Can you trick yourself into changing? Others do.
Milton Erickson, a dyslexic psychiatrist used his indirect hypnosis technique to trick his patients to change. He understood the power of our unconscious minds. If we believe it, then we make it true. Erickson could bypass the conscious filters to get the unconscious mind to initiate the needed change. He appreciated that if a patient allowed his or her deeper unconscious to accept a possibility and that possibility was supported as a plausible reality, then the patient would often change.
A new film I saw few days ago, The Living Matrix – The Science of Healing, discusses recent research on how fields-what quantum physics uses to explain their phenomenon-now explain biology. The film goes on to use the phenomenon of the placebo effect as one demonstration of how what we believe creates our reality. One example mentioned in the film was a knee-surgery study where half of the subjects never received the knee surgery, yet they had the same success rate as the ones who had the surgery. This makes you wonder about all surgeries.
There is also an interview with Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., the author of The Biology of Belief, a book I read a year ago. Lipton cites research on how one-third of all effects in medicine is placebo. If medicine can have a 33% success rate when they aren’t even trying, what can you create if you apply yourself?
So how do you do it?
1. Become clear on what you want.
2. Feel where or how you don’t believe you can achieve the change. This is a step many will not include but it can be key to you achieving your goal. If a negative feeling or believe is not admitted, it will likely sabotage your success.
3. Once you discover the limitation(s), the negative feelings or beliefs-begin to accept them. I’m not talking about accepting them as true; I’m speaking about accepting the feeling behind them. This film has a physician speaking about how the key to her healing was traveling into her brain tumor to discover what it was doing for her. Then once she knew in a felt sense, she began to accept the feelings and knowledge. Six months later the tumor was gone, never to return.
4. Now start tricking yourself into making it real. You behave as if your change is real, much like believing a sugar pill is the real pill.
5. Create support in your world for this new reality. This means extricate yourself from situations that perpetuate the converse. Find or create places in your body/mind and your relationships where your change is encouraged.
6. Accept, and then let go of those feelings and thoughts that come up to tell you that you will not change. In the space those thoughts once occupied, place your new belief and image of change.
7. Be open on this journey that what you want may change. Support what feels right.
The movie is oriented around healing, which is certainly change. If I can heal a serious heart condition and then my Asperger’s Syndrome and dyslexia through the use of alternative methods, some of which are discussed in the film, you can create the change you want in your life. Thirty years ago, James L. Oschman, Ph,D., an old friend of mine interviewed in the film, spoke about how our bodies and minds are capable of great change. Today, traditional medicine and science are beginning to see how change can occur because of people such as the ones interviewed in the film.
Start with a small goal to build your skill of tricking your conscious mind and supporting your unconscious mind. Let us know how you do. Have you had any experience with placebo effects?
