CASE HISTORIES

WEIGHT

Quite often those people who love us the most and want the best for us will go through a Quake because we are changing for the better. Let me give you an example. One of my women students who was working on insomnia and weight goals came in for her 4th session. I asked her what she wanted to work on that session. She had already lost 16 pounds by her 4th week, which was ahead of schedule. Usually we don’t use a specific diet since diets are quite often an example of the law of reversed effect, and bring out the rebel. We change our eating patterns, which usually means a loss of about 2 to 2½ pounds a week.

She said she wanted to continue working on her insomnia but wasn’t going to emphasize her weight goal. I said "Well, I notice you are way ahead of schedule with your weight loss, but according to your chart you wanted to lose another 10 to 12 pounds. What’s made you change your mind?" She blushed and said "Well, I had a talk with my husband the other night and he said I’d already lost plenty of weight and he liked me a little heavier. It gave him more to hug."

Well, I understand that some men do like their women more ample. Luckily, not all men like the Twiggy type. But I remembered very well what she told me the first time she came in. Her husband called her "fats" and "slobs" to try to encourage her to lose weight. Of course, the way the rebel works is she’d go eat another piece of pie after this kind of statement.

I recognized that he might not even consciously understand why he was saying it, but he was going through an outside quake. Wifey–poo, who he had nicely tucked away at home, a few pounds overweight, was not only losing those extra pounds but was becoming so much more independent. All the things he used to nag her about were disappearing and now all the other men would be looking at her. Maybe she had been staying with him just because she needed him. Now what?

Maybe you made it through your own Comfort Zone Quake just fine. So...

DON'T LET SOMEONE ELSE STOP YOU FROM YOUR PROGRESS.

For example: Let’s say you picked out a shirt you liked but you weren’t sure it went with your pants. When you came in I said "Nice shirt but it sure doesn’t go with your pants." Well, there you go taking my word. If you doubted yourself in the first place then you’re apt to be too sensitive to outside criticism.

Let’s face it, those people who are closest to us know just what buttons to push. Just as with a Personal Quake, you need to recognize it for what it is and not let the quake impede your progress. You may say "Why is he saying that? Oh, he’s going through a Comfort Zone Quake."

So, you not only want to work on your current goal, but use your hypnosis towards your self–image as well!

INSOMNIA

Sali was an African–American woman 36 years old. She was a single mother who was in the military working toward advancement to a supervisory position. She was in most ways an independent and capable woman. She came in with a specific goal in mind. Her goal was elimination of her insomnia. She noted she felt she was too shy and was dealing inwardly with a lot of fear.

She described herself as a loner and preferred to remain invisible in groups, which was working against her in her military career. She also mentioned that she had one phobia—a fear of funerals.

First, we began with her parents. Remember, as strange as this seems, we are not as interested in the truth of the situations as we are in what you recall experiencing at the time. That is what is apt to be programmed into your subconscious mind. Also, when we discuss our parents we’re not looking to assign blame. I work under the assumption that most people do the best job that they know how to do with what information they have available to them. When we’re discussing parents and grandparents we are specifically looking for identification or reversed rebellion. In other words, we may mimic a parent physically or emotionally or we may rebel and become the exact opposite! Both, of course, can be a setup if neither is where we want to be now!

I had another student who was a concert pianist. She had stage fright so severely that she would suffer insomnia the night before any performance. When we did our history–taking we discovered that in third grade she had a piano recital in front of the school assembly. She had been sick the week before and hadn’t really had sufficient time to practice. The day before she was to perform she told her teacher of her problem and requested to be excused from the show. Her not so understanding teacher forced her to go on anyway! Well, it turned out to be a disaster! Besides being very nervous she also stumbled through the piece. The kids were snickering and the next day her teacher used her as an example in front of the class about how you are bound to fail if you don’t keep your homework up! Well, years later her subconscious was still petrified before a concert yet she had become a truly gifted and talented pianist. We worked with her issues by desensitizing her trauma from childhood. I also explained to her while under hypnosis that from now on the situation would always be different. She was no longer a beginning third grader. She was very proficient at her skill. And, secondly, that she did know all the pieces that she played. That she knew them so well she could play them with her eyes closed! I also gave her a kinesthetic anchor that when she would feel the ivory of the keys under her fingers it would trigger off all the positive suggestions and associations we had used in her hypnosis and she would hear herself and feel herself playing well, automatically! So she may have felt some backstage jitters but once she began to perform she used that adrenaline to give her the "edge" that makes a quality performance.

Remember, truly successful entertainers or public speakers will usually admit they get those knots in their stomachs just before they have to perform. It’s okay to go through a nervous moment or two but what counts is that when it comes time to get the job done you can do it and do it well!

PHOBIAS

I worked with a man who had a phobia of dogs. He was in his late 20s, healthy, athletic, and over six feet tall. He said to his embarrassment he wasn’t just afraid of Doberman pinschers or Great Danes, but he was just as fearful of his neighbor’s toy poodle as well.

He didn’t understand consciously why he was afraid of dogs. He said, "You don’t know what this does to my macho image–to break into a cold sweat whenever I get around a dog!"

We used a process we called hypnotic regression and went back to his 3rd birthday. He was able to describe the color of his tennis shoes, that he got a red tricycle, and that his favorite aunt was there, as if it had been last month instead of over 30 years ago. I might add he was pretty amazed at his ability to recall in such detail. He was much more likely to recall things that impressed him, either positively or negatively, than what he had for breakfast. We went back four months earlier and found he had been bitten by a dog. He hadn’t consciously remembered it. He went home and verified it with his mom. She explained that at about 2½ years old, the neighbor’s collie had bitten him above the eye, severely enough that he had to have stitches. He was so young that consciously he hadn’t recalled it.

One of the duties of the subconscious is to protect us. If you were the subconscious of a two–year–old, and you wanted to protect him, you might also use fear–if he just stays away from dogs he’s apt to be safe! We used a process of desensitization as well as giving his subconscious alternative ways to protect himself. He could kick the dog or run from it. He also could recognize that he would not put his face down by a strange dog in the first place. As soon as his subconscious knew he had superior alternatives as ways to protect himself, he didn’t have to hold on to the phobic effect. I might add that the following Christmas we received a Christmas card with a picture of him and his new pet puppy.

Many a phobia has been simply caused by a scary story told to us by someone else. How often has a person heard dental terror stories from someone that they trusted?

Now, you might say just hearing a story from someone certainly couldn’t cause a fear as severe as a phobia but I have many examples of just such a thing causing problems. An example of this had to do with an adult woman of 35 who had suffered from insomnia since she was a child. She had the habit of looking under her bed and in the closet every night before she went to sleep. She also admitted to me she slept with the closet light on every night. The cause was traced back to a bedtime story told to her by her father when she was very young. Guess which one it was? It was Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf story.

Remember when the wolf got to grandma’s house? Grandma was in bed. He ran straight to the bed, and without even saying good morning he ate up the poor old grandmother in one gulp. He then dressed up like grandma and waited for Little Red Riding Hood in bed. One of the most remembered lines goes, "Grandma, why do you have such big sharp teeth?" "Those are to eat you up with my dear," at which point the wolf sprang out of bed and swallowed up poor Little Red Riding Hood!

This is a pretty terrifying story when we think about it. Enough that bed became a dangerous place to her subconscious. This, however, explained why she had to look in the closet and under the bed to make sure nothing (like a wolf) was hiding there.

I had one student who had a terrible fear of mice and rodents. As we explored her history we could find no direct negative experience which may have set her up for it except for one.

In regressive hypnosis she recalled an incident at the age of 5 when she was with her mother who was doing the housecleaning. All of a sudden her mom jumped on the coffee table screaming at the top of her lungs. My student very clearly remembered the expression of terror on her mother’s face as she pointed down at this cute little mouse. Now le’s put this incident into a 5-year old’s perspective. If her mother (who is like God to a young child. After all her very safety and ability to survive depends on Mom) is completely helpless and in terror over this little animal it surely is something pretty terrible and certainly to be avoided at all costs. She then learned this fear from Mom.

PUBLIC SPEAKING

Fear of public speaking is a form of test anxiety. For a fuller understanding of the following case history, it is recommended that you first read the section on NLP and the section on Test Anxiety.

One of my students years ago was an actress who had performed in many movies and television shows. She is a beautiful woman, clear speaking manner, direct and quite capable of speaking up for herself. When I first began working with her she shared with me that though she had done many movies she was about to embark on a series of live performances in Las Vegas, which also included singing, and she shared with me she was terrified! She said it was one thing to perform in front of cameras that allowed her to do it again if she "messed up" but on stage in front of a live audience you get one chance.

To add to her dilemma, her throat would tighten up and cause her voice to squeak when she tried to hit the high notes! Yet she began applying her self–hypnosis techniques and establishing a firm foundation of self–confidence. When the time came for her to do her performances she was still a bit nervous, but I received a telegram from Las Vegas the day after her debut stating things went great. She has since done many things live throughout the year with confidence and professionalism.

One of my students was a young, beautiful and talented woman who was embarking on a series of beauty contests. She was very capable at her talents which were hula and singing. While she was also a team leader in group activities. She admitted to me her biggest problem was answering questions, especially to strangers. Of course, in this category are judges of talent contests. As she put it, "Everything would go blank!" No words would come to her! When we did our initial consultation we discovered that her main "Lead–in System" (or Modality) was predominantly Visual, almost to the detriment of her other modalities. I asked her my usual questions:

1. "When was the last time you saw a red Volkswagen?" This is a Visual question. She went visual.

2. I then asked her, "When was the last time she heard the telephone ring more than 10 times in a row?" she then went Visual, not Auditory (hearing).

3. I asked her, "When was the last time she felt the wet sand coming up between your toes?" She went Visual and pictured the beach, not kinesthetics.

When I asked her to recall what she experienced the last time she had to answer questions and she didn’t do well she instantly went down to her "Kinesthetic/Auditory" and began feeling pressured and started a lot of negative self talk. Well, remember when a person is Visual they tend to look up, but when she answered questions for a stranger would go K/A and then go blank! Remember K/A with eyes looking down. The description we used of going blank really fit. Once she looked down instead of up (which was full of Visual cues) she did go blank–she was too busy telling herself she wasn’t good at questions, becoming more and more kinesthetically aware her heart was pounding and her hands were getting sweaty!

Although this sounds so simple I had her make sure she kept looking up! As well as quitting her negative self talk it made a great deal of difference!

We also found out that as a child she was very shy. Remember, shyness is "I–ness." It is really wondering if you have other people’s approval. It is very common, and I have read that a general estimate is that 40% of all Americans suffer from shyness. And, let’s face it, for some people shyness can be very painful.

I was working with a woman who had taken her Real Estate Brokers test and flunked by a few points.

She came in to learn self–hypnosis to overcome her test anxiety. When we did our subconscious questioning we came across some causes. She had attended a rather tough Catholic order in Hawaii. While in the sixth grade she had won a top position in the spelling bee competition. She represented the girl’s team against the boys. She lost by one word after a very respectable showing.

When she got back to class the head Nun made her stand in front of the class and then said, "Look at this loser. Take a good look because she’s going to be one of those streetwalkers standing on the corner when she grows up." Well, she was mortified. Publicly disgraced! It sure wasn’t safe to be wrong, i.e., a test anxiety.

The Nun also told them that if they made mistakes on their reading aloud they’d have to go out into the hall and crawl back into the room on their hands and knees. Well, as we began to desensitize her and heal this fear of failure, not only was she more confident with test taking but her fear of public speaking began to clear up as well. The original cause was generating two symptoms: Test anxiety and fear of public speaking.

MEMORY AND RECALL

We have worked with insurance companies and police departments, helping to hypnotize victims or witnesses who, due to the trauma of the incident forgot details that they had seen.

One case was with the San Clemente Police Department. A detective who I had worked with before called me in on a case . He felt that if I hypnotized this man he would come up with more detail. This man, we’ll call him Bob, was walking out of a public building. As he reached the outside stairs a man hurried by him. He said the only reason he paid any attention to him at all was that he looked so paranoid. The man kept looking over his shoulder. He hurried down to his car, which was parked at the curb, peeled rubber and took off.

Bob read in the newspaper the next day that those buildings had been robbed at about the same time he was there. He couldn’t help but think that the guy he saw fit the description. He went to the police and that’s when I was called in.

Since in general he was what we would call a visual type (able to picture in his head), I used a visual technique with him. I had him relax, picture the car, and then look at the license number as if he were looking through a magnifying glass.

I asked him to read to me the letters and the numbers he had seen. Well, he immediately came up out of the hypnosis and said, "I don’t know what they were. I only glanced at the car." At this point I told him to just relax and use his imagination and share when he got any numbers or letters. He went back into the hypnosis and gave me some numbers. Interestingly, two weeks later they did apprehend the suspect from these numbers, and nobody was more surprised about this than Bob, unless it was the culprit.

BODY LANGUAGE/ORGAN LANGUAGE

I have come to the conclusion, as have many others, that memory somehow also is located in the cellular level. Let me give you an example: I was working with one of my clients with massage and was focusing my attention on her shoulder area. As I began I could tell this seemed to be an area of chronic tension. I have found that it is not unusual to have emotions surface when a person gets massage or any type of bodywork.

As we proceeded, she started to feel some anger coming up. I helped her to get in touch with what was the cause of her feelings. She recalled a situation from her past. She had been married at 15 to an older man. He would grab her by her shoulder and shove her into the kitchen and tell her "Hurry up and make me some dinner!" This situation had caused her to psychologically armor herself. It’s not that surprising that every time he’d boss her around she’d start to tighten her shoulder and arm muscles as a protection. What’s interesting to me is that she did divorce this man, yet years later whenever a boss or any authority figure would tell her what to do she would subconsciously tighten her arm muscles. As we released the emotional issues concerning this original causal pattern her muscles began to relax. At that point doing the muscle work became very easy—if we had not released the emotional reasons and tension the body was chronically holding on to, within a few months she would be chronically tight once again. Her arm (so to speak) remembered her trauma and kept associating it to any pressure on her by another as a reason to tighten up! Thus, "The issue is in the tissue!"

SPORTS

I had a pro golfer who was recommended to my work by one of his students. He’d seen his student improve remarkably within a matter of months. He had only a week to prepare for a big international tournament. There was immediate improvement. However, the consistency under all conditions of competition and play wasn’t really established until he’d had some time to condition his actions and reactions (see lagtime).

Because of the freshness of the information, his physical reactions weren’t yet retrained as well as his mental attitudes. He was still at the point where, between each ball, he would consciously state current reality about the ball he just played. In his case, sometimes frustration would occur. He would acknowledge the frustration, promise to deal with it after the game, then take a deep breath, and as he exhaled, puts the frustration into the past. On his next inhale, he centered himself and was now only conscious of this new shot, not paying attention to what is behind or what he’s supposed to do in front of him. Through his self–hypnosis techniques he’s learned the ability to not be distracted by peripheral data, such as the crowds or his partners, but to have one thought: How he’s going to enjoy making this ball go where he wants it to go, automatically.

Young man in his early 30’s. His handicap is 2.

• Challenged with his putting.
• Plays better against strangers than friends.
• He often makes the difficult shots and misses the easy ones.
• He would do better at practice than in competition.
• He does better in competitions if coming from behind or equal (I call this the Underdog Syndrome).
• Would get a "yip" just as he was about to follow through and hit the ball.
• He said that besides flinching just before he would impact with the ball his hands would go numb.
• He experienced a lot of self–imposed pressures, which causes blocks to game.
• Tended to have similar golf score as his dad.
• Had similar problems of putting as his dad did. (Identification?)
• Tended to get too adrenalized when in competition in golf or basketball, which caused him to overthrow the ball–or cause too much energy to his golf swing.

History

He respected his dad a lot. He was always good at sports as a child and adolescent–football and baseball etc. His self–image from an early age was that he was "always known for sports."

Mom taught him golf when he was 11 years old. She had problems with her putting. He said both mom & dad pushed a little because as a shy kid he resisted doing things he didn’t know!

He began to overtake mom within the first year and beat her the first time when he was 12. He felt guilty. The next year he beat his dad–which was really upsetting to him. He looked up to dad and he knew it bugged his dad. This made him feel really guilty–which seemed to set up a pattern not to win against friends but against strangers. He also noticed he did less well against women. He felt it was unfair for a man to beat a woman. This started when he was a boy and the other boys would hit the girls hard when they were playing dodge ball!

It became a regular pattern as a child and young man to always get picked first. It made him feel a bit uncomfortable on this same point. When we did some subconscious questioning we found he had often felt rejected because the other kids couldn’t compete–so many times they wouldn’t ask him to play in their games (feelings of "fear of rejection" if he did well).

Procrastination is another form of Test Anxiety

I had a client who was dealing with procrastination writing her last two thesis–it had been two years since she had taken the class but never completed her thesis. She needed to complete two minor papers and she’d graduate.

Two pressures showed up here: First, after all this time these papers had better be perfect (this shows up often with writers block). If that first sentence is supposed to be profound you can certainly procrastinate as a protection. Second, she had promised herself that once she got her degree she’d go after her Doctorate. Subconsciously she wasn’t ready to start all that grind all over again as yet. Hence, it was much easier (procrastination) to put the pressure on that rather than starting school again.

Remember we tend to move towards pleasure and away from pain–so think how much you’ll enjoy your free time, watching TV, surfing, pleasure reading, etc., when you’re not feeling guilty because you haven’t put in your allotted time with study!

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