How To Sort Your Head Out

HOW TO SORT YOUR HEAD OUT: A MIND OWNER’S USER GUIDE!

by

JON HICKS DIP.HYP ADV. MIABP

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Contents

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Introduction Computer Mind Beliefs, Seeds and Apps How Beliefs Are Formed Window of Opportunity Two Very Interactive Beliefs Cause and Effect Fizzy Drink Flight or Fight Recap Chain Reaction Sub(Conscious) Marine Stress and Anxiety Personality Types The Sensitive People Pleaser The Determined Obsessive The Attention Seeker The Power of Suggestion The Nature of Repression The Nature of Pleasure Scales of Pleasure The Nature of Addiction Smoking Alcohol Heroin The Nature of Attachment Smorgasboard Association Neutral Contentment The Negative Safety Net It’s a Jungle Out There!

Ego-centrism Perspective Flash Photography Conclusion Postscript

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How to Sort Your Head Out: A Mind Owner’s User Guide 1. Introduction Greetings Earthling. My name is Jon Hicks, I have been a full-time hypnotherapist and hypno-analyst for over 20 years with many (now) happy clients. This book has been written from much of the information I’ve gathered from them over this time. I'm proud of what I do because it has given me the tools to help myself out of very dark times and to help others to do the same, so, I'd like to share with you some of the key ideas and processes that combine to make who we are mentally and emotionally in the hope that you can use them to overcome your own personal issues.

Firstly, we are all human beings! I believe that we are actually pretty uncomplicated and I'm going to try to show this to you with a series of chapters starting frooooommm …. NOW! If you follow some (or even most)! of these ideas over their duration I believe you will put together enough information to help yourself to help yourself.

Because there are so many different aspects of ourselves, our lives and our problems, there are a lot of different chapters in here. I suggest you read all of them and put the ones that will help you together at the end. To be honest from the outset, although I have avoided any unnecessarily long words and psychobabble, some of the content will challenge you a fair bit, because it has to, otherwise nothing will change. If your mindset doesn’t shift then your emotions probably won’t either. So, it’s easy reading but not all easy, although not difficult either if used properly. Please though, make sure you read it all the way through, even if you don’t like/agree /are bored by what I’ve written read it anyway, otherwise you’ve probably wasted your money. It’s also worth mentioning that in 20 years of being a hypnotherapist, I have realised that although fundamentally we are quite simple creatures there is not a “one size fits all” solution to our problems.

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We are all constructed differently as you will find out throughout the course of this book.

I suspect that as you go through it, some of it will stick with you like glue, some of it not so much. What resonates with you does so because it represents something important in your subconscious mind. Try to see each paragraph as a piece in a jigsaw. I recommend that you print of the first page (with the chapters listed) arm yourself with three different coloured pens maybe red, blue and yellow and tick each paragraph with a different colour in terms how relevant the chapter seems to you, maybe red= very important, blue= quite important and yellow= fairly important. When you go back over it at the end take the red chapters and see them as pieces in the first jigsaw, when you put them together you will get a picture of what is most important and therefore useful to you.

When you contemplate this picture and assimilate the information it is highly likely that the other colours and the pictures they create will become important too. Once you’ve done the red ticks, repeat the process with the other two colours.

Just as a very brief bit of background information, a lot of my clients have come to me over the years thinking I can ‘do’ something to them, almost like magic. (Can you “make” me thin, stop smoking etc) My first job is to explain to them, very clearly, that no I can’t. I can’t do magic. No hypnotherapist can. In fact, no-one can, no magician can. It doesn’t exist. Sorry to disappoint you. Any success that is achieved though the information and methods that I’m about to explain will be achieved by YOUR hard work. By blood, sweat and tears…. OK.. without the blood. Sweat yes and tears probably (hopefully) but no blood.

The following chapters are basically descriptions of all (I believe) of the key components of your mind and where they came from, how they work and how to use them to your advantage.

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2. Your mind is like a computer!

This really is a very accurate analogy. Starting with the conscious mind, this is the computer or phone screen (as they are so common nowadays), the bit you are aware of, the bit you can see, where you do all of your thinking, make your decisions, analyse stuff, daydream etc. Your conscious mind is the logical, rational part.

Imagine a set of thoughts i.e your favourite hobby, person, etc or your knowledge of a particular subject, or something negative like a fear or phobia… as being like the app icons on your desktop. Every time you think of them, you're pushing the icons and opening up a whole set of thoughts, feelings, behaviour etc. Pretty straight forward really, this is your logical rational mind.

You will be really helping this process if you imagine that all of our beliefs, fears, phobias, preferences, habits etc are very much like the icons on your computer screen. It’s only when you click on them that you launch the programme. If you didn’t click on them they wouldn’t do anything. I have dozens of apps on my phone some of which I use all the time, some are used frequently, others rarely and some never.

Beliefs are like this. We may think of things often, occasionally or never until we are reminded of them then they launch for the first time in ages, sometimes many years. It is important to remember that everything that appears on your computer screen has been programmed into your subconscious mind at some point. Your subconscious mind on the other hand has absolutely NO sense of logic, it just does stuff. Your subconscious is like your hard drive, the automatic, emotional part of your mind. It is also the healing part of your mind too. It is fundamentally working 24/7 to keep you in the best shape it possibly can, emotionally, physically and ultimately mentally.

It’s doing all the work that your conscious mind can’t do, regulating your temperature, blood pressure, looking for and reacting to danger, keeping your heart beating, keeping you breathing, looking 3

for foreign bodies to seek out and destroy, the list is very extensive it’s apparently undertaking 10 million actions every second. If this was all down to your conscious mind your head would probably explode! Most of this stuff arrived when you did, in other words, we were born with this inbuilt system. But beliefs are different, we accumulate them as we grow. So when we are born, we are consciously pretty much a blank canvass upon which the intricate thread of life is doodled with the passing of life experiences.

When it comes to beliefs/habits your subconscious mind basically does what it’s told to do, through experience, training if you like.. and then practice. Essentially everything we practice we become good at, whether they're positive ideas or negatives ones.

Have you ever wondered why it is that some of your problems seem logically to be deal-able with but you still can’t change them? It’s like your logic says one thing and your emotions say another! The reason I have written this book is to try to explain to you some of the core processes that create and maintain our problems and what we can do about them. I have used extremely straight forward language, avoided psychobabble completely and minimised and simplified the descriptions of the processes described.

Strangely, there is no real specific order to the contents here, as you read the book the bits with the most relevance to you will stick with you and you’ll find yourself thinking about them. Over a few weeks as you process the info, you’ll start to form a different set of ideas towards your problems and will have something solid to start to work with.

When this happens you’ll feel more empowered to do something about them (after all, knowledge is power - right)?

As I mentioned already, your mind is like a computer. Very much so.

It has two main components to it, the conscious and the subconscious. These equate to the computer screen (conscious) and the hard drive (subconscious).

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Your subconscious mind (the hard drive) is really an automatic storage facility, it has no sense of logic, it basically does what it is told and processes information automatically. It is your instinctive emotional part. As a number, a “petabyte” means 1024 terabytes or a million gigabytes, the average adult human brain has the ability to store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital memory. The subconscious mind can process 20 000 000 bits of info per second. The conscious mind can only process 40 bits of info/sec.

So, the subconscious mind can process 500 000 times more what the conscious mind is able to.

It is also your healing mind, the bit that wants to make you better. If you cut yourself you heal up, automatically, without trying. The same applies if you have a virus, the hard drive/ subconscious will seek it out and try to destroy it without any conscious involvement from yourself.

It wants to make you the best person it can be (actually you want to make you the best person you can be, the subconscious is part of you just not logically) VERY IMPORTANTLY: the subconscious is trying to heal us emotionally as well as physically.

Think about this: everything that appears in our conscious mind has at some point been “programmed” into our subconscious. We weren't born with it. Especially if it’s a problem.

To clarify, I believe that when we arrive on this planet we are pretty much a blank canvas, apart from, it’s reckoned, two preprogrammed fears or anxieties.

1) The fear of falling (if you were to make a dropping type action when holding a baby it will cry- not suggesting or recommending it though- or (2) If you make a loud noise like bursting a crisp packet, it will also cry, but apparently, that’s it! This raises an interesting proposition. If we are only born with two preordained fears / phobias, the rest must have been created somewhere! They must be, they can’t have come from nowhere. They may feel like they have but they haven’t.

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3. Beliefs, Seeds and Apps!

So, beliefs: where do they come from? Why do we have negative thoughts and feelings that make no sense at all? It may seem illogical, but in fact it is perfectly logical and rational and I’m going to try to explain to you how this happens. When you understand this, it will make a lot more sense and you will feel more empowered to change the problem.

Where do beliefs begin? There is a well-known analogy of ideas starting as seeds so I’m going to start with this. Everything we believe in, we, at some point in our lives have been introduced to. We were given the idea through an experience of some description. We were sown the seed. Let’s take an example. I support Arsenal Football club. There, I’ve said it! Please try to not judge me too much. There was a point in my life when I knew nothing of football, let alone Arsenal, until the point I was introduced to it (I have no idea when) I do remember being a kid at school and other kids asking me what team I supported to which I had no answer.

Probably feeling a bit alienated, I imagine that I felt it would be a good idea to seek out a team to show that I was a normal human being so I found Arsenal, probably as both my elder brothers supported them.

So, I pledged my allegiance to the Gunners and over time sought out evidence to support this idea, by taking an interest in them, talking about them and eventually going to watch them play. After a while I had scarves, cigarette cards with players on them and posters on my wall. Along the way, if anyone asked me who I supported I would say Arsenal… automatically.. I didn’t have to think about it anymore.. this was now my belief. So.. the seed was planted in my conscious mind where I watered it with thoughts, actions and emotion. It sent its roots out into my subconscious where they took hold. There it stayed and still stays, unperturbed until something reminds me of them, then I start to think of them, I’ve pushed my Arsenal App. 6

Imagine a seed landing on the ground. It takes root and the seed disappears into the earth where it sprouts and then grows, reappearing at some point as a shoot which then sprouts leaves. This is how ideas are formed. The seed is a suggestion which, if it is to turn into an idea, will land in the conscious mind, put roots into the subconscious, grow and re-emerges as a belief.. or as we could say, a be-leaf (see what I did there)!

This book, if boiled down to its essence, is really about belief systems (as you may have guessed already). You could call belief systems habits, after all, everything you practice you become good at right?

So if we practice an idea .. or belief, it becomes a habit. To the point that it’s automatic. We’ll come back to this later too. Also, there are quite a few different elements to this book, but not everyone is the same and there is no one-size-fits all solution to our problems.

4. How Beliefs are Formed - to put it another way!

Cairn do or no Cairn do. How we build ideas.

So here’s another analogy which should be useful to you. When I was in my twenties I spent a lot of time in Scotland, sometimes on hills and mountains and often I would happen across cairns which as you may or may not know are piles of rocks and stones that are created by other walkers. Each one was created by a random person who began the process by putting down one rock, then following it with more.

As part of the analogy, that first rock can be seen as the initial suggestion (or seed / introduction) that begins the belief. When we start a belief we then seek out evidence that confirms the belief and we therefore add more rocks to the cairn. Some rocks are big, some are small but they all fit with the structure of the cairn to build it, in the same way that experiences, no matter how big or small will fit with the structure of our beliefs.

We won’t build a belief with evidence that contradicts the belief 7

because it would therefore create a different belief system (or app).

So, on the top of our mountain (and in our heads) we add more and more building material that corresponds to our already existing idea.

After a while, the cairn becomes very heavy with the weight of rocks (evidence) and something very important happens.

I want you to imagine that the cairn starts sinking into the ground under the weight of the rocks. This is a very significant process. In our mind, this is the point when our conscious mind and the idea we are building becomes so laden with proof/evidence that it goes from conscious to subconscious, at which point we have trained ourselves into the belief, we have created a habit. At the moment that the cairn disappears from our view is also the exact moment that the ‘APP’ will appear on our computer screen!

Nearly everything works in this way, every belief / idea that you have started with the suggestion, the planting of the first rock before being swallowed up by the subconscious. Essentially, we become so good at something, we don't have to think about it anymore!

So, imagine you’re now looking at the desktop of your computer, on it are probably lots of icons of “apps” that when you click on them launch a programme. All of these icons and their subsequent content have been programmed into the hard drive.

Imagine now that these icons are belief systems in your head. They can lie dormant for ages until you click on them and the programme is launched, but in this case the ‘app’ opens lots of feelings, emotions, thoughts and actions.

They only open when we click on them, or in this case think of them or are reminded of them.

Now these apps, these belief systems, these habits all work in the same way, we fundamentally learn them and practise them until they become part of our internal fixtures and fittings.

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Essentially there are only two types of beliefs that are important within the context of this book, that is good ones and bad ones.

Positives or negatives. As there are primarily two types of belief, positive and negative we could extend the analogy to growing flowers (positive obviously) or weeds (negative). So, get your gloves on, it’s time to take up gardening. We can learn how to delete old (negative) apps and create new (positive) apps, or beliefs.

So: where do they come from? Why do we have negative thoughts and feelings that make no sense at all?

It may seem illogical, but in fact it is perfectly logical and rational and I’m going to try to explain to you how this happens.

OK, so let’s go back to the beginning, I think most people would agree that our childhood is our formative years, where we learn what the world is like.

Between the ages of 0 to probably around 12 or 13 we don't have a true sense of logic about the world and our place in it, because its new to us, we haven't experienced it before.

So, because we can’t rationalise what’s around us, we have a set of emotions to help us navigate through our early experiences. We may not understand what’s happening to us in our young lives, but we do know how it feels. It may feel good, or bad, we may feel happy, sad, angry, frightened, jealous, guilty, ashamed etc etc.

These emotions act as a guidance system for when we are in the same or similar circumstances again, so we can respond appropriately, embrace it if it feels good, avoid it if it feels bad and so on. During our early years we are creating an emotional map of the world around us.

Our conscious mind has sent our subconscious mind information, our subconscious mind has responded to it with our instinctive feelings… we then have a learning experience which is being 9

‘programmed’ into our psyche.

Let’s take an example: A young child wins first prize in the school egg and spoon race…everyone cheers.. the child feels good about winning! So now, in the conscious mind, an app is being created.

00 An app about egg and spoon races, about winning, about appreciation. If the app continues to be developed (more about this later) it will become present on the desktop, along with many other apps. It could go for years without being opened, perhaps 20 years later that child (now adult) could be reminded of the experience and it opens the app.

When it’s opened all the associated elements of the experience are relived, and the memories i.e. visual images are recalled and along with them the attached feelings.. “oh yes, I remember that, wow I felt good that day” etc . Our heads (subconsciously) are full of such ideas/beliefs/experiences/habits…. call them what you will.

It is very useful for you to see these experiences as bubbles floating around at the back of your mind, there are thousands of them!

With most of them, you have no idea what created the bubble, what’s in it or anything else. In fact, you have no knowledge of many of them at all!! Inside the bubble is the memory of the experience, but most importantly the bubble contains the EMOTION attached to the experience. As you will find out later, it’s only the emotion that matters, the experience itself is (almost) irrelevant. When the apps were programmed, the hard drive didn’t make any decisions about accepting them, it followed the instructions of the download.

Imagine now that these icons are belief systems in your head. They can lie dormant for ages until you click on them and the programme is launched, but in this case the “app” opens lots of feelings, emotions, thoughts and actions. They only open when we click on them, or in this case think of them or are reminded of them. As we go 10

through this process we can learn how to delete old apps and create new apps, or beliefs.

5. Window of opportunity Here a very important point: I believe that when we are relaxed, there is more connectivity between the conscious and the subconscious mind, I imagine it being like an aperture in a camera or the iris in your eye, the more relaxed you are, the wider it becomes, it creates a window of opportunity within in which, two things can take place: 1.

2.

Things can go in Things can come out

We will go into both in more detail later but essentially: 1) is the power of suggestion. When you are nicely chilled, suggestions are more likely to take root in the subconscious mind.

A very good example of this is advertisers spending lots of money advertising on TV in the evening because they know that you will be sitting in front of the Telly forgetting about the more problematic and difficult elements of life.

As you are relaxing you are more likely to take in the ideas they are offering, a new washing powder for example, you have enough space in your head to contemplate the fact that a new washing powder will make you the envy of the neighbourhood and your children and other half will adore you even more.

On the other hand, imagine that somebody tries to sell you a new washing powder at 9.30 in the morning when you’ve got loads to do, children to organise and a head full of plans for the day etc, they’ve got next to no chance, your conscious mind is so full of “stuff” that there’s no way you’re going to contemplate the concept, it just won’t take root.

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However: If suggestions are the vehicle that drive into your subconscious, then emotions are the fuel, it’s the intensity of feeling that causes a suggestion to take root, any feeling or emotion will do the trick: happiness, fear, anger, pleasure, pride, all of them.

Suggestions without emotions aren’t really suggestions, they’re really just statements.

The more emotional intensity you give to your ideas the more likely it is they’ll become embedded in the subconscious.

When you're nice and relaxed say some positive things to yourself that conform with Coue’s Law of Reversed Effort - which we’ll come to later. So here, we can “put ideas into” our subconscious mind.

It’s especially effective if you visualise yourself becoming more and more relaxed, maybe starting with the top of your head and working your way around the rest of your body, using language that conforms to Coue’s Law “My scalp is relaxing, the muscles in my face are becoming more and more relaxed, etc.” This process is known as auto suggestion. Remember to say them with conviction and with positive emotion. Emotion is the fuel that drives suggestions into the subconscious mind.

Try it. Find some spare time to relax, try meditation or deep breathing exercises.

As well as putting things in, when the window is open, things can come out too.

I mentioned earlier the subconscious mind is a self-healing machine, it is constantly, i.e. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year looking out for things that may cause us problems, the mending of injuries, viruses in our blood, changes in temperature, and, most importantly, in the context of this book, it’s looking to express emotions, negative ones that cause us pain and distress, this takes us back to the bubbles in the bottom of the fizzy drink.

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Your subconscious is always looking for an outlet for these pent-up feelings. The best example of this is when you’re asleep, you are as relaxed as you can be, there is no conscious activity, so the window is wide open giving the opportunity of expression into the conscious mind. This is when and why you dream, the subconscious sees the opening and throws unexpressed thoughts, feelings, desires etc into your conscious.

Of course, most of the time they make no sense at all as they are in a “representation’ and therefore “acceptable to the conscious” form, but it’s better than nothing.

I remember a Yoga teacher friend of mine telling me years ago that it was relatively common for her students to suddenly burst into tears during her sessions because they were very relaxed and therefore (unknowingly) the window was open!

From the get-go, my advice is that any emotions that are seeking expression are best let out.

This is the purpose of emotions. This is why we have them. If we leave them in they can cause a lot of problems. Unexpressed emotions will be converted into different forms.

These will manifest themselves emotionally for example through depression, anxiety, self-doubt, fears and phobias, or physically through muscle tension, migraines and headaches, high blood pressure, digestive problems such as irritable bowel syndrome and many more.

My advice towards this is very simple: LET THEM GO!

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6. Two very interactive beliefs: There are two domains in which we exist, which are 1. The internal / inner domain (i.e. the logical/emotional/spiritual world including our self and our self-esteem and what we think of ourself, what we think of the outside world) and 2. The external physical world (which includes POI, Point of Influence - we’ll come back to this) POI also has a sub chapter called social anxiety.

Self-esteem is a belief, or habit. Whatever we practice we become good at. I will say that again…Whatever we practice we become good at….If we have a problem, our self esteem towards that problem is low, it has to be. We really are the only people who can heighten or lower our self-esteem, we may think that others can but ultimately it’s us who do the allowing, that take in the suggestions, depending on whether they feed our existing belief.

Someone with low self-esteem will find it difficult to accept compliments from others. Someone with high self-esteem will probably not pay to much attention to criticism.

This brings us onto the other belief of Social Anxiety. This is an anxiety towards other peoples’ judgement.

Because we are social animals, it’s important to us how we interact with those around us. Many problems have a deep sense of social anxiety attached to them. These may include being overweight, low body image, sexual performance, emetophobia, (the fear of being sick), fear of public speaking etc.

When our social anxiety is high our self-esteem is low, in other words, when we’re feeling a bit down about ourselves, we care more about what other people think.

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As we raise our self-esteem we tend to not care so much. It’s important to see the correlation between the two.

These two beliefs are really based on what we think of ourselves and what other people think of us. Another important psychological process deals with everything else; this is: Point of Influence (POI). Our POI is in one of two places, either external, i.e. outside of us, or internal, inside of us. Imagine the POI as being a red dot that fluctuates from being inside us (internal POI) to outside us (external POI).

When our POI is external we believe that things outside of us influence us more than we can influence ourselves, they become more powerful than we are in terms of the emotion created.

This includes for example the bad weather “making” us depressed, other people’s opinions influencing us, believing in luck, certain situations or objects “making” us anxious and so on. When we externalise our POI we are really just playing the blame game, blaming external factors on problems rather than endeavouring to change them. We are simply giving our power away. When we internalise our POI we are taking responsibility over our thoughts and feelings toward external factors, i.e. “it doesn't matter if the weather is bad, I can still have a good day”.

It is very useful to understand when we are being external in our thinking as we can recognise this and internalise the thought processes. If we can’t change what’s outside of us, we can certainly change how we think/feel towards it. When you put these two beliefs together, Point of Influence and Self Esteem, you have the word POISE. Try to act with POISE, it’s a good way of reminding yourself to use these two ideas to your advantage. Raising your Self Esteem internalises your POI and vice versa.

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Its also worth mentioning that, as mentioned above, a significant aspect of our external world is other people, we live in societies and how we interact with other people in our societies is very important, we all have an innate, often subconscious desire to fit in, to feel as though we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.

This can often result in feelings of anxiety if we don't fit or belong, causing what is commonly known as Social Anxiety, a concept that all of us will recognise to a lesser or greater degree. There is more on this subject later in the book.

7. Cause and Effect When my clients come to me for help, it’s quite common that they are suffering from issues which have been in their lives-in varying degrees of intensity - for many years. Depression, anxiety, fears or phobias, low self-esteem etc. Often the problems were tolerable for many years but, due to the practising/nurturing/watering of them they grew in intensity to the point where they can’t cope with them anymore. Often, they have no idea what caused the problem, or if they do think they know what caused it, they are usually mistaken.

How can this be I hear you cry! Well, here’s how it works.

As I mentioned earlier, we are pretty much a blank canvas when we are born so all our ideas/beliefs/problems have been introduced to us at some point. Usually, they stem from childhood. Why? Because childhood is our formative period and is predominantly created through our emotions as opposed to our logic.

When we are born we have no real sense of logic as we haven’t yet had the experiences that shape us. Our conscious sense of self and our place in the world are yet to be molded. So, when we are born, we are all (nearly) living through our subconscious automatic emotional minds. We have very little sense of self.

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Because we have little sense of logic, our emotions play a very important role in our lives as they give a sense of, not what things are (as we may not understand them) but how things FEEL. So, we go through childhood gathering information based on our senses not our logic.

We determine whether situations, objects, people make us feel good, bad, safe, happy, sad, excited, confused, angry etc. This is really our in-built survival system. We create inside our heads an emotional map to help us navigate our surroundings so we know what to avoid or what not to avoid.

But here’s the rub. As we will see, the map is not necessarily the terrain, its just our perspective of the terrain. You’ll recall that a day seemed to last for ages, summer holidays seemed to stretch out for infinity, each moment was filled with emotion. Children live their lives emotionally, we all did. Over time, however, experiences are forgotten, they become buried under layers of newer experiences and are no longer conscious, we lose all sight of them. This is OK if the experiences are positive ones, our heads are filled with nice, happy ideas. But when they’re negative they can cause trouble.

As I’ve already mentioned, our subconscious mind is our hard drive, it just processes whatever we put in and converts it into some form of emotion, action, belief etc. It is also our healing mind.

Therefore, if we have buried negative emotions in our subconscious, it will try to express them so we can be free of them. Once they are TRULY expressed (as opposed to repressed- we’ll come back to this later) we are completely free of them, never to return, and any negative feelings and subsequent issues that they create can no longer exist.

In the meantime, it’s important to understand that the physicalities of the experience are not important, whatever the experience was that caused the emotions is long gone and we’ve survived them. Its only 17

the emotional residue that is the issue.

8. Fizzy Drink Try to imagine a glass of any liquid, we’ll use a fizzy drink, maybe lemonade. The actual lemonade represents the subconscious.

The surface, meniscus is the technical name for this, is the conscious/subconscious barrier created by “surface tension”. You can often see insects and other items in a pond trapped by the surface tension, they can be underneath trying to get out, above trying to get in or trapped halfway between. Pond skaters use it to stay above water, just to illustrate its existence. Imagine this is like the barrier between your conscious and subconscious. At the bottom of the glass are some bubbles.

Each bubble contains an experience (in these cases a negative one) and the accompanying emotion. Now, the subconscious is trying to heal us of the negative feelings, that’s its job, its trying to express them, so in order to do this its trying to push the bubbles out up at the top of the drink where they can pop on the surface, into the conscious mind (in other words we remember it) and where we can release the trapped feelings.

Remember here that inside the bubbles is emotion that was created in childhood, therefore it is by default, childish emotion. As it’s emotion that was created in childhood it is very intense emotion.

Try to remember when something good or something bad happened in your childhood and try to recall as strong those emotions were.

For example if somebody was to steal a child’s bicycle or toy it feels as though it's the end of the world. The adult perspective is that it's only a bicycle but the child's perspective is that it's MY bicycle belongs to ME.

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It’s only the emotion that matters, the physical experience that created the emotion has long since passed and you have survived it. You cannot re-experience the same situation again, it’s impossible. You can re-experience the feelings again though.

This is all well and good, except there is a slight problem. The conscious mind is our ego. It’s our sense of self. We don’t like negative feelings because they make us feel crappy.

So, as the bubbles make their way up from the subconscious they bring with them all the crap feelings (anxiety, depression, fears, phobias, self-doubt etc) and the nearer they get to the computer screen, the conscious mind, the worse we feel so we push them back, back down as far as we can so we don’t have to feel the feelings anymore (what is called a state of denial or disavowal). The subconscious will then try harder, it’ll push them back up again, knock more loudly at the door but the harder it knocks the less likely we are to let it in.

We push them back again; we disavow ourselves of them. So we are in an emotional conflict, a tug of war between our thoughts and our feelings.

We now have a conflict between our conscious (adult/logical mind) and our subconscious (childish/emotional mind) But remember, the subconscious, (being like a hard drive), has to process right! It can’t leave something floating around, it has to put it somewhere. So, it does something very interesting. It will take the uncomfortable bubble and its unacceptable-to-the-ego emotions and turn it into something else, something that is acceptable to the ego, maybe unpleasant, but acceptable non-the-less. Let me try to give you an example.

Control is a very important facet of our lives, no-one likes to feel out of control, it’s unpleasant and confusing.

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Unfortunately, however, life ain’t always plain sailing, we will go through times in our lives where we will feel out of control for whatever reason, it’s part of human existence.

It's always a good idea to imagine a line of control. Often, there was a point when our current problems were manageable. At this point the future problem was inside our line of control.

These experiences, like many others, can become buried, trapped under the layers of our subconscious, become a bubble in the glass of lemonade. The bubble tries to rise out but is pushed back because we don’t like the accompanying feelings, we don’t want to revisit or acknowledge the experience that created the emotion.

So, the subconscious. will take the bubble and convert it into something else, something acceptable to the ego, something that REPRESENTS the original feeling but more acceptable.

It may be uncomfortable, problematic, annoying, frustrating etc but it is acceptable and therefore expressable.

Taking anxiety as an example, we may have experienced occasional bouts of anxiety or anxiety in a mild form, we are aware of the anxiety but may have coping mechanisms for it.

We may be able to talk ourselves out of it or take up exercise to alleviate the symptoms. However, as we are doing this, we're still paying homage to the problem and we are inadvertently building the issue inside our heads by focusing on it and by default finding evidence to support it, and consequently building it. Should we continue this process there will be inevitably a point where the depression goes beyond the line of control. This is really the point where our self-esteem towards dealing with the problem reaches rock bottom.

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Once the problem has crossed the line of control, as the name suggests, we feel powerless towards it and may well externalise our POI and decide to seek help via some new positive beliefs from various sources. It's very useful to imagine our new positive beliefs bringing the problem back inside the line of control.

Our subconscious mind likes visual ideas (remembering the power of our imagination) as does our conscious mind. It gives us something tangible to work with. The idea of bringing the problem back inside the line of control is positive by default.

So now we can get an idea of where our apps / beliefs come from.

They are created by experiences (giving the suggestion) and nurtured, processed and expressed, either directly (like me and Arsenal) or indirectly (redirected like a fear of flying). Try to imagine that all our conscious beliefs / apps are linked to subconscious experiences / seeds / programmes.

Later in this book you are going to find out, in more detail how and why this process takes place, the importance of the emotional content of the subconscious experience (after all this is where the emotions are “stored”) and what we can do to resolve the trapped feelings and emotions.

Before that however, we are going to see what we can do in the conscious mind (the computer screen) to deal with negative apps, i.e. problems.

As I alluded to before, if we continue to think about our problems in a negative way (that they are getting worse) then we are watering the seed of the idea, it will grow, and if we keep watering it, it will become overgrown and out of control, a habit, eventually blocking our previously clear view. So, what do we do? Firstly, if possible, try to not think of the problem, as doing so feeds it. If we do think of the problem then it’s best minimise or eradicate any negative language as it will confirm the belief and make it worse.

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It also falls foul of a very important process call Coue’s Law of Reversed Effort. It’s so important I’m now going to dedicate 200 words in order to explain it to you… here goes.

Coue’s Law states that “when your imagination and your will power conflict with each other, your imagination will always win.” What this means in real terms is, if you want to change a negative (problem) into a positive then it really helps to not think about the negative, let me give you an example.

I see many clients for weight loss, it’s a common issue these days.

They’ve often put on weight because they’ve attached themselves to a particular type of food which isn’t particularly on the healthy spectrum, let’s say chocolate, as it’s a common one. So, after eating too much chocolate and putting on weight, they’ll often say to themselves “I need to lose weight, I’m not going to eat chocolate any more as it’s making me fat.” Seems sensible right!? Logical, rational, a good plan for weight loss! No. It’s not. It’s terrible! Why? Because every time they say “I’m not going to eat chocolate, they are reminding themselves of chocolate and when they remind themselves of chocolate they are pushing their chocolate app and will create desire towards chocolate (as we create our emotions). As they create desire they are in conflict. The two parts of their mind are now sumo wrestling.

The conscious (logical) mind is saying “I’m not going to eat chocolate” but the subconscious mind (that has built the habit (..or app..) for liking chocolate is saying…. “but you love chocolate, it makes you feel yummy, you can’t resist the pleasure it brings” etc etc (not with words but with feelings).

If you keep saying I’m not going to eat chocolate anymore, the chances are you’ll soon be down the petrol garage at 11.00 on a Friday evening. The best thing to do here is to not think of chocolate at all, to not even say its name, (like MacBeth or Voldemort) If you 22

do you are “pushing the App” or “watering the weed” When I help clients to lose weight I do it by showing them how to build a new app that avoids mention of the thing that’s trying to be avoided. With weight loss for chocolate lovers I use the phrase (suggestion/idea/ belief) “I am a healthy eater (and I am proud of it).” This phrase avoids mention of the unmentionable and states what IS going to take place and has a positive emotion attached to it.

When this happens, the imagination goes straight to the positive outcome and builds the positive belief instead of the negative one.

As the belief towards being a healthy eater grows, the owner of the belief becomes better and better at being a healthy eater until its normalised, and a new habit has been created (usually 3-4 weeks).

In short, it’s a bit like saying “whatever you do, don’t think of a Hippopotamus wearing a monocle… the first thing that happens is… you think of a Hippopotamus wearing a monocle… You have to think of it in order to not think of it!

Coue’s Law has won again. This law is very important, it plays out in many everyday situations... here’s a few to think about: I have a driving test tomorrow, I’m not going to feel nervous……

Tomorrow, I’m going to be a calm and confident driver.

I need to stop smoking so I’m not going to smoke cigarettes any more… I am a non-smoker and proud of it.

I’m flying abroad today; I hope I don’t feel anxious on the plane… I am flying abroad today, I am going to be a calm, confident and relaxed flyer.

I have to make a presentation today; I hope I don’t stammer or stutter. I have to make a presentation today; I am going to speak calmly and clearly.

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Emile Coue became quite famous for his phrase “every day in every single possible way I’m feeling better and better.”

I hope these make sense and help illustrate the power of Coue’s Law. I believe this is one of the core reasons that we should “think positively” and not “think negatively”.

Imagine for a second that your head is like a bowl of water. If you drip feed positive thoughts (clear water) into your bowl on a daily basis then your bowl - and your thinking - will remain clear as will your perspective.

If you imagine dripping negative (inky) thoughts into your bowl then the water (and your thoughts) will become cloudy and you will lose perspective. It will then take lots of clean drops to dissipate the inky water, but hey, it’s worth it.

As a general rule of thumb, it’s a good habit to minimise negative ideas and maximise positive ones. Our beliefs aren’t carved in stone, they may feel like it but they’re not, they’re flexible, malleable and ultimately changeable. Essentially they’re created by words and pictures (our imagination) there is no physical element to them whatsoever, they’re really just ideas with energy (emotions) attached to them.

They change over time anyway (for better or for worse) they can’t stay the same. Understand this and use it, it’s very helpful to know.

Remember, every time you say positive words and phrases you are rehearsing a positive outcome.

If you rehearse a positive outcome you are training your mind into creating positive feelings associated with the experience. Then you will avoid anxiety, anxiety that is created by:

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9. The Fight of Flight Response!!! Da da daaaa!! (dramatic music)!

The flight or fight (FOF) response is our instinctive reaction to danger. Most of us have had a close shave or two in our lives, the moment where we nearly came a cropper. Let’s take a scenario: Imagine you’re walking down the street one day happily minding your own business when a car accidentally mounts the pavement and is careering towards you.

The moment you are aware of it lots of things happen almost instantaneously.

They will include: your heart starts beating really fast, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, your thinking becomes fuzzy, you’ll get panicky feelings in your stomach, your blood pressure will rise, your muscles will become tense.

Basically, what’s happened here is that your subconscious mind has over-ridden your conscious mind to get you out of the way as quickly as possible. You have lost your conscious will. Your fast breathing is to get as much oxygen into your body as quickly as possible and your heart beating fast is to get this oxygenated blood to your muscles as quickly as possible, your muscles are tense and ready for action. You do not have the time to logically assess the situation, if you stop and think, well, that car is doing about 40 miles an hour, it’s 70 feet away from me so that gives me 00:07 seconds to…… BOOM… too late!

So, your subconscious mind has gone into auto pilot to help you survive.

This response is prevalent throughout the animal kingdom.

Imagine when we lived on the plains of Africa 200,000 years ago our lives were probably threatened on a regular basis, either by wild animals trying to eat us or other humans wanting to kill us for our property etc. When we were faced with such danger, we could either 25

fight (good luck if it’s a lion) or flight (also good luck if it’s a lion but you get the drift).

Being serious, in this environment it’s a very useful reaction indeed!

An important thing to realise here is that this response to a lifethreatening attack has a very definite timeline, i.e. a beginning, a middle and an end, so when “it’s all over” assuming we’re still alive, we calm down and go back to normal, thanking our lucky stars we’re still alive and kicking and telling all and sundry about our dramatic experience. Today, in this country (England for me), we are much safer than being on the plains of Africa, 200,000 years ago (regardless of what the papers tell us) I reckon we have maybe 5-10 “close shaves” in an average lifetime where the FOF response has been necessarily evoked, so our need of the FOF has diminished somewhat.

In effect, society has progressed far more quickly than evolution so we are running an old operating system on a new computer. What’s so bad about that I hear you cry, it saves our life here and there!

Well, when it’s needed it’s fabulous, but outside of these scenarios it can create a big problem. It’s this: There are two types of anxiety: Real Time Anxiety (when something is actually happening and the flight or fight response is launched) and Anticipatory Anxiety, when what you fear is going to happen in the future, in other words, your imagination sending scary ideas to your subconscious mind.

The Father of psychology (and psychotherapy), Sigmund Freud called anxiety “fear thinly spread” and (in my opinion) he was right.

As mentioned, your subconscious mind has no sense of logic, it’s the instinctive, intuitive emotional, automatic part of us, doing 10.000.000 things a second. It is ALWAYS looking out for us, its continually gathering information through our (apparently) 21 26

different senses in order to ascertain how to respond to our environment (if it’s hot we sweat, cold we shiver, dark our pupils dilate, etc) The FOF response is trying to protect us.. the survival of the fittest essentially.

I believe the subconscious mind, fundamentally, has two main default settings: 1) Everything is OK (positive) 2) Everything’s not OK (negative) If it senses anything wrong it subconsciously believes we are in some sort of danger so it responds with the only thing it can do, the fight or flight response.

At this moment it’s sending out all the stress chemicals to get you out of danger as quickly as possible (adrenaline, cortisol etc). I believe that when we are thinking negatively and imagining a negative outcome, our subconscious mind sees it as danger and responds with the fight or flight (it’s the only thing we have) This applies to all negativity so even if you are fretting about being in a traffic jam and imagining you’ll be late for a meeting… and your boss will be angry or you’ll lose a deal etc etc, your subconscious is drip feeding the flight or fight response to you, slowly and gently nudging the buttons so you slowly accumulate all the symptoms.

The problem here is that with real time anxiety the FOF has a definite timeline with a beginning, middle and end, something dangerous happens, the FOF response is launched, the danger passes, the FOF response is turned off. Beginning. Middle. End. However, anticipatory anxiety is based on what we anticipate… but none of us can see onto the future, we’re not fortune tellers so what we anticipate (in other words imagine) is very important.. our imagination is infinite, it doesn’t have beginning, middle and end like real time anxiety so if we’re very well practised in negative thinking, to the point it’s become a habit and feels “normal’ then it’s hardly a surprise that we’ll feel stressed on a frequent basis as we are feeding ourselves FOF fodder continually. Have a think about how many times you may have catastrophised something that never happened, 27

spent hours agonising over it with no outcome.

If we practise this we can spend many hours creating anxiety within ourselves. Ironically, a few days later there’s a good chance we have no real memory of what we were panicking about, or, if we do remember, we will probably struggle to recall how we felt, so really we were just wasting time. Mark Twain, the American author once said: “I have been through many terrible experiences in my life and some of them have actually happened” I think this a very apt statement! To add detail to the picture, do you ever remember lying in bed at night as a child, feeling like everything was ok, then a thought came into your head, ”what if there’s a monster under my bed … or outside my door, behind the curtains.. in the wardrobe?”

If so, try to remember how you felt. Your heart would start beating fast, your stomach may have felt queasy, your breathing faster and shallow… etc etc. All symptoms of the flight or fight response and all just from a thought! There was no reality, just your imagination but the physicality’s were very real. Your subconscious mind responded to what you told it and it launched the FOF response.

10. Let's have a quick recap: Two parts of the mind, conscious and subconscious. Like a computer, Computer screen and hard drive. Everything on the computer screen has been programmed into the hard drive. We were not born with problems.

Every belief system or app is created at the same way. Practising it until it becomes a normality. We could call a belief system a habit.

Remember EVERYTHING we practice we become good at.

Fundamentally there are only two types of belief systems, positive and negative. Obviously positive belief systems do not present problems to us. Therefore, only negative belief systems are problematic.

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Negative belief systems activate the fight or flight response. This is the only place that stress and anxiety can come from. There are no other internal systems at play here.

Our subconscious mind has no sense of logic it just does what we tell it to. Our imagination is very important, a picture paints 1000 words.

Practising positive thinking towards just two belief systems Will help you enormously. They are POI SE which stands for Point of Influence and Self Esteem. Practice acting with POISE. 11. Chain Reaction Negative language creates negative images which the subconscious mind equates to danger and evokes the flight or fight response. This creates physical and emotional symptoms. If / when we practise these thought processes we get better and better at it and create habits/beliefs/apps. The same process applies (but in reverse - for positive feelings) when we think positively!

12. The Sub(conscious) Submarine OK, getting a bit abstract now but bear with it, it’s going somewhere.

People of my generation may remember watching black and white war films on T.V (often on a Sunday afternoon as I remember) which also often had the old style submarines in them.

These would be underwater (obviously) and would have a periscope that projects above the surface and can be pointed in any direction.

Remember these? If not, then hit Google right now. In the sub, a commander would be sitting there looking up through the telescope surveying the sea/landscape. If there was nothing to see then he would sit back and relax (and being very British) and probably have a cup of earl grey tea and a slice of Victoria sponge cake.

However, at the first sight of the enemy the commander will hit the panic buttons and the sub would take evasive action in a state of 29

panic (DIVE DIVE DIVE)!!

So, imagine that underwater is your subconscious mind and above water is your conscious mind, the periscope is the connection between the two and is constantly relaying information i.e. your eyes and ears. Imagine now, a little you in the submarine looking through the periscope. The little you is the subconscious you that responds to whatever you see & hear up above water in your conscious mind.

The little you is in fact the emotional you (sometimes/often even the childish you) that has been trained to see & hear some things / situations as a problem. As your conscious mind sends your subconscious mind info down the periscope, the little you will primarily see it in a fundamentally binary way, either OK or NOT OK. (positive or negative) Imagine you are in your sub looking up through the periscope (the conscious world) and you see a dot on the horizon… what’s your first thought? is it positive ( ooh a nice friendly ship bringing gifts) or negative ( ahh some pirates coming to rob and kill me) The truth is you don’t know either way , its just a dot… what happens next is up to you, your internal language and where your imagination sends you. So the same rules apply as before.. OK means we can relax (by nudging the feely-goodie hormones), not OK means pushing the panic buttons (the stress hormones, adrenalin, cortisol etc, basically the flight of flight response).

The periscope is the key thing here, what we choose to look at and through what coloured lens (worth looking at the balloon colours for personality types here to give yourself an idea of the perspective you’re taking) and maybe changing the colour of the lens to adjust your conscious mind’s ideas to keep the subconscious you happy with tea and cake.

Another balloon….

13. Stress and Anxiety Imagine a balloon inside your head with your problems written on it, 30

maybe anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, social anxiety etc.

When the ballon is deflated, the writing (ie your problems) are quite small. As the balloon is inflated they become (or at least feel) bigger.

It is my opinion that only one thing that inflates the balloon is stress and anxiety. To simply describe this, if we are feeling generally stressed, when we go on holiday we feel better, more relaxed, which is why we go on holiday in the first place!

After a few days on a beach or touring the countryside or city we ease into our new surroundings and usually feel a lot better. But why? What has changed?

The stuff that we left at home that was causing our troubles remains the same but we don't care so much, we can take a different perspective and relax knowing that we can deal with it when we get back so we don't focus on it. Instead we think about where we are, what are going to see and do, we make new friends or just laze and relax soaking up the sun.

Perspective is the key word here. If we were to take a different perspective at home, we can go to great lengths to keep our stress balloon as deflated as possible.

Very important. A picture paints a thousand words. If you do remember being a kid lying in bed at night quite happily, then you have the thought that there may be a monster under your bed, then you’ll appreciate this. Remember, how, very suddenly, you went from being relaxed to terrified.

Remember all the physiology that you experienced was created by the flight or fight response. All of this was nothing more than our imagination, but our subconscious mind accepted it as a reality! (because it has no sense of logic - and it’s trying to save your life!)

Try to also think now how often you may think negatively during a day. Each time you0 think of a negative outcome your subconscious mind perceives it as a real threat. Remember it primarily only has 31

two settings, everything is OK or not OK. Each time you imagine a negative outcome you are invoking the flight or fight response, maybe in a relatively small way but invoked nonetheless.

If you habitually think negatively and therefore probably in a catastrophic manner you are spreading fear over the course of your day/week/month/year/life etc.

This creates stress and anxiety. When we are stressed and anxious we lose perspective, problems become bigger, our self-esteem becomes smaller and we believe we can’t change our problem.

So. negative language creates negative images that our subconscious reacted to, creating stress. The more we practice this the better we become at it.

The same applies to positive language which creates positive outcomes. The subconscious has nothing to worry about and doesn't do the flighty fighty thing.

Now let’s try to find out “Who we really are”….

14. Personality types There are three predominant personality types, and we are all a blend of the three. It’s impossible to just be one, or only two types, we have to be a blend of all three.

Try to imagine you have three balloons in your head, each one a different colour and each one representing one of the three personality types and all the traits they contain. It’s probable that you have one largest balloon, one next largest and one smallest although it’s also possible to have all three the same size, or two the same size and one smallest or one biggest and the other two the same size.. you get the idea. It’s important to remember that we have to have three balloons, and so are all a blend of the three types. The characteristics featured below are aimed towards those who mainly 32

have a large balloon of each type mentioned so they are towards the extreme end of the scale. We all have elements of the all of the traits but in different varying degrees/amounts: 1) The Sensitive People Pleaser The first one is what we’ll call the Sensitive People Pleaser (SPPs I see as a red balloon).

SPP’s get a lot of their self-esteem from how much other people like them so they are frequently trying to help others: a) because it helps others and b) because it makes them feel good too. SPP’s care about how others feel, they are fundamentally kind considerate souls. They have a very strong trait of all or nothing thinking. This means that they can and often will fluctuate in their thinking from highly positive thoughts to very negative ones in quick succession, sometimes hundreds of times a day.

One minute everything is great, the world and everything in it is super! Fantastic and couldn't be better. The next moment its terrible, the worst, couldn't get any more dire than it is now.

So they are on an emotional rollercoaster and find their emotions uncontrollable and very difficult to understand.

Maybe because of this, they tend to live in the moment, in the here and now and are often looking for a quick fix to feel better, if they think of something that they believe will make them feel better, they will do it with very little thought as to the consequences of their actions as they live in the moment and have difficulty delaying / deferring pleasure into the future.

This make them COMPULSIVE people (very different to OBSESSIVE people and certainly not “obsessive compulsive” as this is an oxy-moron as we will see in a moment) For starters, compulsions give instant pleasure, that why people 33

have them. SPP’s tend to be introspective and often quite shy with a touch of melancholy, often looking back to the good old days with a sense of nostalgia. They can also feel quite detached from the rest of the world, feeling like they’re somehow stuck behind a pane of glass, they can see everyone and everything around them but can’t seem to quite connect with it properly. This can lead to feelings of isolation, sadness and depression.

So, in order to make themselves feel better they indulge in compulsive activities such as over eating, smoking, drinking, speeding, sex and drugs and sausage rolls, etc.

If a carer has a few quid in their pocket they will want to go out and blow it on a good night out or some new clothes, shoes… anything really, even if they're deeply in debt it doesn’t matter, to hell with the future and its consequences, ”I just want to feel good right now.“ Carers spend a lot of time trying to work themselves out as they don't fully understand themselves.

Because they find it difficult to express their feelings and are kind, sensitive souls, they will often become creative in order to do so, perhaps taking up poetry, songwriting or painting to do so.

I hope this paints a picture (terrible segue) and gives you an idea of the key characteristics of the SPP. 2. The Determined/Obsessive Thinker (DOTs - blue ballon) DOTs are, in my opinion pretty much the opposite to the PP. Other words for obsessive can include focused, committed, or brooding.

These can sound bad but as with all personality types and their accompanying traits it really depends on what nature your thoughts are, if they are negative then there will be problems but if they are positive this is a very productive element of our thinking.

So DOTs are fundamentally like a dog with a bone, they just don't 34

want to let go of anything, so they’re determined and committed to their career, marriage, work projects, hobbies, life goals etc. They like control, organisation and predictability, they want to know the outcomes of a particular situation, a journey, investment etc. They are creatures of routine.

Often, the reason for needing control is to avoid the feeling of not having it, in other words, the “out of control” type feelings. Many control-based thoughts and actions are actually based on fear, the fear of not being in control.

Where carers get their sense of self-esteem through helping other people, DTs often get theirs from how much they can control others, so positions of authority, might is right attitudes, and other forms of perceived power, i.e. money or flashy cars, watches for example feature highly in their thinking and actions. Anyone who commits thoroughly to a certain lifestyle, belief system hobby, sport in fact any belief system is showing DT thinking. Again, when the thinking is positive it’s a fantastic way of operating, DT’s are always thinking ahead, planning for an ultimate outcome but when negative, naturally it has its associated problems of brooding on negative issues and subsequently creating a lot of negative feelings.

As this is a book on solving problems, we are going to focus on the negative (problematic) elements. Fundamentally, because a DT likes control, anything perceived to be outside of their control is a real thorn in their side. They will want to know everything about the problem (depression, a fear or phobia, an imagined illness as examples) in order to understand it and therefore resolve it so they will research on the internet and/or join groups for people with similar problems to gain knowledge. The biggest issue with this is that every time they think/talk/react to the problem they are watering it, paying homage to it as such so the belief will continue to grow as will the feelings that the issue will create.

Very importantly, DT’s are very good at deferring pleasure, unlike the SPP. They get pleasure from deferring pleasure.

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If a DT has a few quid in their pocket they will take it down the bank and deposit it there getting feeling of comfort security and control that the money is safely stored for the future which is where they live.

There is an important element of these traits which is the idea of “obsessiveness” in the extreme forms.

Obsessions often do not give any pleasure as such, certainly not in the here and now, but more offer a means to continue without feeling anxious about something. For example, a relatively extreme form of obsession is the need to check things incessantly.

I’ve had quite a few clients over the years who would spend hours checking plug sockets, counting tiles in the kitchen, checking their car before being able to close the garage door.

They didn't enjoy doing this but the thought of not doing it creates a lot of anxiety, so a sense of relief is a more appropriate description.

This is why I think the concept of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is something of an oxy-moron as the two ideas are contradictory.

Compulsions are driven by feelings of pleasure in the here and now, Obsessions are carried out to avoid anxiety in the future.

3. The Attention Seeker / Show-Off (AS) I see this as a yellow balloon. This is a very simple personality type that is very easy to describe. Essentially the core trait of an AS is “Everybody, here I am, look at me.” They want your attention, they want to be noticed and once you’ve noticed them, their job is done.

Again, this trait has positives and negatives attached to it. In a positive sense Attention Seekers are the entertainers, the comedians and actors, the performers, the presenters and are great fun to be around. They want to impress you with themselves and their talents.

The world would be a very dull place without them. When you first meet an AS, it’s like a bottle of bubbly has been opened, it’s all fun fizz and froth with a fair dash of intoxication.

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Often though, pretty soon after the bottle has been opened, it then lies empty. There tends to be not much more left in their locker. AS’s can be quite shallow, flighty, often lacking depth and will move from place to place, person to person to get what they really want which is your attention and mainly (although not always) and your approval.

After they have this their job and your job too is complete and the party is over, there is a good chance they won’t hang around long enough to be a part of your life. They are always on the move, again, often a good thing, often a bad thing too.

I believe that AS’s see the world through a giant magnifying glass, everything is far bigger than others see it. They are dramatists after all. Their language will tend to be exaggerated, things will be “amazing, fanatic, incredible, the best ever” or “terrible, diabolical, nightmarish, unbelievably awful.”

Body language will be exaggerated too, as will facial expressions.

Clothes, hair and make-up may be bright and eye-catching in order to grab your attention.

Have a good think about your blend of personality types and see if you can conjure a rough idea of how big each balloon will be and how your thoughts, words and actions match the traits mentioned above. Remember, there are only three personality types and we all have to be a mixture of all three.

I have often tried to think of behaviours, beliefs, thoughts and actions that lie outside of these three personality types but have so far been unsuccessful. If you can think of any, please let me know. It’s an interesting process.

Some of you may think that I’m generalising here and oversimplifying our seemingly complex and intricate personality traits so I’m going to take some time out to describe WHY we have these traits and why there is - and only can be - three of them.

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OK I said that this book ain’t always easy reading and I meant it.

Some of this next bit is a bit gruesome but important enough to include, in my opinion and I really hope that by the end of it it’ll make enough sense to you to have been worth the grisliness. So. Here goes.

These are the three stages of development according to Freud (and I agree with him here) that explains where our personality types come from. These all involve “fixation” and are written in my language according to my interpretation: Oral (carer) Anal (brooder) Genital (attention seeker) The oral stage creates the Carer characteristics and begins from birth until around the age of 3- 3 1/2. from the moment we are born we are breast or bottle fed. All of our primary pleasure is experienced orally, i.e. through the mouth.

As babies we first test the world though how it tastes and feel in our mouths. If you give a baby your little finger it will “gum” it like crazy.

As we start to crawl around the floor, everything we encounter goes the same way, we are exploring our new world through taste, smell and texture and whether it is pleasurable or not. Everything tends to be hand to mouth activity, as it’s part of the oral phase.

At this stage in our lives, we are very dependent on those around us as they take control and care of every part of our lives, we are waiting for others to come to us to help us with feeding, clothing, entertainment etc so naturally our Point of Influence is very external at this period in our lives.

This is why, in adulthood, people with lots of red balloon still tend to have quite a lot of external thinking.

Equally importantly, this phase of our lives it Is probably as good as it gets. All our basic needs are met and our lives are essentially 38

heavenly.

It's my belief that in times of stress we resort to all oral compulsions i.e. hand to mouth actions in an attempt to recreate the feelings that we had in this phase of complete comfort, safety and security.

So, after the oral phase things tend to get a bit gruesome. The focus of pleasure shifts from the mouth to the anus (sorry, I told you it was gruesome) this is the potty-training phase of childhood and is all about control and the pleasure of control, and the deferred pleasure of letting go.

As an illustration if you've had children yourself, or you may remember yourself holding on to your poo, so it feels better when you finally let go. This is what the term anal-retentive is all about.

You can sometimes see children standing outside the toilet going different shades of different colours as they hold on and hold on and just to get more pleasure when they finally let go.

This phase also creates order and cleanliness in people and planning for the future (and getting pleasure from it, i.e. deferment). This is why some people become obsessed with saving money for example, rather than enjoy it now, it’s better (in their minds) to plan for the future by saving, investing etc. This phase is really the one that creates “obsessive” or “repetitive” thinking. If this is you, you will find some useful strategies on page 70.

So we have this phase from about the age of 3 1/2 until about 5 when the emphasis shifts again. And now moves onto genitalia where is all about willies, minnies, you show me yours I'll show you mine and so on. This is where we start showing off being proud of ourselves demanding attention until social anxiety takes over to whatever degree.

This is the dramatising phase, the attention seeking phase it's driven by sexual energy.

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It's no coincidence that there's a semantic connection between the words hysterectomy and hysteria. Our libido and our ego are intertwined with each other.

Pull one down and the other will follow, build one up and the other will also follow too. I really hope this makes sense to you. It's not pleasant reading but it is based on logic.

Everything comes from somewhere and is cause and effect. If you don't agree with this, ask yourself where else our behaviors’ may come from instead?

See if you can find any alternative answers, being honest I'll be very surprised (and interested) if you can.

15. The Power of Suggestion (seed planting) is interesting Now, the thing is, children live their lives emotionally, they have no real sense of logic as they haven’t been in the world long enough to develop enough awareness to understand what is right or wrong, good or bad. They have no framework to utilize.

What they do have, however, is an in-built instinctive set of feelings and emotions, a kind of emotional navigational system to guide them as much as possible through their formative years.

When they have different experiences, they can get a feel of whether it’s good (so they can do it again) or bad (best avoided from now on) From these experiences they build an emotional map of the world and themselves within that world. However, as we will find out later, the map is not the terrain, only a representation of it according to their experiences and their emotional response to those experiences. It is also worth remembering the intensity of childhood experiences. Every moment is infused with emotion and children are fully immersed in that moment and the accompanying emotions. A moment can seem to last forever, a day can feel like a week and school holidays feel like a lifetime.

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If a child has their favourite toy stolen or loses it, it can feel like the end of the world for them, tears and tantrums ensue.

As an adult looking at the experience its “well it’s only a toy” but at that moment in time, to the child, its everything. Again, it’s not the physicalities of the experience that count, but more the amount of emotion that’s created.

16. The Nature of Repression Also, children are very good at expressing their feelings, if they’re angry they will be angry, if they’re frightened, they will be frightened and show their fear, the same with jealousy, happiness etc.

Children will comfortably go to their parents or trusted adults with these feelings and talk about them “Mum, I’m scared, Dad, I’m angry, hungry, jealous etc etc. All of these emotions are expressed, they go OUTWARDS…… except for one little bunch. GUILT, SHAME and EMBARRASSMENT. Why is guilt, shame and embarrassment so damaging to our psyche when we are children? Let me try to explain. I believe that in childhood we all have an innate desire to feel as though we belong to something, feel part of something that is bigger than ourselves, which includes our family, our peer group, our neighbourhood, our community, our society, our country etc.

We need to belong to something to give us a sense of security, a sense of safety, a sense of belonging. When we feel guilty, we feel as though we are being judged. At the moment of judgement, we are alone, us on one side and everybody else on the other. For a brief moment we are emotionally isolated, detached from our support system.

This, I believe, is the most uncomfortable feeling a child can experience. The feeling of being an outsider, feeling different, not feeling a part of something. This is dangerous ground for us psychologically as it makes us unsupported and vulnerable. This is 41

why we learn to not express our guilt, shame and embarrassment.

If you see a child that looks like he or she has done something naughty or bad and you ask them what they have done, they will become very defensive. The more you ask them the more they will try to protect themselves from the feelings of guilt.

If they were to confess their crime they run the risk of more judgement. Especially if it is their parents that are trying to get them to confess.

The fear of losing the love of their parents is far too dangerously powerful to risk. This is why they/we learn to hold back guilt shame and embarrassment, there is simply too much at stake. All these three emotions create the feeling they’ve done something wrong.

When children feel they’ve done something wrong they feel judged.

When they feel judged, they are no longer a part of their system, community, family, peer group etc. It’s them on their own against everyone else, they are segregated and isolated. These feelings are very damaging for children as they (we) all need to feel as though they are part of something bigger than them (our)selves, then they feel safe, secure and protected.

So, there is a lot to risk in expressing these feelings.. what if they get judged for what they’re confessing to, they run the risk of losing the love of the people they need it from most and feel 1000 times worse.

SO, they hold it back, keep it in, bottle it up. Guilt shame and embarrassment are the only emotions that do this. Interestingly, it’s not external factors that create our sense of guilt, it’s actually us, when we take responsibility and ownership of what has occurred, either what we’ve done or what has been done to us. True guilt isn’t created by somebody blaming us and calling us a bad person, it’s created when we believe it and accept it as a truth, essentially agreeing with it. It’s when we blame ourselves, it’s what we say to ourselves about ourselves. We may use language like “oh god, what have I done, I am a horrible and nasty person, everyone will hate me, other people won’t like me anymore.”

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When we make these type of statements to ourselves we are substantially lowering our self-esteem as it’s what we are saying about ourselves to ourselves that creates our self-esteem and this is VERY negative language. These moments of intense guilt and shame are often created in a split-second.

Again, it's not the physical world that creates the problem. It's the intensity of the emotion. Intense guilt and shame is unbearable to us as children, so much so that we hide it from ourselves.

The bubbles that are created in this process hold immensely powerful feelings. It is my opinion that later in life these bubbles account for every act of prejudice towards other people. Why? Because the bubbles represent feelings of isolation, not fitting in, and a fear of judgement. As these bubbles are not expressed to the conscious mind, they have to be redirected to something that represents them. Ethnic minorities, LGBTQ, the disabled, maybe people with tattoos, anyone who represents something different.

Let me try to express this in another way. I hate kidney. It's one of the few things that I can't bear to eat. It would be impossible for me to hate kidney unless I've experienced it.

It's impossible to hate somebody for being different without having experienced the feeling of being different. I couldn't tell you that I love/hate the taste of a far off distant tropical fruit if I've never tasted it.

In the natural world we would only attack something if a) we were going to eat it or b) if it threatens us - subconsciously and therefore emotionally - as well as physically. In modern society food is plentiful so therefore it has to be option B. Essentially therefore, every act of aggression or violence is an act of fear, a fear of something about ourselves, something internal projected externally.

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Going into deeper and darker water now, it's my opinion that the most intense form of guilt shame and embarrassment is always somehow connected to our sexual self (or libido) the reason for this I believe is because of the following: I believe that sexual self is probably 95% of our psyche From the moment we’re born the first thing that's said of us is ” it's a boy” or “it's a girl”. From that moment on we're defined by our sexuality, it’s VERY important to us. Sexuality is after all the driving force in nature, we wouldn't be here if it didn't exist.

I see our sexual self (libido) and our conscious self (ego) as being like a double helix. If one is pulled down the other one will follow.

Vice versa, if one is lifted up, the other will also follow. If our selfesteem is high we generally feel more sexual.

We generally tend to find confident people as being more attractive.

This is why any sense of shame and guilt or embarrassment to our sexual self causes greater shame.

Everybody goes through life, especially their childhood, accumulating bubbles of sexual guilt, shame and embarrassment in their subconscious mind. It's impossible not to.

There is a very definite moment in childhood when we go from being very happy to run around the garden naked, or letting our Mums and Dads bathe us to suddenly feeling very uncomfortable with these types of situations.

I also believe that the Oedipal and Elektral complexes are very real.

If you haven't heard of them, they are named after characters from ancient Greek mythology who fall in love with their parents.

I believe that this is why it’s relatively common for women to seek out a “father figure” in their personal relationships, to create a feeling of safety and security. Men do the same with their mothers although I think it’s less obvious in later life.

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Bearing in mind that our sexual self, our libido is the driving force of nature it’s no wonder that it can wreak havoc if/when it’s misdirected.

Primarily at a core level, we are still animals vying for supremacy amongst our peers. This is why I believe that sexual guilt is so powerful. It’s also worth mentioning that “Sexual Guilt” and “Repression” isn't confined to just our sexuality and the associated physical acts, it also includes anything attached to our sexual drive so, for example, poo and wee are included as are even just thoughts of a carnal and shameful nature.

When it is repressed, our self-esteem comes down with it. When this happens, our social anxiety increases and our point of influence externalises. Just to remind you, children very rarely express any kind of sexual guilt or shame.

We never did as children and our children probably won't either. OK, I’m really going into dark water now but I believe in what’s about to follow (based on 20 years as a hypnotherapist) and I believe in sharing it, although some of you may not like it (which is why I very sneakily left till towards the end of the book.)

Guilt, Shame and Embarrassment go inwards as we’ve looked at. If these emotions are the vehicle, then our libido - our sexual self is the fuel that drives these experiences deep into our subconscious.

By this I mean ALL the bubbles have at least an element of sexuality attached to them. If these statements trouble you, ask yourself 2 questions: (1) WHY do they trouble you! and (2) What other areas of your mental and emotional make up would create the same amount of discomfort and/or denial? For example, if I said all of our problems come from subconscious anger, you probably wouldn't care too much (you may not agree with it but it wouldn't “trouble” you).

Essentially, it’s my belief that children can’t really be truly guilty of anything as they’re children and haven’t had the opportunity to 45

understand about themselves, the world and other people in it.

Controversial I know, and many of you may not agree with me but that’s how I see it. Going a bit deeper and darker, children also take the blame for things that have happened to them. The extreme end of the wedge here is sexual abuse by an adult.

In a child’s mind, adults are god like figures who know life and the world and would have only done what they did because the child did something wrong, so they take the responsibility, they don’t have the broader perspective to realise that it wasn’t their fault, that they were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But more that they somehow deserved what happened, even instigated it and it is them that are left with the feelings of being dirty and horrible because they believe that they are to blame.

The abuser will often walk away with very little guilt even though it was him / her who orchestrated the whole sordid experience, the child will feel enough shame to not want to tell anyone for fear of judgement.

At the darkest of the dark end of the wedge if the abuser is a parent (which does actually happen relatively frequently), the child can often deeply hate themselves and still love the parent/abuser.

Going back to the bubbles in the bottom of the glass of fizzy drink, these bubbles can really only contain Guilt/Shame/Embarrassment as they are unexpressed at the time of the event/s (remember that all other emotions go outwards) so are therefore repressed and not expressed. SO….. where do these emotions/ bubbles go??

If they’re left floating around in the conscious mind, they are very damaging for us as children,

Such serious self-doubt will greatly hinder our self-esteem and its 46

subsequent development so, the Subconscious mind has a strategy here and that is, essentially, to throw it in a cupboard at the back of our heads and close the door on it. Firmly. Lock it away.

This means that we no longer have sight of it, it’s gone, vanished from our conscious view, we have absolutely NO recollection of it.

But, the bubble is still there, trying to surface at a later date when we are ready to accept it, but as mentioned before, the nearer it gets to the surface (the ego) bringing the feelings of guilt with it, the more we push it away as we find it so uncomfortable.

The subconscious will try again and knock on the door even more loudly, but we like this even less and push it away even more… and so it goes on, the constant battle between our thoughts and our feelings, our ID and our Ego, our computer screen and our hard drive.

So now, the subconscious does something very interesting.

As we won’t willingly accept the bubble into our conscious mind (because we don’t like what’s in it) our subconscious - because it has to process the bubble - will push it in another direction, it will send it outwards onto something, someone, somewhere that represents the emotions trapped in the original experience.

This way the subcon expresses these feelings, which, although being unpleasant, are acceptable; even though we don’t like the feelings we will accept them into our minds and often find it OK to talk about them with others.

These can include fears and phobias - spiders, heights, vomit and vomiting, open spaces, closed spaces, birds, bees, butterflies- the list is almost endless, negative thoughts and feelings, wrapped in the generic parcel of depression, stress and anxiety ( which seem to circulate around each other) behavioural problems such as obsessions, compulsions, anger, social anxiety (a fear of judgment) 47

low self-esteem, eating disorders, etc etc. Let me give you an example (of which there are thousands).

I’m going to use the fear of flying as an example, a very common fear.

In fact it’s estimated that one in ten people in the UK (6.733 million people) have this fear but none of them have died in a plane crash and probably never will, it is after all allegedly the safest form of transport, (you would need to fly EVERY DAY for 127,000 years to die in a plane crash)! So why are so many people frightened of it?

It’s because they fear being out of control. If they’re 30,000 feet in the air and the wings fall off (not that they’re likely to) then there is nothing you/they can do about it, you’re/they’re helpless and out of control.

Incidentally, there are several phobias that are created by the out-ofcontrol type feelings re-presenting themselves, including spiders, moths, birds, butterflies daddy long legs, emetophobia (the fear of being sick) driving over bridges or on motorways, to name but a few.

So the subconscious has taken a feeling and projected it onto another situation (or object) that (a) closely represents the original feelings/ experience and (b) is acceptable to the conscious mind, i.e. we can live with ourselves and the fear, not happily but at least we can acknowledge it.

This process is very important to understand as it accounts for ALL of our emotional problems. Yes, I’m including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, all fears and phobias and anything else you can think of. The includes physical problems too, IBS, muscle tension, headaches, It’s a bold statement I know but one I believe in.

After all, just to recap, we weren’t born with these problems, they have to come from somewhere. I hope this is all making sense so far.

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16 The Nature of Pleasure This is important as it connects with many different elements of our behaviour. Essentially, we are all pleasure seekers, we are all looking for pleasure and pleasurable feelings (rightly so really).

When we have a problem (or more than one) we look for ways to make us feel better. When we find something that we perceive as pleasurable, we will do it again, and again and again… why?

Because we like it!! Simple as that! We practice that thing until it becomes a habit.

We attach ourselves to that thing, whatever that this is, it doesn’t attach itself to us, it can’t do, it (whatever “it”) is, is an inanimate object/action. It can’t move, think, talk, sing, dance, nothing. It can only sit/be there waiting for us to find it.

Take cigarettes for example, I’ve helped numerous smokers quit over the years, it’s actually probably the easiest thing I do!

They often come in telling me how difficult they find it to stop smoking, how they’ve tried over the years and find it near-on impossible.

The biggest problem they have is that they believe it’s going to be difficult to be a non-smoker. This is the only belief that really stops people from quitting without a problem.

I used to smoke many years ago. I can’t really remember, but I’m sure there were times when I would have found it nigh on impossible to quit ( because I enjoyed it so much).

Being honest there were also times that I do remember when I also found it very easy to quit and went through long periods of being a smoker until I quit “for the last time”.

17. Scales of Pleasure 49

I've already said I believe we are egocentric creatures; we are pleasure seekers. Always try to think of the scales of pleasure.

Imagine that however much pleasure we feel we get from something i.e. food alcohol, drugs, we will always exchange these pleasures if we are offered something greater.

Generally speaking, whatever our problem is we could improve or alleviate or even solve completely the problem if we were offered an enormous incentive i.e. £10 million, world peace, feed all the starving children in the world, or if the lives of us or our loved ones depended on it.

This illustrates that often the problem itself is not the problem, it's our belief towards the problem and whether the rewards are adequate enough and create enough pleasure or benefit to make the effort of changing worthwhile.

I’ve talked a fair bit in this book about pleasure and habit, so I put myself up for a challenge. I started smoking again for the first time in 16 years, and I charted (roughly) the amount of pleasure I got from starting and the subsequent difficulty I had in stopping. Now, I have a fair bit of Caring personality type going on which means I am prone to compulsions, so I thought it would be pretty easy to reconnect with my old chums Mr Benson and Mrs Hedges. Here’s what I found, charted in pleasure from scales of one to ten. My first cigarette tasted absolutely awful, I knew it would taste bad but not as bad as I expected .. I have to score in terms of pleasure but this was absolute zero (in terms of it leaving me cold to the point of - 271.4 degrees) But the interesting thing here is that I knew I could attach myself to them because I’d done it before so to continue seemed to have a benefit with persisting for. So I tried again the next day.. but still a 1 out of 10 .. I had decided I wanted to build myself to a 10 a day smoker so I really had to try harder.

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The next day was still 1 but I convinced myself to raise it to 2 just to get myself under way, then go up from there.

I do need to mention that I had to smoke only in the late afternoon or evenings when I didn’t have clients as they would have smelled the smoke on me (not a good vibe for a hypnotherapist) so occasionally I really felt like I was binge smoking which stifled the pleasure a bit.

So here the interesting thing, I believe I’d re-developed a taste for cigarettes and assumed that it would take me at least three weeks to wean myself off of them, like the above chart but in reverse, but no, it was pretty instant to stop, bar a few occasional pangs I just forgot all about them and went about my daily routine without thinking of smoking.

Ironically the “worst” pangs were ones created during smoking cessation cessions with my clients as I was talking about smoking for 90 minutes which reminded me of the (perceived) pleasure I’d created towards them.

However, the general conclusion wasn’t particularly enlightening to be honest apart from the fact that it gave me a measure on my compulsive side and clarified the habitual nature of habits on a personal level.

I really now view it in the same way that I view having an alcoholic drink or eating chocolate with the caveat that I don’t have to try hard to get to like them, the pleasure is far more instantaneous, but I always feel that I can choose to have or not have chocolate or alcohol at any given time.

Just to reframe this a bit more, over the years I’ve had clients come in, sit down, look me fairly and squarely in the eye and proclaim, in all seriousness, that they are “addicted” to something… the usual suspects are there, cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, gambling etc, but also some more unusual ones, like chocolate , sex, crisps. I”m going to use crisps in this (absolutely true) story. So, the client in question 51

came in, sat down, looked me in the eye and told me they’re “addicted to crisps” and they believe they are because they “can’t stop eating them”. She then told me that she was eating the equivalent of about 15 packs a day.

For her, this was a genuine problem, certainly health wise, its probably worse than being a smoker. But, if you were sitting in a chair listening to our conversation you’d be thinking “Oh come on, get over it, they’re only crisps, of course you can stop eating them” but to her it was as a genuine problem as the other obvious “addictions” i.e. heroin, cigarettes, cocaine etc.

But here’s the thing. I helped her off her habit using almost exactly the same process as I would with smokers,“chocoholics”, and other perceived “addictions” for weight loss clients, (they are all “oral compulsions” which we will come to more of later) and I use a very similar process for many other issues such as drug abuse, trichotillamanis (hair pulling/plucking) even self harming.

18. The Nature of Addiction OK, stand back for this one, a bomb’s about to go off. I don’t believe in it! I don’t think addiction exists, well, not in the way we are told it exists anyway ….

Controversial I know, so now I’ve really got to go some to keep your interest so here goes.

Firstly, I think it’s important to establish what “addiction” actually is and “what does it mean”. The most common idea is the “you can’t stop doing something” like take drugs, smoking cigarettes, alcohol etc (even though people do all the time).

In my opinion, external factors, such as cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, chocolate etc do not attach themselves to us, we attached ourselves to them. They are all inanimate, lifeless, soulless entities. They can’t do anything to us, they can’t universally create feelings in us.

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I don’t believe true “addictions” are possible! Why? Because they all involve some kind of pleasure, even if this pleasure seems pretty unidentifiable. Sometimes, the pleasure created does so because it alleviates (usually temporarily) physical and/or emotion pain.

When we understand that when we exchange the pleasure we get from the habits/ behaviours for a greater pleasure, the habits become a lot easier to overcome. All the things mentioned would be quickly dealt with if there was 10 million quid, world peace or saving the life of a loved one on offer if they succeeded.

19. Smoking Let me give you an example using cigarettes and nicotine (sometimes touted as being as addictive as heroin). If cigarettes were addictive, then everyone that smokes would become addicted to them right? I have helped hundreds of clients quit smoking over the years, in just one 90 minute session.

They ALL believed that a) they were addicted to smoking and b) that it would be difficult to stop. After 90 minutes, they all walked out of my office a non-smoker. How could this be? Because what they believed in is the driving force here! A belief that smoking is pleasurable, not the nicotine addiction.

Let’s elaborate a bit: If it’s the nicotine that has some kind of physical hold over us, then why don't nicotine patches work? Why don’t smokers become addicted to them instead of cigarettes? Why do you get social smokers? People who can smoke a few cigarettes, put them down and leave them for a few weeks/months etc then rinse and repeat. It doesn’t make sense. More importantly, I’ve NEVER met anyone who enjoyed their first cigarette.. not one.. you have to really practise smoking to get to like it, and you do this because there is something in it for you, some kind of return on the action even if the smoking 53

itself isn’t yet pleasurable.

The usual reason for carrying on are that the average smoker tries their first cigarette in their teenage years and they want to look cool in front of their mates, or they think it might lead to weight loss but there has to be a perceived value otherwise they would just try it, dislike it and stop doing it, perhaps in the same way that if someone asked you to chew a piece of burnt rubber you might try it but wouldn’t continue doing it (unless it was trendy for some bizarre reason, or had perceived health benefits to it) it would be seen as lunacy.

So the truth is that the pleasure comes from practicing and getting used to the habit, so it’s US that creates the pleasure, not the cigarettes. Another interesting point is that, if addiction did exist, by its own definition, you “need” more and more of the thing you’re addicted to get the same “high” or effect. So why is it that you get 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 40, 60 a day smokers? Again, the answer here is that you’ve create a habit that suits your tastes and requirement.

When you practise the habit, you become good at it and you then associate times and places with smoking cigarettes to the point that smokers can almost set their watch by it, i.e., a cigarettes with their first cup of tea in the morning, driving in a car, talking on the telephone, after a meal, with a glass of beer/wine, in cigarette breaks at work and so on, like clockwork.

Interestingly, between these times, very little or no desire is created to smoke as it doesn’t fit with the habit of the smoker. Very few smokers, probably none, habitually wake up in the night just to smoke a cigarette. So why can they physically go for 7, 8, 9 hours asleep without nicotine if it’s a physical need?

Let me ask you a very pertinent question. Have you or anyone you know ever become addicted to nicotine patches or gums? I personally have never met anybody that did so.

Get this? Agree with it? I hope so!

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Why would this be if nicotine is so addictive? My opinion is that it is because there is no (orally compulsive) pleasure attached to them or at least not enough pleasure attached to gums or patches.

You might now be thinking “yeah ok, that’s cigarettes or nicotine, but what about the hard stuff, like booze or heroin for example” Well, my answer is the same.

20. Alcohol Again, if alcohol is addictive, we’d all be addicted to it. Half the country goes out on a Saturday night to attain various levels of inebriation depending on the occasion.

But who wakes up the next morning saying “Oh God, I’ve got to have another drink now”? No-one (unless it’s a hair of the dog). We’re more likely to say “Oh God, I’m never drinking again” (until tomorrow anyway). So how is this addiction if we’re making conscious choices about how much we drink? Again, in my mind at least, it doesn’t make sense. Our individual emotional requirements are the most important factor in the process of becoming “addicted” to something, not the “addictive substance” itself. I don’t have much more to elaborate on this specifically now, but I hope you get my drift.

OK so now you’re thinking, hmmm maybe, but what about heroin, surely that’s addictive!! …. NOPE!!

21. Heroin Cutting a long story short, I spent a week in a Spanish hospital many years ago on a morphine drip (I slipped a disk in my back). Morphine, as far as I understand anyway, is high grade heroin, apparently much better quality than what you can get on the street.

After a week attached to the drip, when I came out of the hospital, I didn’t, for even a split-second think “I really need to go back in there to get some more morphine/heroin”.

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Why? Because I was just too pleased to be out of hospital! That was it! The pleasure I got from being out and to enjoying what was left of my holiday far outweighed the pleasure I got from the heroin (in proportion to the pain relief I got from it) So again, if heroin is addictive, why didn’t I become addicted to it?

Another truism is that during the Vietnam war American soldiers were given large amounts of heroin. Primarily because it was such a terrible place to be. Apparently, when they returned home only 5% of the soldiers had trouble coming off the heroin. The other 95% gave it up quickly and easily. How? Probably because they were just very pleased to be home. Presumably, the other 5% had trouble quitting because they had deeper emotional needs to carry on using it.

So quitting is “do-able” - with the right mindset and application. This means (in my opinion) that it is a psychological problem, not a physical/physiological one.

According to Wikipedia:“Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterised by a persistent and intense urge to engage in certain behaviours, one of which is the usage of a drug, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.”

This explanation firmly lays addiction and “addictive” behaviour upon the “addict”. “Neuropsychological Disorder” is not an external factor it’s an internal one.

So, the real drive comes from inside us, not from the external substance/activity or whatever we are supposedly “addicted” to.

To clarify a bit more: Here is a Google search result for the 5 most addictive substances on the planet.

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The 5 Most Addictive Substances on Earth Heroin.

Alcohol. ...

Cocaine. ...

Barbiturates (“downers”) These substances are typically used to treat anxiety and induce sleep. ...

Nicotine. Nicotine, the highly addictive substance found in tobacco products, is the most common addiction in America. …

I personally have experienced 3 out of those 5 (I’m not telling which ones though) but at this point in my life I’m not involved in any of them! How come? If they're so addictive, why am I not addicted to / taking them now? (not that I ever was addicted to them)!

The answer is very simple, I don't have the “emotional requirements” for them. I feel good enough in myself to no longer seek things outside of myself to “make me feel better”. I may choose to attach myself to things occasionally, but they do not attach themselves to me! I therefore feel I have control over my behavior towards these things, alcohol and nicotine being very good examples.

Belief is very important here, and when believe you are addicted to something, you are invariably giving that thing more power than it deserves and certainly more than you feel YOU have towards it.

Therefore, stopping doing that thing will feel a lot harder than before.

It is therefore very unhelpful language to carry around inside your head.

22. The Nature of Attachment The answer to all the above examples is this. It’s not the ‘external factor” that’s important, it’s our emotional requirements that are important. How much do we believe we “need” (want really) these substances.

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The reason I’ve taken time out to write these chapters on addiction/ attachment is because: when we believe we are “addicted” to something, we immediately externalise our Point Of Influence and the external factors (heroin, nicotine, alcohol) etc becomes more powerful than we are. Language such as “it’s got its teeth in me” becomes commonplace and we absolve any control we had over the substance. If I were to put on my very cynical hat, I could even suggest that the idea of addiction is very profitable to certain companies, especially tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and even confectionary especially chocolate. We also instantly obtain a good excuse to carry on doing something that we enjoy (otherwise we wouldn’t do it).

What do they give us, in terms of outright pleasure for the sake of pleasure, or in terms of relief from physical or emotional pain, is a kind of relative pleasure (in other words, we may not feel happy or ecstatic but we feel better for not being in discomfort/agony etc.) We attach ourselves to things, not the other way around. External factors are inanimate objects, they can’t do anything to us, they can’t speak and encourage us to take/use them. We do all the work. To put this frankly, if we believe that alcohol for example is the only thing that's going to make us feel better then our self-esteem is very low and our stress levels will be very high.

If your self-esteem is very low your point of influence becomes external.

That is why we seek out external factors such as alcohol and other drugs, as we have no inner belief that we can help ourselves to feel better.

23. Smorgasbord Imagine you have in front of you a table with all the thousands, if not millions of things that you could attach yourself to if you wanted to: Crisps, chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, cannabis, ice-cream, coffee, toffee, banofee pie, sweets, cheese, 58

snuff, cigarettes, cigars, vapes, pancakes, scones, fast cars, sex, and drugs, etc etc.. maybe one or two of the above examples are relevant to you, you may have an attachment to them, but the others are meaningless. However, to other people, they may have attached themselves to the things you have no interest in and have no interest with the things that you have attached yourself to.

So, the things you find difficult to “Give up” are easy to others and vice versa. So what’s the difference? It’s plain to see that the external factor is irrelevant, whether its cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate or whatever. The important thing here is belief!

How much does a person believe they need something, how much have they attached themselves to that that thing (and not the other way around) remember external factors are inanimate objects, they can't do anything to you, they can't talk to you, they can't persuade you, they can't write letters to you asking you to partake in them.

Really, emotionally at least, nothing can make us do anything, it's us that does the accepting or rejecting of the idea or suggestion.

I’m very aware of how contentious these words are, I am not trying to undermine the people who struggle with “addictions” or “attachments”, I have helped many of them over the years (especially smokers, alcoholics and cocaine users) My opinion is that they were never addicted to these substances in the first place, but they all suffered from low self-esteem/belief that they couldn't stop the activity that they had attached themselves to. After all, biologically and genetically we are all very similar, if one person can quit something, then why can’t the next person?

Smoking cigarettes is a prime example. My stop smoking sessions last 90 minutes, in that time I challenge my clients’ old beliefs and introduce some new ones (some of which I’ve already written about here) but nicotine addiction is the main one. Once my clients realise that they are not addicted to smoking and that there is absolutely NO physiology attaching them to cigarettes, they instantly feel a lot more confident in stopping the habit and most of them go on to become 59

immediate non-smokers. Nothing else has change, cigarettes are still the same, it’s just the idea that counts.

So to summarise, if we practise something we become good at it. If we practise things we believe are going to give either real or relative pleasure (alleviating discomfort for example) we will expect and want to experience that pleasure at certain times and places.

If we build up a strong association of times and places or even feelings with these items (essentially a habit) then we start to think of not having these things anymore, we are going to become stressed at the absence of the nice feelings (or relative pleasures) we were getting.

If we believe that the only way we can create these positive feelings is through the external factors, then it’s going to be even more difficult to detach ourselves from them. The greater our emotional need, the greater we attach ourselves.

24. Association We live through association. Association is created by training our minds into reacting to something as what we believe is a “normality” In other words, when we think of something where is the first place our minds go to?

When we see a spider, what do we associate with it? Fear, affection?

Ambivalence?

When we think of cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, flying, what do we associate with them? Pleasure?

When we think of our childhoods what do we associate with it?

Happiness? Sadness?

Wherever our mind takes us has been created by habit, by association, we trained ourselves into the given response..

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None of the things we are thinking about are relevant in this process, we are all individuals with differences (as well as similarities) and external factors can’t “make us” feel or behave in a certain way towards them, if they could then surely, we would all feel the same way…

We are masters of changing our habits, and beliefs, we do it all the time!

The reason that the human race has proliferated across the world is that we are very adaptable, we can move into new environments and create new habits in order to survive there, habits come easily to us, good ones or bad. Therefore our habits/beliefs are malleable.

25. Neutral Contentment (Or “alrightness”) I believe that the pursuit of happiness is a bit of a mistake. We have a whole range of emotions; happiness is just one of them. To say that we are permanently happy, really means that we're flatlining.

We can't have happiness unless we have something to compare it against i.e. sadness. We cannot sustain one emotion permanently, it's impossible. That's why I think a state of neutral contentment is more realistic. If we live in a state of neutral contentment then we can respond to our environment, to the events outside of us, proportionately and in the “appropriate” manner.

Therefore, if something amazing happens we will feel excited and happy, if something scary happens, we will experience the fight or flight response. If we lose a loved one, we will feel grief and sadness.

All of these scenarios along with any other scenarios with different emotions have a beginning a middle and an end. They all come and go.

The idea that we can sustain one emotion permanently is highly unrealistic.

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I think we are perfectly adapted to live on this planet and to respond to our lives and the events in our lives proportionately and appropriately.

26. Negative Safety Net and the Nature of Control Just go back for a moment to the idea of the sub submarine and seeing a black dot on the horizon. What was your first thought?

Positive or negative.. What did you associate with the unknown entity? There is a very interesting process here that is possibly at play.

Sometimes (probably always) there is a value to holding on to negative ideas.

If you have a lots of blue balloon (or focused thinking) this may be especially interesting for you. Often, we tend to focus on things to get a sense of control over them. This is great if are focusing on something positive.

However, if we are focusing on something negative this is extremely problematic. Imagine the black dot on the horizon, looking at it through the crosshairs of the periscope, and now imagine how you'd feel if you turned your view away from it. Not looking at, not focusing on it anymore, may well create more anxiety then focusing on it and imagining it is something negative. Why? Because you can see it, you know where it is, this behaviour is more predictable.

If you were to turn your view away from it you can't see it anymore, you don't know where it is, and you don't know what it'll do next.

It can therefore come back and surprise you, you’ve lost (what little) control you had over the situation. This is a very important part problem making and problem breaking.

Remembering again there are only two types of anxiety, real-time 62

anxiety and anticipatory anxiety.

We are not at war in submarines and our lives are fundamentally safe now. It is anticipatory anxiety, or, more precisely our imagination that is the problem. Focusing on an imaginary problem in the belief that you can somehow control that problem is in fact the biggest problem you may have.

When you imagine letting go of a problem how does it feel? Difficult?

Anxiety inducing? Virtually impossible?

Remember that every time you think of a problem in order to resolve it you're adding rocks to your cairn, you're practising a belief and becoming better at it.

There is usually no magic moment where you resolve the problem in your head. No running down the street naked shouting Eureka.

The best way to solving a problem is to stop pushing the app.

When you stopped pushing the app you can start to build a better one next to it. This should be easy for you especially if you have a fair bit of blue balloon. You're great at focusing on things, you're great at building, you see things through to completion.

Please trust me on this, whatever your problem is, you'll never work it out by over thinking it, you’ll probably just make it worse.

Once your thinking shifts from negative to positive and attach positive emotions to it, you can build a new idea/ belief / habit very quickly.

It's also worth remembering that all problems will be constructed by overthinking them and also dramatising them. Our emotions also play their part here (being the fuel that powers our suggestions) So whatever new beliefs/apps you want to create, add lots of emotion to them. Excitement and pride are always good ones to use.

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So blue balloon and yellow balloon are very much play here.

Language becomes very important, try to minimise negative language and maximise positive language.

Whatever you choose to send to the mini you in your submarine is what the mini you will respond to. If it's negative then the panic buttons will be pushed to shouts of dive dive dive.

This is the fight or flight response releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.

If you choose to send the captain of your submarine positive ideas he or she will believe that everything is okay which will release all the nice really good hormones such as dopamine. Remember we are binary creatures, this is how simple we really are.

27. It’s a Jungle Out There!

This is another unashamedly weird analogy but please bear with it, it has a relevant message behind it.. here goes: A man wakes up to find himself completely naked in a jungle. He has no idea how he got there, he is confused and stumbles to his feet bleary eyed and begins to look around.

The first thing he is aware of is the beauty of this forest, the shimmering verdant foliage, the soft light and shadows speckling the lush leafy floor, he can hear gentle soothing birdsong, he loves where he has landed, it feels amazing, magical and natural.

He walks, breathing in the fresh clean air, relishing the environment which he feels so much a part of.

On he strolls…. absorbing his surrounding almost through osmosis..

Suddenly, he hears a faint rustle in the bushes… he stops….. he hears another one… his heart starts to beat a bit faster..”what is it, what could it be?” His mind conjures a picture of a tiger… he instantly 64

feels the blood coursing through his veins…his breathing is fast and shallow.. his heart pounding, his muscles tensing, he feels sick… he starts to panic … he starts to run….. he imagines the tiger following him.. he can’t see it, he can’t hear it… but he feels that it’s there…. he’s sprinting now.. faster and faster, the world is rushing by him in a blur, he can’t focus on anything … he’s lost all sense of logic, he just feels panic… fear… anxiety… he runs, he runs, he runs, he reaches a crevice, he starts to climb down it further and further it he nearly at the bottom.. he sees a cave… he runs inside to hide…

He’s in the dark now, recovering, breathing heavily but slowly more and more easily.. as his eyed become accustomed to the dark he starts to make things out in the shadows.. something catches his eye, a faint metallic glint.. he bends down and picks up a piece of metal.. its curved, hinged.. and shiny and strong.. he turns it over .. studiously.. then he realises what it is.. It’s a lower leg piece of a suit of armour!

WOW! he thinks.. what’s this doing here!

He bends down and wraps it around his lower leg.. it fits perfectly.. he thinks again of the tiger.. if it gets him by the leg the guard will protect him! He feels safer, reassured by the promise of protection.. he looks up… there’s another piece of armour in front of him.. a chest plate.. as he looks around he sees that the whole cave floor is strewn with armour.. enough to make an entire suit.. he starts clamping the metal around his body, it all fits, even the helmet.. he is now covered from head to toe… he lurches back out into the sunlight .. he feel great! safe, secure, wrapped in his metallic cocoon… …he continues to walk… stiffly but safely.. the view he has from inside the visor is limited but through it he enjoys the narrowed vista, the foliage framed by the darkness of the helmet… on he goes.. comfortable, satisfied in his safety.. he walks, boldly, striding out… purposely… on and on… however… soon he starts to feel tired, hot, bothered.. weighed down by the casing…he starts to worry again.. he doesn’t have the security of the cave, the bushes could be full of tigers…he has a dilemma…carry on with the armour and wear himself out, exhaust himself, or take it off…. be free again, but 65

vulnerable … hmmmm… He decides to lift up his visor… As the light fills his eyes he feels renewed already, he likes the feeling… likes the fresh air on his skin.. he walks a bit further… he hears a rustle in the bushes, this time he stops to look.

In the bushes he sees the most beautiful bird with the most fabulous plumage. It looks at him carefully and casually flies away.

He stops to think… he takes off his helmet, it feels great, it feels lighter, he feels liberated, he starts to take off other pieces of armour bit by bit slowly slowly freeing himself. Every bit that he takes off he feels better for, lighter and freer.

Soon he is as he started completely naked. It feels great. He carries on walking enjoying the beautiful scenery. He feels content, natural and normal just as nature intended.

You may have worked out the analogy of this story already.

Negativity is our armour. We use it to protect ourselves. It gives us a sense that we are ready for the worst-case scenario.

We can often be apprehensive about raising our thinking to Positive because it gives us further to fall if the worst-case scenario should happen, which is usually a one in a million outcome.

28. Ego Centrism We are all born with egocentric/narcissistic/pleasure-seeking traits!

This is a good thing because life is there to be enjoyed and we should do so.

Fundamentally we’re pleasure seekers, we are all looking for experiences, substances, objects etc that we believe will make us feel good.

From the moment we’re born we're looking for pleasurable feelings and we get them through being fed, held, cuddled, massaged, loved and so on.

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I believe that it is these formative years that set the template for the rest of our lives, from the ages of zero to two or three our lives are bliss, they’re heavenly, we have no responsibilities, and all of our basic needs are met. We don't even have to try to get “cooed” over, people just appear at our side!

It’s mainly positive until we reach our teenage years when hormones kick in and we start to get a taste of “adulthood”. The journey isn't always easy though-everyone (literally in my opinion) has negative experiences from childhood. I think we need to be narcissistic otherwise we wouldn't survive life itself.

I also believe that in adulthood we are subconsciously seeking to recapture our positive feelings from childhood.

This is why when we are stressed or anxious we revert to basic oral pleasures of food or smoking- or even nail biting for example because it subconsciously reminds us of those feelings of complete comfort safety and control.

You'll see from the personality types chapter where all compulsions are formed and play themselves out in later years.

It's interesting to note then, if we have a problem that is based on egocentrism/ narcissism and pleasure, we will happily swap that problem for a greater pleasure. An example of this is weight loss.

When my clients tell me they think it's difficult to lose three stone for example I asked them if they would find it easier to lose that weight if I were to offer them £1 million.

They'll say yes. Why? For one reason and one reason only. Because it's worth it!

As soon as they realise that they would get more pleasure from the new habit of weight loss i.e. £1 million than they get from the food that they attach themselves to they will swap pleasures immediately.

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You could even apply this concept to problems that have no perceivable pleasure attached to them.

If I were to offer £1 million to a client to overcome their fear of flying for example I suspect they will take that deal.

And even if they didn't take that deal there would be a point that they did accept maybe £2m, £5m or £10 million, world peace, feeding all the starving children in the world, immortality, at some point they would make the exchange. You can deduce from this that everything has an element of ‘what's in it for me’.

29. Perspective Remember if you can't change what's outside of you, you can change how you feel about it and ultimately, it’s only the feelings that matter!

A lot of my clients blamed a particular element of their lives for their problems. These are often things like their jobs, their financial situation, their relationships, all external factors.

I asked them to imagine 100 people in exactly the same situation that they're complaining about. I'll ask you to do the same.

At one end of the line of 100 people, there will be somebody that is thriving and that situation, relishing the challenges in front of them.

At the other end of the line there will be somebody ready to throw themselves off the nearest bridge. It is possible that you may be somewhere in the middle of that line. Now ask yourself what the differences between you and the other people? And the answer is perspective!

It can't be what's outside of you that's the problem otherwise everybody would be responding to it in exactly the same way, and they are not, it has to be a product of what's inside you and what are your beliefs are, how positive or negative your thinking is and your overall perception of the situation.

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Your perspective and perception are belief systems, they are malleable, they’re changeable, and you are very good at doing this.

It's possible/probable that the problems you have now didn't exist when you were younger but over time you're thinking shifted from positive to negative. Essentially that is all that happened.

Try to shift your thinking around by a few degrees to see things from another angle, a more positive one. If you do this, you're not drip feeding your subconscious mind negative ideas, your goldfish bowl will remain clear and the little you in your submarine can kick back and relax.

Remember to assume that everything is okay until you know otherwise. This is a habit, practice it, become good at it, make it normal.

It’s important to disrupt any recurring, problematic thoughts. If you find yourself having to tackle frequent, repetitive thoughts, here are a couple of useful strategies: If my clients tell me of any, or if find myself replaying something negative in my mind, I switch the scenario to me being in a nice posh, speedy sports car and speeding away from the scenario as quickly as possible whilst watching it becoming smaller and smaller before disappearing in the rear view mirror. I then look down at the steering wheel and see the logo in the centre. I then remind myself that the experience that originally created the problem Brought Me Wisdom! (BMW) Again, this is the suggestion, and it needs an emotion attached to it to function properly and again, pride works very well here. This is another way of training your mind into a new thought process because it a) removes you from the original experience and b) “makes it worthwhile” It is very useful as a general strategy against negative obsessive thoughts.

30. Flash Photography Another useful tactic is to freeze the memory at its most emotionally uncomfortable point so it’s like a photograph being held in the palm of your hand. Then imagine setting light to the photo and it igniting 69

in a flash of fire leaving a pile of ash in its place. Next you want to imagine blowing away the ash of the experience using the emotion that was originally created by the experience. If you practice this regularly, you should be able to reduce your anxiety towards the event considerably, crossing the line of control until it’s no longer a problem.

Another good way of changing your perspective towards something is to use a timeline.

Timelines have a beginning, a middle and an end. If there is a specific scenario i.e. A driving test, for example that is causing you anxiety, the likelihood is that it's your imagination that is creating the anxiety.

You're probably imagining lots of things going wrong, you failing the test, and the disappointment and embarrassment that this could bring. So try to become the world's best film director.

Create a timeline in your head which has the specific points to it.

Let's take the day of your driving test as an example.

You wake up in the morning and brush your teeth. This is the first scene. When you imagine yourself brushing your teeth try to also imagine how calm relaxed and confidence you're feeling (remembering Coue’s Law) moving to the next scene we could be seeing you walking out the door, imagine that the noise of the door creates feelings of relaxation and confidence, then the next scene, meeting your test examiner, feeling relaxed in his or her presence, the click of the seatbelt creating confidence, the specific tasks that you are imagining to be difficult, starting making them being easy and you feeling confident about. Go all the way through the driving test experience in this way, keep it simple and practicing over and over in your mind. You are rehearsing confidence.

Naturally is very important to minimise any native language that you may find in your mind: Use appropriate language. Remember we all have yellow balloon in us, therefore we can be prone to catastrophising.

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The problem isn't the problem without a bit of exaggeration going on.

Then stop and think about the words you're using, are they appropriate and proportionate to the situation?

If you're late for work and you're ranting at yourself saying it's “a nightmare” and “a disaster”, is this really true? Is it life-threatening?

It's really just an everyday event there will come and go and be forgotten with no lasting consequences.

Try to downgrade your language, suggest to yourself that the situation is “mildly inconvenient” for example, and you'll be sending yourself better ideas so your sub captain can stay calm.

Think about other words you may use and how you can change them to something more representational of what's going on outside you.

Remember that we are all self-healing machines. Our subconscious mind is trying to mend us 24-hours a day. It's trying to express those bubbles of emotion to resolve the inner conflict.

When the conscious mind prevents that from happening, the subconscious mind will express emotions in other ways.

If we were to put all of the chapters together into one simple and condensed version of the book, I think we’d find that actually, we’re all very similar in terms of our emotional development from childhood into adulthood.

I often hear people blaming their childhoods for their current malaise. Their language is often generalised and catastrophic, using statements like” I was always unhappy as a child” or” I was always being bullied” etc.

The truth is that all childhoods are a mixed bag, with many different experiences and many different emotions attached to them. I think it’s important to understand that NO-ONE gets through their childhood scot free. We will all have some negative emotional residue in some form or another. Therefore, be kind to yourself.

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Your problems were not your fault, you were going through a period of your life that you had no control over. In many ways, these experiences shape who you are now, be proud of yourself that you survived them and learned from them. It's impossible to sustain one single emotion, we can't perpetually be sad or depressed or even happy, because then we are flatlining and we have nothing, no alternative highs or lows to measure our feelings against.

We are always moving up and down with our feelings albeit in varying degrees depending on our general emotional state.

There is an old slightly hippyish expression that I like, “You can't step into the same river twice.” Why? Because the river is in a perpetual state of movement, therefore the water that you first stepped into has now moved on, so the second step is into different, new water.

The flow of time works in the same way, there is no “going back to square one” or going back in any shape or form, it's impossible, we can (and are) ALWAYS experiencing forward motion. Therefore, every experience, every second, every hour, day week month year etc is a new opportunity to create the right feelings for you.

So, if we are looking back and blaming our childhoods for example on our current problems, then it's because we are bringing those memories and experiences forwards with us.

I liken it to being in any enormous supermarket with a shopping trolley. As we walk around the supermarket it is up to us what we choose to put in the trolley. If we choose to put junk food in the trolley it will be unhealthy for us so if we have a trolley full of junk food imagine yourself gradually taking it out and putting in healthy fresh fruit and vegetables instead.

Put another way, if I asked you to carry around a heavy sack on your back full of bricks and rubbish for the rest of your life I suspect you would reject the offer. Because it’s pointless and has no value as well as being heavy, awkward, limiting and tiresome.

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Remember that your main objective here is to keep your stress ballon as deflated as possible, therefore keeping your problems small and manageable.

As a parting story, many years ago I had a client with an obsession with checking things (quite a common problem) and he used to pay me by cheque (remember those!?) He had the most immaculate handwriting, very neat, tidy and a pleasure to read. One week I commented on it, saying how nice it was on the eye. He said that when he was young he had a teacher at school who taught him from an early age to write and told him “if you’re going to write something, then write well!”

I now say that to many clients, but instead of the word “write”, I use the word THINK!!

A parting shot of real honesty: Some of the bubbles that are trying to express themselves may contain deep rooted issues which can carry very powerful emotions. Often, it’s best to release these under the supervision of a fully trained Hypno Therapist.

If you’re feeling like that may be the case, I’d strongly recommend that you seek professional help to guide you through the process and that Hypno - Analysis would be the best option.

I have been an active member of the International Association of Evidence Based Psychotherapy (or IAEBP) for over 20 years now.

I highly recommend this organisation for its ethics and its highly trained (in Hypno-Analysis) members. www.evidencebasedpsychotherapy. com

Or do some research of your own (either from friends or on the internet) but wherever you look, it’s very important to find a form of therapy that you’re comfortable with.

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Whatever route or option you choose, I hope this book has been helpful and that you get the result you’re looking for.

32. Conclusion It’s worth at this point in the book asking yourself a singular but very important question, which is: Whatever you’re doing inside your head, how much does it affect the outside world?

Probably nothing. If you’re catastrophising about something in the past, it won’t change anything about what took place, it will only create stress and anxiety in YOU so bin it! Otherwise, you’re just wasting time in the present.

33. Postscript On the 8th January 2021, I had a massive brain aneurism whilst in the Azores. It came out of nowhere. I hit the deck in a place called Porto Pim on the Island of Faial.

I don't remember much after it happened, but, as I 0found out later, I was flown by military helicopter to Lisbon, where I was put in an induced coma for 3 months, after which I had an operation to put a shunt into my head (it drains fluid from my skull into my abdomen) Apparently, during the operation I died more than once and was brought back to life. So why am I writing about this now!? A few different reasons really, the main one is: Having “experienced” death, I can honestly say that there was no parting of the clouds, no fire and brimstone, no court case in the heavens, really there was just a nothingness that I had no recollection of when I came out of the coma.

In later months, as my brain started to mend itself (which it is still doing), when I thought about the experience, I remembered that I had a sense of strange comfort, which I can only liken to imagining being suspended in soft, warm jelly.

I can say with some certainty that there was nothing negative about the “experience”.

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Now, at this point in time, I have no way of recalling those feelings, they are beyond my conscious thinking, but I do feel a definite sense of everything being OK when we (permanently) depart this mortal coil. I now have no fear of death/dying, I’d suggest that if you do, it’s worth spending time to overcome it. In my opinion, it’s another Control Based Anxiety (along with the ones mentioned earlier, ie spiders, birds, insects, being sick etc). These fears are often attached to the obsessive/ brooder personality type. Here’s a simple strategy that I use to help with this and any other obsessive thoughts/problems: Apparently, Red Indians believe that we don't really own anything, we are borrowing it all from our children and their children. I almost agree with this with the exception of one possession, which is this moment, the here and now. We do own this. It’s all we have really and whatever our status is financially or otherwise, it’s the same for each and every one of us. You certainly can’t take anything with you when you die (as I found out). Physical possessions are worthless to us when our time is up, my opinion is that it is far better to search inwards for happiness and meaning to life, than outwards (possessions are a product of an external POI).

It’s not the moment that’s the key factor here, it’s how we choose to feel within it, positive or negative, happy or sad. What we do with each moment is entirely up to us. Put bluntly, we are going to go through life anyway so we may as well try to make the best of it and enjoy it as much as is realistically possible!

Obviously, if you’re going through a moment of grief, a bereavement for example, then grieve, that’s why we have emotions, to help us express our feelings in any given point.

Allow this process to take place. Lighten your load, enjoy your time here! Relax. Be a Warrior not a Worrier.

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