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.