." We're going to talk today about anxiety. Is it easier said than done to move on and not live in such a fear-based society that we are living in these days?
Cal: Awesome. Hey, if you guys are watching this anywhere except calbanyan.com, go over to calbanyan.com right now, because on calbanyan.com we have additional text, links, graphics, that just makes each one of these videos, I think, just a little bit richer and better for you. Plus, we have 400 other hypnosis training videos for you so it's just the place to go. Ahh. All right. Let me introduce you to Brenda. Brenda is absolutely awesomeoneous. As you can tell, just by listening to her, the enthusiasm, the excitement for the profession, the excitement for helping others is there. She worked for years in a totally different environment doing rape crisis intervention and then we got her to switch over to the happy world of hypnotists and she's got a good, strong background. She's got a Bachelor's degree in Sociology, Master's degree in Criminology, and if there was such a thing as a hypnocop, she'd be my favorite one. How are you doing, Brenda?
Brenda: I'm doing great, Cal. Thank you so much for having me. I am pleased to be here with Cal Banyan, the authority in hypnosis that works. Cal brings us years and years of these weekly podcasts where we're giving you golden nuggets of information to help you get out there and really be the best of the best in the profession. Cal is one of the trainers of the best of the best of the profession. He brings his "5-PATH Hypnotherapy", "7th Path Self-Hypnosis". He has books on hypnotherapy and hypnosis as well as "The Secret Language of Feelings", which is just such an incredible help to so many clients. I think we're probably going to tackle some feeling today as we're talking about anxiety. Cal, like I said, he brings everybody together between Our HypnoSpace, bringing his students together to really be leaders and movers and shakers in the profession. I'm very pleased to be here today and pick his brain about a very important topic. Should I go ahead and get started?
Cal: Yes. Do you have your brain-picker out and ready to go?
Brenda: I do. My brain-picker is out and ready to go.
Cal: All right. Let's rock.
Brenda: I really want to talk about anxiety today, Cal, because I'm afraid it is everywhere. I've talked to quite a few of my hypno friends out there that have mentioned they've seen quite a few anxiety clients and I, of course, have myself. It's very much a common theme, whether people come to me and they start with that word or that's where we're moving as they start talking about feeling anxious and fearful. We had a recent question on our Hypnosis, Etc. podcast Facebook page from Donna Bloom. I loved how she said it. She said, "Cal, what is up with this epidemic of anxiety plaguing our society?" She said, "The last time I checked most of us are not being chased by a tiger." I mentioned this to you yesterday, Cal, and you had such great insights about anxiety and fear. I really wanted to take some time to talk about what is going on with all of this fear in our society, Cal?
Cal: Okay. Like I say in my book "The Secret Language of Feelings", all feelings are good when they're based in reality. The problem is… there's a lot of different problems actually, that causes us unnecessary anxiety. Another thing I want you to understand is anxiety is fear felt in the body. That's what fear feels like. Fear is the emotion. Anxiety is what it feels like in your body. There's all kinds of reasons why you could be going around with good fear or useless fear. Good fear, fear is there for a very good reason when it's based in reality. You do kind of a reality check. You say, "Okay." Fear comes from the thought or the perception something bad is going to happen. Someone's going to get hurt, whatever it is, something bad is going to happen. That automatically creates fear in the brain and anxiety in the body.
You do a reality check and say, "Is there really something bad going to happen?" Sometimes just taking that momentary time to be responsive to the emotion instead of reactive to the emotion can cause a lot of settling down. For example, as was mentioned, is there really like a tiger chasing me? Am I really, really about to lose my house, spouse, whatever it is that you're worried about, my job, my reputation, whatever it is. Sometimes just taking that moment you go, "Wait a minute. That thought is just so out of line of reality," and the fear instantly goes away. You will look at it and maybe you will say, "You know, it's not as bad as I first thought," and the fear will go down and the anxiety felt in the body will go down. One of the more problematic things is, you see, if the fear is based in reality then it's actionable.
You can do A, B, C, D to prepare to avoid, to make yourself more secure, to get help, whatever it is. That's what fear is for. Fear is there to motivate you to do the, sometimes, difficult things you need to do to make yourself safe and secure or the people that you care about or the property you care about safe and secure. Right now, we're in California and the Northern Pacific Coast, Oregon, Washington, we're getting a whole bunch of storms. There's some people that are very fearful and some of those people the fear is based in reality. Maybe their house flooded last year or there was a fire that burnt up the mountainside and now there's no trees and bushes to hold the mud in place. That's based in reality. That fear is good. That fear gets you to move or fill the sandbags or whatever you need to do. The harmful fear, harmful anxiety, is this chronic anxiety or fear that is not actionable.
You see, the actionable, based in reality fear tends to be episodic. It comes and it goes. It comes, we deal with it, it passes, we recover from it mentally, physically, emotionally. This chronic kind of unrealistic fear might be a fear that was started as a child. Something happened that made you think you're not good enough. You're not smart enough. This kind of thing can leave you in this perpetual state of fear, which is extremely unhealthy. This constant stress can cause skin problems, digestive problems, hypertension, all these kinds of things. With 5-Path and 7 Path we can help eliminate that. The other culprit is there is actually this multi-billion dollar industry out there that is designed to make you feel fearful. It might be a politician giving you worst-case scenarios. It could be a mouthwash commercial that's trying to make you feel insecure about your breath.
It could be a show that uses very, very, very, very slim models and they say that if you don't fit this model outline then there's something wrong with you. There's all these commercials that constantly are designed to make you feel anxious, worried, insecure. Again, you need to do that reality check and if you have anything of the past that they're triggering you've really got to go see a good hypnotist like Brenda. How you doing, Brenda?
Brenda: Wonderful. I was scrambling taking notes because, this will help me with a client that I'm working with right now so I do really appreciate that. I think one of the things that is so important for us to talk about is that the media angle is that we are definitely sold a 24/7 state of anxiety, state of fear. It started, I especially noticed it back after September 11th that stages of alert and things like that or every time I'd hear breaking news. It was like, uhhh! That took a lot to recover from. In fact, I think many of us still have that. Now, there is another interesting phenomenon that I really noticed where I see clients get very fear-based and very anxiety-based beyond news and the traditional media and that is social media, Cal. Oh my gosh.
Just, actually, I see that every once in a while for myself where it can just, you're just flooded with all of this information and people's issues, people's problems, people's happiness and then I don't feel so happy and all that stuff. That's, I experience that just for me and I'm normally pretty healthy and things like that, don't have a lot of anxieties and fears per se. I see that sometimes with my clients or different people that I talk to that constant stream that they're comparing themselves to other people, feeling not good enough and the anxiety just goes through the roof. What do you think about that, Cal?
Cal: Well, you know, that's right. It's like I was talking about with if they have that insecurity, one of the things we've got to do, this is what I would do, just to get kind of technical here, is in the session I'd take them into somnambulism doing age regression. I would get in touch with that emotion and then I would time tunnel, find out where they're feeling it in their body, take them, turn that into a tunnel, follow it back to an earlier time, recent time, that they felt this way. I'm going to find out something very important. Is that feeling familiar or new? If it's new it could just be, I'm sure when the 9/11 attack happened there were a lot of people feeling an insecurity that was new. That was a big change in the world. Then if it was familiar, then we know that that event is triggering an insecurity from the past.
The Fab Five, the five questions that must be asked in every event that we regress someone to: What's happening? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Is it familiar or new? How old are you? These five questions reveal so much about what we're doing with the client. How's that?
Brenda: Exactly, so important. You know, Cal, I have another very important question that I wanted to ask you about anxiety on behalf of everybody because you and I talked about it and we said, "Fear, if the feeling is fear, but anxiety is what's, the literal –
Cal: The emotion is fear and the feeling is anxiety.
Brenda: Exactly. The emotion is fear. The feeling, the physical feeling is anxiety. However, anxiety is also a medical term, Cal. Is that right?
Cal: Right. Right. I think that if you're just being really careful that you're not talking about diagnosing someone with anxiety, the word anxiety existed for a long, long time. You're not diagnosing someone with some kind of emotional disorder. We're very careful about talking about that the emotion is fear and the anxiety is what we feel in the body. I don't see a real problem with that unless you start talking in diagnostic terms or labeling terms of "you have". We don't say, "You have an anxiety disorder." We say, "You're feeling anxious." Right? We're talking about the anxiety but they say, "Yeah, I'm feeling anxious." The clients don't come in and say, "I'm feeling anxiety," quite as often as they would say, "I'm feeling really anxious or nervous about this." Nervous is the same things as anxiety.
Brenda: That helps a lot, Cal, because like I said, actually I see people all the time and they'll come and they're not seeing a psychiatrist for these things. They're not seeing a doctor in any way and then they'll throw out that word anxiety and I do kind of have a moment of, "Oh my gosh. Do I need a medical referral? Where are we at?" I'm not, I'm very familiar with those feelings of nervousness and anxiety but that they're not necessarily clinical depression, you know, or clinical anxiety. I think that that helps a lot always being very clear about what our capacity is. The truth is that sometimes we may realize, Cal, that we see someone and maybe they're just here, not just, I apologize.
They're here for nail biting or a “too much†behavior that maybe didn't initially need a medical referral but we also need to be aware that sometimes, actually, they may bring up a level of anxiety that could be beyond the scope of hypnosis. What do you suggest in a situation like that, Cal?
Cal: If you've got someone who appears to just not be mentally healthy, we deal with normal everyday people with normal everyday problems. It's normal to be anxious about things or to be nervous about things. You've got a talk that's coming up and you're worried about it, you're nervous about it. That nervousness can be good if people understand that fear is good when it's based in reality. It motivates them to prepare and to avoid maybe mistakes they've made in the past and that kind of thing. If you're working in an environment, it changes from state to state, region to region, where anxiety is an iffy word, just, as you're talking to them, reframe it. Not reframe it. Rename it. Say, "Okay. I understand you're very nervous about this," and just keep using the word nervous and they'll eventually switch over to using that vocabulary too.
If you think somebody is beyond your skills then you should always work on a referral basis with someone. Either if it's just a matter of skill level, confidence level, you might want to send them to a more confident and competent hypnotist or if they are in that area of you're thinking, "This person really needs some psychological help, for sure," ask them to get a psychological evaluation just to be on the safe side. How's that sound?
Brenda: That sounds great. There's so often where, you know, actually one of the interesting things that I see is there are so many people who will come to me with fears or they'll say anxiety and boom, we knock things out in age regression and they have huge shifts that are happening very quickly. We can see it and we can see improvement and what have you. It's always important to take note when you're not seeing progress. Especially when you're dealing with somebody who is saying things like anxiety and fear and things like that. Every once in a while, you're going to realize in the midst of it, "Wow, this actually is beyond the scope of what I'm able to do," and it's important to be self-aware about those things and be prepared to refer out or potentially you'll have them get a mental health evaluation to be sure that it's appropriate for you to continue doing that work.
Just kind of wanted to talk about that a little bit because, like I said, there are, fear. I believe sometimes fear is healthy and good and normal and sometimes it's based in misunderstanding, misperception. Sometimes there's a little bit more going on so we definitely need to be aware of those things. Thank you so much, Cal, for being able to talk about anxiety. Hoping for an anxiety-free New Year but I definitely want all of my hypno friends out there to be prepared to deal with people who are dealing with normal, everyday fears and know that they don't have to last forever. When we understand them or we take action on them then we can overcome them. That's what I have to share today as we wrap it up. I look forward to seeing you all out on our HypnoSpace at the Hypnotists' Lounge. I can be reached at ochypnotherapy.com or on Facebook at Healing Path Hypnosis. I look forward to seeing you all next time I'm here. Have a great week, everybody.
Cal: Thank you, Brenda. I've got a news announcement. Hey, guess what? Brenda just agreed to take over the group in our HypnoSpace and she's going to be the hypnotist lounge concierge or bartender or whatever you need her to be because she's taking over that group and I think it's just going to be a better place with her in there keeping the conversation going, keeping things light and very social. All right. I want to see you guys in class. I know you could be watching this video a year from now, two years from now so you can always just check out our schedule here on the site calbanyan.com. If you're watching it as it just comes out I want to let you know that we've got the National Guild of Hypnotists approved Banyan Hypnosis Certification Super Course coming up on March 2nd to the 13th with the weekend off right in the middle.
You know what? It's a great time to be in California, especially if you're from a cooler place. Come out here. It's going to be nice in March. You can go to Disneyland, check out the beach, and all that kind of stuff. Also, we've got the Week of Power May 3rd through the 9th. That's for you guys who are already certified. We don't spend nearly as much time on the basics, just make sure everybody's on the same page. Then we get right into 5-Path, 7 Path, advanced techniques, instant inductions, and all that kind of stuff. All right. That's it. So glad to have you. Happy New Year. Let's do great things together. Cal Banyan signing off.