5.1 Contemplation

Some people get into network marketing and dedicate themselves to developing a financial pyramid scheme based on selling cleaning products and cosmetics to their friends and relatives. The success of a sports team or political party is vitally important to some individuals; for others it is a particular religious or philosophical structure that gives meaning to life, while others are single-mindedly focused on getting laid.

How do you evaluate these core motivations? Do some seem more foolish or more base than others? Not everyone would agree on which are the foolish ones. Each of us was impressionable as a child, and the conditioning that you received when “the cement was wet” may have produced perspectives that are no longer valid, yet continue to influence your beliefs and motivations. Now that you are an adult and considering changing your course, what criteria do you use to determine which is the path of greatest advantage?

There are many ways to view the world, and some have enthusiastic advocates who are motivated to convert others to their value system. Since the goal of this kit is self-direction, the only values of importance are yours. How do you appraise the alternatives available to you? The criteria by which you evaluate other people’s motivations can tell you something about your own. For example, Ms. X evaluates people on the basis of how much joy or pain they bring to others; Mr. Y evaluates people on the basis of their income and social status; and Ms. Z evaluates people on the basis of how judgmental they are.

Appreciating your core motivation enables you to honestly appraise the choices available to you so that you can go for what you really want, rather than rebelling against, or slavishly complying with, the “shoulds” you have been conditioned to accept. There may be people who think they know what you should do—for your own good. But they have their own biases, and they don’t know all there is to know about you. The important question is: How do you select among motivations? What do you really want? And what are you willing to sacrifice to get it?

If you have never thought deeply about what is important to you, what you stand for, and what you want to be sure to include in this limited lifespan of yours, then what is the source of your core motivation? Do you even know what your core motivation is?

You are now at a crossroad, and are considering a radical change of course, but you are pulled in different directions. You will have to choose between maintaining access to the incentive and your path of greatest advantage; you cannot have both. So now is a good time to revisit or develop your core motivation, so that you can make intentional choices.

Contemplation
The indispensable first part of the exercise of will is deciding what you will. Each individual has a unique story and intended direction. Contemplation exercises provide one path to understanding of your core motivation.

Contemplation often involves posing a question such as: “What do I really want for this one life I have to live?” and then letting the mind explore, without editing, the thoughts and images that come along. Investing your cognitive resources in a contemplative investigation is interesting in its own right. The real payoff of contemplation exercises lies in the improved quality of life over the alternative that would result from following the path of least resistance.

• Thought Experiment: Contemplation – to access and investigate your core motivation you are invited to participate in an experience that combines a script designed to evoke a calm, clear mindset (presented as a trance inducing audio file) with an intention (in you) to discover or review your core motivation. Contemplation questions provide opportunities to dispassionately consider important aspects of your life. So now, or when convenient for you, get into a dispassionate mind set, listen to the contemplation audio file on the CD-ROM, let your mind go, and watch what happens

Occasionally, this exercise yields clear insights and specific answers; if you know what you want and have the motivation to do what it takes to get it, you are ready to complete the Decision Matrix presented later in this chapter. If there is any ambivalence, then continue working with the exercises in this chapter and elsewhere to answer questions such as:

• Who am I and where am I going?
• What is meaningful for me?
• What do I stand for?
• What do I really want for my finite lifespan?
• What must I do to get what I want?

Thus Spake Zarathustra
Another invitation to self-discovery was suggested by Nietzsche. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra describes two roads:

“One leads from the past, the other from the future, meeting at a gateway where I now stand (the present moment). But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence. I shall return, with this sun, with this earth . . . not to a new life or a similar life. I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the recurrence of all things.”

Nietzsche was proud of his ‘discovery’ of Eternal Recurrence, and there is more to it than at first meets the eye. The value of this exercise is unrelated to the validity of the concept; instead, the focus is on the choices you would make if it were true. Suspending your disbelief and acting as if this weird premise was valid can reveal your core motivation.

Thought Experiment: Eternal Recurrence. Consider a crossroad in your life that requires a decision from you: In evaluating your choices assume nothing but the premise of Eternal Recurrence. Act as if the path you select now will be the very same path you will be condemned to repeat for eternity. How would you behave if you were free from all constraints? Abandon all the “shoulds” and all the restrictions associated with the morality conditioned into you since childhood. For this experiment we are purposely choosing to ignore any concept of good and bad. You are free to make whatever choice you want, knowing that you will encounter the same choice point and make the same decision with the same consequences again during each of your recurring lifetimes—for eternity.

5.0: The Stages of Change

Evidently, your relationship with the incentive has led you to
the point where you are reading about how to change it.
Coincidently, the text says that individuals who have developed
an addictive relationship go through a predictable sequence of
stages, including one in which they gather information about
how to change by reading texts such as this.
In fact, much can be learned by observing what happens when
people attempt to end or control their relationship with an
addictive incentive. The Stages of Change model1 emerged from
researching how addictive relationships unfold over time. The
typical sequence of stages is listed below. As you review them,
see if you can identify your current position within this
developmental passage.
Pre-contemplation – Stage at which there is no intention to
change. You are unaware or under-aware of the problem. It isn’t
that you can’t see the solution; it’s that you can’t see the problem.

Contemplation – Stage of ambivalence; you are aware of the
problem and would like to give up the costs but are reluctant to
give up the benefits of incentive use.
The Decision – When it is clear that the costs of incentive use
far outweigh the benefits, you may decide to do what it takes to
change course. You make the decision with the understanding
that you may encounter local conditions that would motivate
lapsing, and so the promise that you will do what you said you
would do despite the influence of local factors is implied.
Action – Stage at which you develop the plan to change your
life’s course and begin to implement it.
Relapse Prevention – During this stage, which hopefully lasts
the rest of your life, you do what it takes to prevent relapse. If
you do relapse, you will cycle back to the contemplation stage
and at some point in the future go through these stages again.
Because it is both painful and hard to escape, an addictive
relationship condemns you to continue to cycle through these
stages until you achieve irreversible change, one way or another.
Like the passage from childhood to adulthood, the passage from
dependence to self-determination is complex and takes time.
During different stages you will face different challenges that
require different tactics. Tools well matched for particular stages
are described later in this chapter.
This model is useful because it suggests that the different stages
of this passage require different ways of coping. Because you
will be developing your own plan, you have the opportunity to
match your methods with the stage of change that best matches
where you are at now. Some rules of thumb:

• Do not rely on change processes appropriate for the
contemplation stage (e.g., costs-benefits analysis) when you
are in fact in the action stage. Trying to modify behaviors by
becoming more aware of why you should change is not
effective. Insight alone does not bring about behavior change.
• Do not rely on change processes appropriate for the action
stage until you are genuinely motivated to do what needs to
be done. Action without insight produces short-term change.
Recommendations for each stage:
Contemplation Stage: Most people are vulnerable to local
sources of motivation, because they have never developed a
core motivation, or if they have, they have forgotten it. Such
individuals are easily corrupted because their motivation is
always state-dependent—that is, there is no
core motivation to compete with local sources
of motivation.
The purpose of your life is not ending your
relationship with the incentive; rather it is to
be free of dependence on the incentive so you
can behave in accord with your principles and
interests—your core motivation. If you are
unsure about core motivational issues—such as: What do you
really want? What is meaningful to you? What do you stand
for?—please engage the contemplation exercises in Chapter 5.1.
Once you appreciate your core motivation, you can perform a
realistic costs-benefits analysis regarding incentive use by
completing the Decision Matrix, which follows these exercises.
The contemplation stage is completed when you have resolved
your ambivalence so you can make an incorruptible decision.

Decision Matrix to be a useful tool later when you are in the
action stage.
The Decision: The climax of your relationship with the
addictive incentive is your decision to change it. You must
appreciate that the decision requires that your behavior can no
longer be state-dependent. If you decide to quit drinking, you
cannot then have a drink just because you feel like it at the
moment. You accept the commitment with the understanding
that you will go to any lengths to adhere to its terms. Be aware
that unlike a goal, a commitment is a promise. If you make one
and fail to honor it, it would have been better to have declined
it and avoided the violation of your vow. So, if you are not yet
ready to make such a commitment then
return to the contemplation stage
exercises. If you are ready to proceed,
be aware that whatever you decide
during the action stage implies a No
Exceptions Clause such as, “I agree to
permit no exceptions to the
contingencies stated here—regardless of
how reasonable a momentary lapse may
seem at the time.”
Action Stage: Once you appreciate your core motivation, and
have decided upon your intentions, you will have to act. This is
a major undertaking and you will have to pay attention to
following your intended course for quite some time, so you will
need a plan. The action stage includes developing your plan
and the first few days or weeks of following it, and lasts until
the initial excitment of the new project wears off. Then the
most important stage begins.
Relapse Prevention Stage: Research shows that most people
who achieved good long-term outcome did so only after several
trips through the sequence of stages. Don’t be discouraged if

you have relapsed in the past; instead, learn from your experience
in order to discover what it will take to prevent relapse. In the
beginning, most people are highly motivated to do what it takes
to be free of their problem. After this initial “whoopie effect”
has past, the real battle begins. As long as you perform well,
time is on your side, and you will get better with practice.
However, as you might suspect, some people become sloppy as
the salience of their original commitment dissipates with the
passage of time. Good outcome requires that your motivation
to adhere to your plan is always greater than the forces that
would pull you into relapse. Your task during the Relapse
Prevention Stage is to respond as intended during the high-risk
situations that lie ahead until your intended reactions become
the default.2
The chapters of this section are presented in the order suggested
by the stages of change mode, but users are encouraged to focus
on the content best matched with their current stage.
2. The “rule of three” provides a rough guide to the creation of an intended
default path: If you adhere to your plan for 3 days that means you have gone
beyond merely thinking about it and have begun to engage the challenge; if
you adhere for 3 weeks you may notice it takes less cognitive energy to cope
successfully with many of the high-risk situations you encounter; by 3 months
successful coping reactions become habitual and often occur without conscious
effort; and by three years the intended action patterns have become autonomous
and your path of greatest advantage has become the default path.

4.4: Invitation to the Trance

Covert experience is cheap. Imagining what would happen if you take a curve too quickly on a slick road is less costly than learning from direct experience. Taking the time to purposely engage your mental faculties, including rational analysis and creative imagination can prepare you to cope with the unavoidable crises that await you on your journey ahead. The exercises in this chapter will give you the opportunity to explore and develop your cognitive resources.

The Exercise of Will
During the early phases of behavior change you will encounter many autonomous paths that lead to relapse, and so you will have to be vigilant for the early warning signals of state-dependent biases the would promote relapse. These are your signals to switch to a meta-cognitive perspective and dissociate from your current state. A recommended tactic is to use this moment of dissociation to ask Will’s Question: “What is the best use of my attention right now?” The answer to this question may then be used as the target stimulus to achieve Intentional Trance Formation. The objective of this tactic is for you to get yourself focused on thoughts or activities that promote good outcome as you define it, rather than to allow yourself to get sucked into the emotional states and the autonomous behavioral sequences they evoke.

Contemplation
To understand what good outcome means to you, invest 20 minutes of your attention to contemplate questions such as: “What do I really want for this one life I have to live?” Engaging such issues with your full cognitive powers can produce more interesting adventures and a higher quality of life than mindlessly following the path of least resistance. There are many methods to facilitate the contemplative process; the attached CD-ROM includes:

· Ask Alice
· Short Harmony

Other Transformative Tools
Intentional Trance Formation refers to a range of covert tactics that can help you intentionally change your life’s course. The attached CD-ROM contains hypnotherapy audio files (in MP3 format) including inductions and scripts that address specific addictive relationships. These may be copied to a format that will be convenient for you to play in an environment appropriate for the purpose of the exercise.

· Hypnotic Induction: This is a general hypnotic induction.

· Suggestion: An exercise to enhance your ability to use your imagination to influence your subjective reality.

· The audio files below are designed for specific addictive disorders. See Psychological ARTS' web site to register and download the appropriate files.

o Nicotine
o Substance Use
o Overeating
o Impulse Control – e.g. gambling, pornography, computer use, etc.

4.3: Meta-Cognitive Awareness

Crises have both predisposing and precipitating causes ─ a predisposing cause of World War One was the complex set of military alliances among European powers, while the precipitating cause was the assassination of Prince Ferdinand. Likewise, relapses are triggered by specific precipitating events at times when predisposing circumstances render the individual vulnerable to them. This chapter describes a cognitive strategy that permits you to conserve the resources required to perform well during crises, and thereby gives you more control over the predisposing causes; the next chapter describes several cognitive strategies to manage crises and other precipitating events.

We learned how to think when we were children, and most of the time we still think that way. Some schools of thought distinguish between the primitive mentality of childhood and more advanced cognitive strategies. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience, including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings, is merely a temporary, state dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind. The objective world is populated with events; it is only in our subjective experience that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical name for this realization is: Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

It is often easier to see the solution to another person's problems than to your own, because subjective reality is biased by our local fears and desires. It is easier to appreciate the big picture and put things in a realistic perspective when we are detached from temporary emotional states. Meta-cognitive awareness involves dissociating from local experience so you can observe it dispassionately. The awareness that your thoughts and emotional reactions are merely passing experiences ─ not necessarily unbiased reflections of objective truth ─ can free you from the Soul Illusion!

A child may label mental events, for instance thoughts and feelings, according to some judgmental scheme such as good or bad. The evaluation crystallizes these experiential phenomena into "things" that have an independent reality. For example: “It is terrible that my team lost” rather than “I feel terrible that my team lost.” From the perspective of Meta-Cognitive Awareness, thoughts and feelings are viewed like sounds ─ simply passing events in the mind that arise, become objects of awareness, and then pass away.

Mindfulness is a discipline that promotes Meta-Cognitive Awareness and is defined as: Awareness of present experience with acceptance [non-judgment]. Much of our behavior occurs autonomously while we are “asleep at the wheel.” As we go about our daily lives, we are typically preoccupied with the past or future while our actions in the present mindlessly follow the path of least resistance. In contrast, mindfulness involves keeping attention in the present moment without judging it as good or bad - to calmly and consciously observe and accept whatever is happening in the here and now.

Thought Experiment: Mindfulness Meditation ─ Focus your attention on the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don't analyze it or judge it, and return your attention to the breathing. Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape through this exercise). As you follow your breath you will notice that all sorts of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness to which you will react. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and, rather, to experience the here and now directly without filtering it in any way.

Awareness of the continual shifting of emotional state from moment to moment and from situation to situation gives you the opportunity to develop the skill to disengage from bad trances and intentionally change your perspective. Developing Meta-Cognitive Awareness is effortful because it requires that you pay attention, rather than drift in the direction of least resistance, asleep at the wheel.

Acquiring Meta-Cognitive Awareness permits mindful behavior, which is an alternative to the kinds of behavior patterns that promote relapse:
o Autonomous behavior
o Behavior driven by passing emotional states.
________________________________________

Autonomous Behavior
The consequence of repeatedly engaging the addictive activity is that the sequences of events that produce the addictive experience become autonomous. Once that happens, whenever you are not intentionally controlling your actions you may be on a default path that leads to relapse.

Consider a time when you were driving your vehicle along a familiar route, and you were so absorbed in your thoughts ─ planning some future activity or ruminating on a current concern ─ that you didn't notice passing a certain landmark along the way, or the music from the vehicle's sound system, or the feel of the steering wheel in your hands. And even though the conscious mind was so completely preoccupied that you didn't notice all these things, a part of you was driving the vehicle and operating it perfectly safely.

Since your conscious mind was preoccupied with its thoughts, who was operating the vehicle? It must be a part of you of which you are not conscious. The unconscious, experiential processing system is capable of guiding complex performance while making little demand on your finite conscious resources. Indeed, most of the time you are not consciously operating the bio-psycho-social vehicle you inhabit, because your attention is focused elsewhere, or not at all.

By contrast, "mindful" driving means being fully present in each moment, consciously aware of sights, sounds, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise ─ being awake so you can respond intentionally rather than follow the path of least resistance. When mindful, you can act in accord with your interests and principles despite the influence of local stressors and temptations that would promote relapse.

Buddha means "awake." When asked, "Are you a god?" Gautama, the person who became the Buddha replied, "No." "Then what are you?" he was asked again. Gautama's answer was, "I am awake."

Relapse often occurs when you are “asleep at the wheel,” and an autonomous behavioral sequence unfolds along the path of least resistance. Developing more advanced cognitive strategies can enable you to perform mindfully ─ an eye opening experience.

For those who have been asleep at the wheel, the Buddha suggests awakening from the mindless trance. Maintaining mindfulness is critical during periods of intentional habit change. Early detection of relapse-related patterns of thinking and feeling can help you nip a relapse in the bud. In other words, the mindful recognition of an early warning sign can wake you up so that you intentionally interrupt the autonomous sequence before it develops momentum toward relapse. This topic is discussed in detail in the next section.
Fear, Desire and the Mentality of Childhood
Up to now, the text has focused on incentive motivation, which results from repeated exposures to a payoff – the incentive. The other source of motivation, drive, comes from within and seeks to remove the discomfort caused by a perceived need. Hunger motivates the search for food, thirst motivates search for water, and pain motivates one to seek relief. The greater the discomfort, the greater the drive for relief.

A predisposing cause of internal discomfort is, the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. When the child is angry, then Mommy is bad, and, in the child’s state-dependent world, she always has been and always will be. The dispassionate observer can see that the child is in the midst of a tantrum, which will pass;. later the child will be in a different state of mind, and then everything will appear differently.

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children. Provoking a relapse during a high risk state is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

Accepting state-dependent beliefs and perceptions as objectively valid can cause you to fall into a recursive sequence of anxiety, depression, or anger. These are painful experiences that can drive you to seek the temporary relief the incentive offers. Moreover, the emotional states can be exhausting and deplete the cognitive resources that would otherwise enable you to cope with the difficulty and act in accord with your interests and values.

Meta-cognitive awareness - that subjective reality is continually morphing from situation to situation - can enable you to wake yourself out of recursive traps. Mindfulness, awareness of present experience with acceptance, is practical method to detach from a transient state and observe it

4.2: Intentional Trance Formation

You are always in one trance or another. You are angry when your attention is captured by a stimulus that evokes anger. In fact, your current trance is determined by the stimulus that has captured your attention at the moment. Not all stimuli are equally salient; some are more attention grabbing than others. Highly salient stimuli have the potential of eliciting a state change without your conscious intention or awareness.

Stimulus Salience refers to how effective a stimulus is at capturing your attention, not necessarily how important it is. Perceiving a rattle snake at your feet would likely change your motivational state. Even if you really wanted to maintain your focus on this text, it would be difficult to ignore the snake. The fact that threatening stimuli are highly salient is adaptive, and consequently we are descended from the organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those that did not are not our ancestors.

So a rattle snake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia even the thought of a snake – which is not objectively threatening – can elicit a powerful motivational state. In this case the snake is salient, but meaningless.

Reward refers to the pleasurable aspects of drinking or using a drug. Reinforcement refers to the effect the substance use has on autonomous behavior. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement from substance use is that the stimuli associated with getting or using the substance become highly salient. They will catch your attention even when you don’t want them to and, if you allow yourself to attend to them, they can elicit a trance that promotes relapse. To follow the path of greatest advantage you will have to develop the strength to avoid or escape the influence of the many meaningless but highly salient stimuli you are bound to encounter.

To produce the version of you that is most appropriate for the challenge you face, focus your attention on the stimulus [object, thought, or image] that elicits the intended trance. That may not sound very difficult, and you certainly have the faculties required, but as you may have guessed, executing in real-time requires some preparation.

There are many benefits to developing the ability to intentionally alter your subjective reality in real-time; here our interest is to cope with stressors and temptations that would motivate relapse. How you perform in such situations largely depends upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. But appraisals such as “heroism” do not exist in the objective world, only in the mind of the beholder.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you invent. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history ─ and so can never be undone ─ but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it.

So why not create a fiction that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating fictions that produce bad outcomes for you? That is the point of intentional trance formation – to intentionally transform objective reality – your overt behavior, accomplishments, and relationships with others – by creating subjective realities that promotes these outcomes.

As you follow your intended path you are likely to encounter high-risk situations where you will be tempted to be pulled off of your path by local conditions. This kit has used several metaphors for this conflict as suggested by terms such as willpower, mental strength, battle, tactics, and strategies. Regardless of the metaphor, we want this conflict to resolve in your favor.

Warrior Metaphor:
How the conflict among stimuli that are competing for your attention plays out determines your subjective reality. For your intentions to be effective in real-time you will have to be able to focus on what you choose despite the pull of highly salient stimuli that would promote relapse. Just as you would strengthen muscle power by lifting weights against the downward pull of gravity, so you can strengthen willpower by focusing on an intended target despite the pull of distracting stimuli. This exercise is called meditation.

Thought Experiment: Counting your breaths ─ Visualize or sub-vocalize the number “1” during your first exhale, the number “2” during your second exhale, and so on. You will find that your attention tends to wander away, the exercise is to bring your attention back to the target. If you forget what number you are up to, just continue with the number “1.” Each repetition of returning your attention to the intended target is analogous to lifting a dumbbell. If meditation is analogous to lifting weights then hypnosis is analogous to working out with a personal trainer, and the high-risk situations you encounter are your sparing partners – opportunities that help you develop the abilities required to escape dependence and follow your path of greatest advantage.

4.1: Operating the Creature You Inhabit

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the Central Nervous System, which operates your skeletal muscles, so you can raise your hand at will, but your emotions and other biological reactions are controlled by your Autonomic Nervous System, which is not subject to direct conscious control.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a sour but juicy lemon.

For those who engage in regular physical exercise, observe the temporary effects on strength and stamina of recalling in detail a situation that makes you angry. Some people find that evoking a cringe (see below) produces a similar increase in heart rate and physical energy, but with a different flavor of discomfort.

Of primary interest for our purposes is the subjective reality of a craving. For many individuals merely thinking about the incentive or, perversely, trying not to think about it produces an urge to use it. However, you have the ability to influence your immediate motivational state by purposely thinking certain thoughts. For example, thinking in detail about the penalties of relapse can decrease the urge to use the incentive. With practice, you can enhance your ability to intentionally influence your motivational state [trance] in real-time.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe. Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself. You will find that the more detail you can conjure up the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation – that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus – in this case, an embarrassing moment ─ in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to focus and use your imagination are included in this kit precisely because there is so much resistance to efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people intentionally suppress efficacy enhancing imagery because they were trained to be modest or to avoid the sin of pride, but there are more universal impediments to positive self-suggestion:

• Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more dramatic and threatening, negative, efficacy deflating imagery is more salient than positive, efficacy enhancing imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote self-direction are less salient than stimuli that would promote relapse – especially during high-risk situations.

• Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept suggestion from a hypnotist – who may know nothing about you or your situation ─ than it is to accept your own suggestion. Giving suggestions to yourself seems forced and inauthentic, a consequence of the tacit premise that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simple be an attempt to deny the ugly truth. In fact there is no authentic you. The version of you before a lapse when you are experiencing positive outcome expectancies is different than a later version who regrets the relapse. In fact there are infinite versions of you, and whichever version is dominant at the moment feels like the only one possible. Suggestions, whether developed by you or an external agent, are creative fictions designed to evoke the intended subjective reality so that you can perform as intended in real-time.
Suggestion
Hypnosis is a powerful method to deliver suggestion and thereby change an individual’s subjective reality. Most people believe that as a result of the hypnotic induction a mindless subject is compelled to obey the suggestion of the hypnotist, which results in a profound misunderstanding of both hypnosis and self-determination. The belief that the hypnotist is in control is not surprising, because stage demonstrations of hypnosis often include a challenge – for example: "Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/ but it will be so heavy/ that you won't be able to do it.”

This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact the phenomenon is produced completely by the subject, and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation you can experience this classic hypnotic suggestion by downloading the Heavy Shoe file.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as "your shoe is made of lead." In fact your shoe is not made of lead. Clinicians will often use scripts such as this because they show how suggestion can influence actual experience and behavior, and the demonstration is dramatic and easy to produce in the office setting. The experience and behavior is nonsensical because the hypnotist suggests a reality that is objectively false. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true ─ e.g., your shoe is made of lead ─ produces behavior that would appear silly to an observer, which is why stage hypnosis often produces laughter from the audience who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion.

But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your subjective reality. But how you perform in real-time depends to a large extent upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history [and so can never be undone], but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it. So why not create a subjective reality that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating self-sabotaging fictions?

Suggestion, the use of imagination to influence subjective reality, can be used therapeutically to change the predictable patterns of mood disorders, addictive disorders, as well as a wide range of relationship problems. This capability requires a good imagination and the ability to focus attention. Like other talents some individuals are more gifted than others, but everyone improves with practice. The Heavy Shoe audio is a stimulus with which to practice; its purpose is to strengthen your ability to intentionally influence your subjective reality in real-time.

4.0: Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. There is nothing unusual about hypnosis, everything we experience is trance. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to one of the induction audio files in this kit [see Appendix A: Trance Formation Audio Files], but you don’t need a formal induction to change your state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency ─ Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your state of mind and body. State-dependent phenomena ─ including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution ─ are determined by the subjective reality that existed only in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

In the example above the information that evoked the stressful state was objectively false, and so the trance was not valid. But some kinds of information are neither objectively true nor false, so the trances they evoke are neither valid nor invalid. Pathogenic structures emerge when the individual considers such information to be important [e.g., “others find me unattractive,” “I don’t have what it takes to succeed.”]

Barry, the 31 year-old engineer who views himself as socially awkward is at a party with co-workers, when his supervisor makes a joke at his expense. Barry would love to respond with a clever comeback, but he expects to be inarticulate. Will there be a witty exchange or an awkward silence?

The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well” exist only in Barry’s mind not in the objective world, but his subjective reality has a great influence on how he performs in the real world. Appreciating Barry’s tendency to freeze up in such situations, one coworker expects an embarrassing pause and another expects him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Objective reality is determined by how Barry actually performs.

When he is in the right state of mind Barry can be very funny and quick witted. Whether or not he can use this talent in this stressful situation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “I’m a nerd” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual.

So there is a conflict between Barry’s intentions ─ to be cool and clever ─ and his expectations of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine his subjective reality at the critical moment? Which will be the effective stimulus when Barry is faced with his crisis?

Expectations have the advantage ─ both Barry and his friends believe them to be objectively true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. As a dispassionate observer I can see that Barry himself is the source of an artificial limitation that diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. My task as his therapist is to help him create a subjective reality that is at least as valid as the one he currently holds, but that evokes more self-serving trances.

At first Barry resisted change because being someone different than he really is would be inauthentic. My first task is to challenge his tacit premise that there is a real Barry. In fact I have met many versions, including the clever Barry and the intimidated Barry. Intentional Trance Formation refers to the method of transforming a less resourceful version into one that is more resourceful. The ambitious objective of this section is to enable you to intentionally influence your subjective reality and hence you capability to cope with real-time challenges.