DL Scott CtHA / AASD / CDC

One of the things that always amazes me is when a client calls for the first time,
explains how they want to come in and be cured of this issue or that. issue, but they want it done within a space of one session. Recently I had a mental health counselor ask me if I could put him under and take care of an issue he has been dealing with for years, The Fear of Flying. He didn’t want to talk with anyone about it, he didn’t want to go through therapy about it, he simply wanted to be put into a state of hypnosis and be cured of his Fear. It shows the true lack of understanding not just among lay people but also among so called professionals when it comes to how the brain works.
First off let me say, although Hypnosis can do some incredible things, it is not a magic bullet, it is not some dark mysterious power that will put the client to sleep and them cure them all of all their ills by the time they wake up.
With that said, what is hypnosis? Hypnosis is a state of focused concentration, a state of focused awareness. When a trained therapist, such as myself, guides a client into a state of altered consciousness, the actually truth is that we are not creating anything, we are not putting the client into some magical state, we are simply helping the client to shift their awareness from one thing to another.
When we are focused on something, what does that really mean? It means that our brains are filled with images and pictures of what ever is the object of focus.
Think about that, when you are experiencing any emotion, whether that be anxiety about something, such as a fear or anxiety of flying, or pure joy, happiness, where are those emotions coming from? Your emotions spring from the images that you hold in your brain. What ever image you focus on, that will be the basis for your state of emotion. People who experience a Fear of Flying, experience that fear because when they think about flying, their attention is on what might happen while flying, and in this case it means that your brain is filled with images and pictures of everything bad that may happen.
The brain does not know the difference between a real or imagined event. When you are thinking about something, when you have an image of an event in your brain, the same neurons and neuron – firing patterns are occurring as though the event is taking place outside of the brain. That is the beauty and the simplicity of hypnosis, by utilizing the images that we have in our brains already, you can change your reactions, your behavior, your patterns of belief, and accomplish seeming miracles.
There are many effects of hypnosis, and altered states of consciousness that are considered fantastic and beyond belief. Take the idea of fire walking, or walking on beds of broken glass while barefoot. In both cases the feet are completely unharmed, neither a burn nor a scratch will appear. This effect comes from control of the body through control of the images in the brain.
The images we focus on can cause us stress, unhappiness, pain, or on the other end of the spectrum, pleasure, joy, and elation.
Try a little experiment. I want you to close your eyes and think of an event that made you feel scared or uncomfortable. The event might be something that made you actually tremble with negative emotion. When you are done with that, I want you to open your eyes. Think about the images of that event, were they clear, bright, sharp, focused, big, in vivid color?
Now I want you to close your eyes again, and think about that event. Only this time I want you to change the image(s). I want you to retain the same image(s) only this time I want you to make the images in black and white, make them small, dull, fuzzy, and even add silly music to them, something like circus music. Now open your eyes again, and I want you to think about how you are feeling about the event this time, as compared to the first time.
You have just used a very simple hypnotic technique in which you recoded the images in your brain, to change the emotional response. You have not gotten rid of the images, nor have you wiped out the memories, but you have recoded the image(s) and changed the fear or anxiety that you once felt about the event.
This type of technique works well, it works fast, and it is very effective, and if that was all there was to it, then my interactions with clients would be so much easier, but as with most things in life, there is more to it then just that.
I once heard a very good analogy of the process put in the following terms. If you were to attempt to explain to alien from another world where you got a cup of water, and you simply tell them, you go over to the Fawcett, hold the cup under the spout, turn the knob, and presto, you get a cup full of water, you would only be explaining a part of the process. You left out the whole piece about the plumbing behind the Fawcett, the thousands of pipes that carry the water from the water treatment plant, and on, and on, and on. The same can be said for how the magic of hypnosis really works.
As a clinician for the last 20 years working in the more traditional fields of Chemical Dependency and Mental Health, I have learned the value of clearing up old energy, letting go of old beliefs, and ideas, while incorporating a new idea or belief. Another good analogy is to think of waxing down your car. You certainly would not want to put a new coat of wax on it without giving the car a good cleaning, taking away the layer of dirt and grime that you have picked up while traveling along the road.
The human brain works in much the same way. You have traveled many years in your life, and before you can successfully incorporate a layer of new beliefs, you would do well to start letting go of the old beliefs, release the old energy that have been keeping you stuck going in the same direction. This process does not take an enormous amount of time. Unlike conventional therapy, Foundations Hypnosis Seattle – Bellevue can help you release old bits of emotional baggage, inappropriate belief systems, within a matter of just a few sessions, once this is accomplished then the new beliefs, the new layer of energy can be successfully incorporated into your life.
We are the creators of our life circumstances. Now when we first hear this we are prone to get defensive and shoot back with, why would I have created the circumstances of my life in this way? Why would I have put myself in this type of relationship, or put myself into this lousy job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The truth is that we have invited in, or in someway created the circumstances of our daily life, through our focus of attention, through the images that we carry in our brains.
Generally we are not aware of this process, and the images we keep in the forefront of our brains are based on fears, old emotional wounds that we are so traumatized by that they become the script that we live by. We constantly focus on these images, even we think that we are trying to remember them so as not to repeat the same events, but we are none the less focused on these images and they doom us to keep creating, recreating, and experiencing the same behaviors over and over again.
When you use the powerful technique of hypnosis to recode old images, and create new images in your brain, these images help to instill a new behavior, or belief into your life. The problem is, that just like the dirt that keeps working its way up through the new coat of wax, the old issues often times will resurface and continue to create havoc in your life.
One of the things that hypnosis does, and does quite well, is to put you into a state of altered consciousness in which the critical brain is lessened, and powerful, positive ideas are more easily instilled into the brain. (It is important to note here that the key word is positive, the subconscious is designed in such a way that it is constantly trying to protect and promote you, it will not accept what it deems as harmful or negative ideas and beliefs while in the altered state of hypnosis).
As I try to explain to clients, you can be put into the state of hypnosis, you can be given as many suggestions as possible concerning whatever new behavior you would like to incorporate into you life, but if you don’t clear out the old inappropriate energy / emotion first, the effect will not last. Just like that new wax job on a car that has not been cleaned, it might look OK for a little while, but the old dirt and grime well eventually just come right back through. These old images, beliefs, and thoughts are often what cause prolonged stress in your life.
When we allow ourselves to remain under the effects of prolonged stress we weaken the immune system and open ourselves up to sickness and disease. What a help it would be if we just took a few minutes each day and practice simple relaxation or self hypnotic exercises to reverse the effect of the stress.
Looking more directly at the body / brain connection, is it any surprise that someone who has feelings of low self worth and esteem seem to experience lower energy, lower immune response, and actual occurrences of specific illness according to constant messages, and corresponding images they are focused on, i.e. “I am so sick of always having to deal with rude and pushy people,” repeated several times over the course of many days the brain will take the message, “I am so sick”, and translate this into an actual physical sickness in the body.
Eventually the sickness well probably have to be taken care of on a physical level, costing the person time, money, and excessive wear and tear to the body. You see we are in control of the body through our brain, we just don’t recognize this and so the incredible power of our brain goes unchecked, undirected.
You may notice that I have been using the term body / brain connection, instead of body / mind connection. What the power of suggestion does is to help you implant suggestions into the physical brain itself, it is then up to the mind, that controlling force behind the mechanical brain, to direct the use of those suggestions. If you were to put in brand new shinny positive suggestions over the top of old, inappropriate, negative, ideas, which do think would last. The negative ideas have been pilling up for years, building in strength and in numbers. The new suggestions, although they may be planted deeply and firmly will have a rough time of growing in strength and numbers if they are overwhelmed, much like a healthy plant being strangled by a garden of weeds, this is what happens when the old ideas that have never properly been gotten rid of subtly strangle the new ideas.
Through out the years I have worked with a wide range of complaints, from phobias and anxieties, such as the fear of flying, and addictions, such as nicotine, alcohol, and Crystal Methamphetamine, to issues of low self worth and esteem, procrastination, weight control, etc. In each case the successful client has been the one who does the necessary work of clearing out the old foundational beliefs, while putting in the new beliefs, and ideas that they want to incorporate into their lives.
A good example would be that of the smoker who claims that they want to quit smoking. I have had people who come in and expect to be put into the hypnotic state of consciousness, be given a few positive suggestions about not smoking anymore and then leaving, never having the desire to smoke again.
I can tell you from experience that it does not work this way. In most cases where a person is told they can be made to quit smoking in one session, the person is usually desiring a smoke by the time their leave the office, or within a few hours. In those rare cases where someone does quit with just one session, they have already resolved that they are no longer going to smoke, the benefits of not smoking have become so important to them that they have already released the idea of whatever benefits they received from the smoking in the first place. When I have someone come to me for not smoking I can usually tell by the second or third session whether this is going to be the time that they quit. If the client is willing to release the old belief patterns of the benefits they get from their addiction, if the client is willing to incorporate new activities into their daily life to replace the old addictive activity, (such things as a few weeks of daily deep breathing exercises, or a few weeks of listening to a reinforcement hypnosis CD), then I am certain that the prep work is being taken seriously, and so the new suggestions will have fertile soil to be planted in.
So is hypnosis some mysterious magic bullet, like the mental health counselor at the beginning of this article had hoped or is a way of effectively cleaning up old images and thoughts that create various states of emotions in the body?
The next time someone tells you that they can put you to sleep and then cure you of what ever ails you, I hope you will remember, that there is no magic solution to life’s problems, and there is no magic bullet.

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Emotional Release Therapy

An Alternative Approach and Tool

In

Recovery from Chemical Addiction

By
DLScott CtHA / CDP
www.dlscottpersonalenergymastery.com
dlscott2@comcast.net

When someone talks to you about being an addict, just what is it that they are talking about? Are they talking about being addicted to some chemical substance, such as alcohol or cigarettes or maybe a harder drug like heroin? Are they trying to label you with some diagnosis from the DSMR III, so you can be classified and treated according to the standards of today’s industry? Or are they talking about something deeper, are they talking about the fact that you are actually addicted to the emotions or feelings produced by the intake of the drug?
A little discussed secret among Chemical Dependency Professionals is that studies have shown that most people, who enter into recovery from substance abuse, do so on their own without the assistance of a traditional treatment program. Now that flies in the face of traditional wisdom, and the prevailing culture of Chemical Dependency Treatment, but it is none the less true. In an article by Karen Schweitzer, (Love to Know Recovery, Drug Addiction Treatment) it is sited that there is no treatment program in existence that is right for everyone. A treatment program should address an individual’s needs and feelings as well as the drug addiction.
In working with clients in the chemical dependency field, there are a few givens that I have discovered that can enhance a person’s ability to stop the use of their drug of choice.
First off I would like to suspend the argument about whether Drug Addiction is a disease or not. We can write hundreds and hundreds of pages upon this argument, and still not agree on the answer. Whether Chemical Dependency is an actual disease or not, is not the issue. The Issue is that Chemical Dependency affects people in such a way that it mimics, or produces some of the symptoms of a disease.
The disease concept of Chemical Dependency is the basis of most standard methods of treatment, and are also embraced by such programs as the 12 step model. According to statistics generated by 12 step programs the success rate of this model ranges anywhere from 5% to 50%. What is not mentioned is that the statistics are based on a lifelong commitment to a 12 step program. This is one of the major complaints of people who do not wish to be tied to a program for the rest of their lives. Many clients complain that they are expected to exchange one habit, “drug use” for another habit, “lifelong 12 step attendance”.
So for the sake of this article, let us agree that it is actually the feelings created by the use of drugs that we become addicted to, the medium of the drug is just the way to experience these feelings. Let’s face it, if you didn’t get a benefit out of our chemical use, you would not continue to use the chemical. Some of the benefits for most people include:
1) Using drugs creates an avoidance of uncomfortable feelings, (even the avoidance of feelings is still a type of feeling in the body, it is called numbness).
2) Using drugs creates a happy feeling.
3) Using drugs causes us to feel more relaxed,
4) Using drugs causes us to feel more social in some situations.
When someone decides to stop using their drug of choice it is usually because the
consequences begin to outweigh the benefits, i.e. legal issues, job issues, relationship issues, health issues, to name a few.
The prevailing belief is that the primary concern is to stop the use of the drug, and the consequences will stop. While this may be partially true, it is also a well known fact that just removing the use of the drug will lead to a condition called white knuckling it. What this means is that once you remove the use of the drug, but don’t change any of the conditions that lead to the drug use in the first place, you will continue to have to deal with the those conditions and issues. In most cases this simply causes another addiction or behavior to replace the one that was stopped. This has become a complaint of many recovering addicts who are not involved in a 12 step program, for while 12 step programs provide tools to help change a person’s attitude and emotions, it requires the person to admit to being powerless over their own behavior, while accepting a belief in god, and requires that a person exchange the behavior of drug use for the behavior of attending 12 step programs for the rest of their lives.
What is needed is a method that can provide a person with the ability to regain power over their behavior, while supplying the same initial benefits of drug use in a quicker and more efficient way, without having to commitment to lifelong 12 step attendance. How can you accomplish this goal?
What I have developed and refined over the last 20 years, from an original tool taught to me at the Northwest School for Clinical Hypnotherapy, is a technique called Emotional Release Therapy.
It works like this; everything that exists is made of energy. You are made of tiny bits of energy, (some people claim it is atoms and molecules, Quantum Mechanics now claim the tiny bits of energy are actually called strings, billions of times smaller than atoms), the clothes you are wearing are made of energy, the air you breath, the chair you are sitting on, even the thoughts you think are made up of electro – chemical bits of energy. In fact we produce energy in our body, and the strongest energy we produce is our feelings. Now think about that, when you walk into a room, how many times can you recall being able to tell if someone where happy, mad, sad, glad, etc., and the person doesn’t have to say a word. You can argue that it is facial expression, body posture, etc., and while these factors play into the event, the fact is that some indefinable quality is alerting you to a person’s emotional state of being. This indefinable quality is the energy that the person is putting out.
To understand this, it is important that you understand that energy vibrates. That means that everything has its’ own vibrational pattern. Your heart vibrates in beats per minute, your brain vibrates in beats per second, the earth vibrates, the air vibrates, electrical currents vibrate, EVERYTHING vibrates.
There is a basic law of physics that cannot be changed, and cannot be broken. That basic law is that vibrations attract vibrations. To demonstrate this I want you to think about the simple tuning fork. If you have a room full of tuning forks and you strike one of the tuning forks, what happens with the rest? The tuning forks that are set to the same frequency will start to vibrate in response to the vibration of the first fork, and slowly other tuning forks will start to shift their own frequency in response to the prevailing frequency.
It is the same effect when you put out a very strong emotional vibration. Think about a time when you were in a room full of people, something happened and all of the people in that room were stressed out or experiencing some form of emotional chaos. Someone then walks into the room and is able to reduce the stress, with their own steady and powerful calming emotions.
We are at the mercy of these oceans of vibrational patterns throughout our entire lives. In fact we are looking at the world through layers of emotional vibrational patterns.
When you are first born, you have no strong emotional attachments, I know that some people well argue that you picked up emotional attachments in the womb, or from our ancestors, DNA, (see the book DNA of Healing by Margaret Ruby 2006 Hampton Road Publishing Company), or even from past lives, but at the moment of birth our brain is a clean slate, and such emotional patterns have not been activated. As you reached out to the world, it is usually because you were wet, hungry, or needed to be held, etc.. You begin creating Neuro Firing Patterns in the brain that produced images that create feelings. These feelings became your guide map of the environment. If, when you were young, you had caregivers who were loving, kind, having a good day, etc. and they responded to you with love and kindness, you began viewing your environment through layers of belief and feelings that told you that things were safe. (Think of each new experience as a layer of colored glass placed over your eyes. Each time you view the world, you see things in a tinted fashion. Right now as you read this article the way in which you are processing it, is based on the color and depth of your layers of colored glass). This same process works in the negative fashion. In other words, if you were treated in a hurtful, angry, less than positive way, you would have emotional patterns, “colored glass” that would tint each new experience with that type of belief system.
We as human beings are programmed for survival. We strive for things that will make us feel better, that will make us feel safer. In most cases the initial use of the drug was to try and loosen these negative emotional vibrational patterns. The first few times that you used your drug of choice you probably did get a feeling of relief and probably did feel much better, but eventually the consequences of the drug use started outweighing the benefits, and in most cases the consequences began creating even new images, new beliefs, and emotional patterns that compounded the old issues. Most people who become chemically addicted began using drugs in this inappropriate self medicating way.
While it is important to stop the use of your drug of choice, it is also important to deal with the initial issue, which, as I have stated, in most cases is the idea that the drug user is looking for a way of feeling better, a way of dealing with the emotional vibrational pattern that is hindering their lives. The emotional vibrational patterns are created by thoughts, or images, in our brains. Feelings are created by thoughts or images in your brain, it has been shown that every thought that you have, has traveled through your body and activated a physiological response. (See research by Dr. Candice Pert, “Molecules of Emotions” by Jon Franklin, 1987 Bantam Doubleday Publishing Group).
What if there was a way to release from the emotional vibrational pattern without using substances, such as alcohol, or other drugs? What if you could detach from the physiology of emotion without having to dredge up every memory, and every event that you have ever encountered in your life?
Emotional Release Therapy provides that ability.
By being inducted into an altered state of consciousness, through hypnosis, a client is then lead into a deeper trance, that swiftly alters, and lowers brainwave patterns activating the healing effects of the deeper alpha state of brain wave patterns.
It has been shown, through a device called and electroencephalogram, the human brain has four patterns of vibrations.
The first pattern is known as the Beta state. In this state, our brain is vibrating at about 15 to 21 cps, (cycles per second). This is considered our waking state of consciousness. In this state we are dominated by our five senses, hearing, vision, taste, touch, and smell. This is the state of consciousness that you are in during most of your waking hours.
The second pattern is known as the Alpha state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 8 to 14 cps. It is the same state of being that you experience when you are daydreaming, or when you are driving down the road, and can’t recall the last few miles that you have driven. This type of episode is commonly referred to as Highway Hypnosis. Interestingly enough our brains shift into this pattern on the average of ten or more times per day, for about 10 to 15 seconds. It is during these 10 to 15 seconds that the body is going through brief healing periods, trying to correct stress, and other abnormalities in the system.
The third pattern is known as the Theta state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 4 to 7 cps. It is the pattern you exhibit while you are in deep sleep.
The forth pattern is known as the Delta state. In this state our brain is vibrating at about 1 to 3 cps. This is the pattern a person exhibits while they are in a coma. Not much is known about this state, since generally, if a person comes out of a coma, they don’t recall anything about the experience.
You will notice that each of these states became narrower, and narrower in their frequency band.
The important thing to remember here is that the healing takes place in the alpha state, and while you can be considered in an Alpha state at 14 cps, to experience Emotional Release Therapy, you have to reach a cps of 7 to 8 cps.
Once again, the client is lead into a light state of an Alpha vibrational pattern. This state of altered consciousness is obtained through a focus on the client’s breath, combined with specific guided imagery. Once this state has been reached a specific set of sound waves and tones is used to create conscious panic. After being inducted into the lighter state of Alpha vibrational pattern, the subconscious portion of the brain is more dominate. Then using tones, and sound waves the conscious portion of the brain immediately tries to become more dominate and the brain wave start to return to the Beta level. Due to the fact that the sound waves and tones are undecipherable by the conscious portion of the brain, the conscious brain drops back down into the Alpha state, but instead of the lighter state, it now drops down to the lower pattern of about 7 to 8 cps. (Many clients report that they fell as though they are experiencing a falling sensation.) Once this state is reached the brain begins immediately seeking out stressors and threats to the system, by wiping out the emotional connection to the original memory or images.
The benefit to this system is that the memory is not changed in any way, thus eliminating any problems with created or changed memories, but the emotional impact of the memory is eliminated. This allows the client to have the ability to then look at and deal with the initial image, and recognize that it is simply a thought, an image that has no real power or hold over them.
When a client can use his or her own brain to deal with these uncomfortable feelings, the need to use drugs as a coping mechanism is eliminated, and a swifter recovery path can be obtained.
Emotional Release Therapy is not intended as the only tool during a client’s recovery journey. It can, and does provide an incredibly powerful method that can accelerate, and make the journey safer and easier to take.

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