Lessons from my Hypnotist – Part 3: Practicing Self-Hypnosis for Anxiety & Role-Shifting

Guest post by client Abigail Caress

My morning started with a water heater on the fritz and a crying preschooler. It felt like shots fired in the window, for all the mental barrage I was feeling at 6:40AM.

I had my tears first. Then I had to muscle through getting both kids ready for school, calling the plumber, and trying to realign my brain for something resembling (paid) work.

There was a lot going on in my mind. In the past week, we had totaled our family car in an icy accident, my husband had worked overtime and through a weekend (leaving me as default parent to our kids), and during the week I had helped move my grandmother into hospice and pack up her apartment, all while I had dealt with car insurance and undergone my own stressful medical testing.

To then face another expense and care task—the water heater issue—suddenly felt like the last straw. I was in a fluster, a meltdown, an exhausted woe-is-me mindset that only happens when I’ve hit this kind of tumble-down feeling under a pile-up of responsibilities without hope of rest.

I sat down at my computer and did the very first obvious thing – opened my email. I couldn’t focus past the first task of sending invoices.

Until I spotted a ball sitting on my desk and was reminded that I had hypnosis tools to reach for right there.

My Tools for Self-Hypnosis

And, the tools were part of my homework. Wally and I had just had a session few days before this, and I felt guilty for not remembering that I was supposed to be practicing self-hypnosis every morning and night since then.

But maybe it’ll help.

I reached for the ball, passing it back and forth between my hands to redirect my mind to both sides of my body, changing my awareness. Breathing deep.

Then I reached for the next part of my kit – the stone that we had used in session to remind me of my favorite hypnotic place of rest: my backyard of my childhood. It was a mental space to reach for, the place to go to ‘dive’ mentally in and out of hypnosis when I’m by myself.

My visualization journey goes like this: The garden gate. The clustered grass and clover and wild violets under my feet, never tamed into proper lawn. The mulberries and the wildness at the back of the yard, edged off by chicken wire shoved under the fence to keep our little dog in. The sleek black cat in the silver collar who liked to lounge in the grass in the sun. The crunch of gravel on the driveway to the side of the house and yard, a sound I heard when my dad pulled his truck forward when he came home all those years when he was alive. The peace and sunlight and quiet, the soft breeze. The smooth stone, associated with this, in my hand and here, where I was right now.

The rope is the next part, and I had to reach for it while in an eyes-open lighter hypnotic state. Like praying a rosary and feeling the beads, the knots on the rope are meant to be repetitions of your choice of affirmations.  It’s based on the DICCC model of hypnotist Marisa Peer, who teaches how to direct, instruct, compel, and code the mind into a new state of purpose, rest, or trust with this kind of repetition while in self-hypnosis.

I had a lot on my mind, so my code felt long:

With God’s help – I will make it. I will find creative solutions and rest. With God’s help – I will make it. I will find creative solutions and rest. With God’s help – I will make it. I will find creative solutions and rest.

I was trying to put myself back in a trusting state.

Doing Parts Work: Shifting Mental States & Roles

Next came getting ready for actual work by shifting my mental role into a writer’s mindset. I had to get there by doing what Tom and Lauri Holmes call “Parts Work” – associating another hypnotic state with a different part of myself – not the worried mother, not the household manager dealing with the plumber and the car, but the artist and writer who says what she feels and does it calmly, even energetically. I had to find a way to invite her forward into the “living room” of my mind, as the Holmeses call it. ¹¹

I had built in our last session my associations with this mode, a memory of the ease I felt during the writing process from my last published novella, mostly composed while I sat drinking the maple coffee at our local Jackrabbit Café, sipping sporadically while on my laptop I was writing away under a window in sunlight and enveloped in the polite, calm business of the coffee shop around me. In a minute, I was there.

In the next, I sat down and wrote all about it, and now you’re reading it, here with me.

To learn more about self-hypnosis, contact Wally Post here.

Source:

1. Holmes, Tom and Lauri. 2007. Parts Work: An Illustrated Guide to Your Inner Life. Kalamazoo, MI: Winged Heart Press. p.8 ↩︎

---

Abigail Caress is a published writer and freelance marketing consultant specializing in nonprofits, ministries, and small businesses. Check out her website and blog at www.abigailcommunicates.com.