[Music] most people see what's known as allopathic Solutions allopathic means treat the symptom not the cause everyone has some unresolved emotional crap and as long as we are committed to just treating medication or as helpful as it is for some people just talking about it
and talk therapy at a rational level then we're not really solving the cause the cause is what the person is thinking every day that predisposes them to emotionally and behaviorally reacting that's where a lot of hypnosis comes in is changing the belief once the real issue is resolved
at the root at a subconscious level it doesn't come back so basically we took the Vicious Cycle and just you know cut it you're giving your client agencies back everyone no matter where they are in life has the potential to unlearn these disempowering mental programs foreign
with another infinite Loops today we have back by popular requests my guest Todd Goodwin who is a board certified hypnosis expert also a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming something that we talked about earlier and that I studied endlessly when I was a teenager when all
that stuff was kind of cool sorry sorry you mean it's not cool anymore I'm bringing it back baby it's cool once again we are single-headedly you and me gonna make neuro-linguistic programming cool again let's make that our our goal what do you think in with it with a name like
neuro-linguistic programming what's not to love it's already cool yeah but all the tech guys are going to say uh NLP means natural language all right [Laughter] who needs AI who needs artificial intelligence if you can really master your natural intelligence and most
people have not yet begun to master that but that's an important thing the natural intelligence can solve many problems without AI see I completely agree with you but I also am very uh excited about AI because AI can be an amplifier of our natural intelligence which I think is
very cool you can AI has the ability like we can't at least I can look into an array of I don't know 100 million data items and and see all of the liminal connections and I think one of the really cool uses of AI is it can and so we're gonna do lots of projects like feeding every story back to
Gilgamesh into AI let's let's actually jump in um we were chatting beforehand and you you said a couple of things that really fascinated me today we're going to look at uh all of the various case studies uh that illuminate why hypnosis can be so helpful for people
and uh as I was getting ready for uh today's podcast uh one of the things I call AI in your stuff was most people seek uh what What's known as allopathic Solutions allopathic which is basically the way the United States practices medicine by and large uh you know allopathic means treat the symptom
not the cause so we get you know what's Downstream from that are a lot of behaviors that are not great right like if you've got a horrible headache and all you do is pound a leave or aspirin or whatever uh that can solve it in the short term but oftentimes it's not looking for the
cause of those headaches sometimes benign sometimes serious so it also kind of conditions us I think and I want your opinion obviously to to think oh you know I got a headache I'm just gonna take some aspirin and move on and and most of the time yeah that's fine uh but
sometimes when we don't look for the cause we can just have that recur recur recurrent when we were chatting uh you said that you look at symptoms as dates I like that because uh you know a lot of these things and I'm going to ask you uh to walk us through some um to help people understand
uh the states uh can be like somebody's overweight that's a state it's a symptom but it might have a cause that is it's very very different and what I'd like you to do Todd is take a couple of uh examples of people you've treated successfully in the past with hypnosis
because my guess is they tried a lot of other stuff first please yeah for sure and I'd be happy to um I just can I just start with the a brief Parable that I think will really cement the whole notion of what you were talking about when you said um upstream or Downstream it triggered this
so there's something called the parable of the river um and uh you you may know it but this is this is my retelling of it as I recall so there was this you know far off Land There was a river and a village on the side of the river and um uh there were
some people you know just picnicking or something on the side of the river and they noticed that a baby was just sort of floating down the river towards a waterfall and these people were very alarmed and they went back to the village and um you know after a few more sightings
of more babies you know one at a time floating down the river to their Dune uh they gathered the the Elders of the village together and they said what what what are we going to do we have to save these babies we have to you know prevent them from going over the waterfall
hmm and so they all agreed that they would set up watch Towers um to see the babies coming from a little farther Upstream so they'd have time to go and you know go in and rescue them with rafts and and swimmers and divers and all these things and they set up all this whole apparatus to prevent
the babies from falling over um the waterfall um and so it became like the main focus of the village and while the first this was successful over time more and more babies were floating down the river and it was it became almost too many for the people of the
village to handle more watchtowers more divers more swimmers pretty soon there were dozens of babies at any given time going down the river and someone said wait a second why don't why don't we go upstream and figure out how these babies are ending up in the river to begin with and the
village Elders said no don't be foolish if we do that we won't have anyone here Downstream to stop them from going over the waterfall so when I've told that story before to illustrate in a way the absurdity of Our Sick care system and I mean that in mental health as well
as the physical allopathic approach is that while yes it's important that we treat symptoms because trim symptoms lead to harmful unhealthy chronic States like obesity or um poor Health financial relationship issues that's not really a you know a allopathic issue but you know there's
any number of persistent states that people have that they suffer from and that is really the main reason why our Health Care system is a disaster and so expensive and so while it's important to treat symptoms it's critically important to go upstream and figure out who's dropping
these babies in the river to begin with and go Upstream to the cause and now I am I you know I used to be a nutritionist 20 something years ago and so I I learned all about this from the dietary point of view but even people who are overweight because they're eating too
much or eating poorly and not moving enough and usually that's the cause that is usually caused by something emotional and that emotion is usually caused by something the person is thinking and that thought pattern whether it's mental pictures or a belief is often caused by
not caused is often programmed into their subconscious mind by some emotionally distressing experience and I do want to say before I get into a few examples and jump in anytime you want Jim but you know the adverse childhood experience is the Ace studies they've done where they look at
um you know what what's included in that is everything from neglect to physical sexual verbal abuse to being at home growing up with domestic violence substance abuse even divorce in some cases and and other very or mental illness with a parent so these things
based on various Studies have affected probably I think it's I read 55 to 65 percent of people depending on the study have had some adverse childhood experience and some portion of those have had three or four or five of them then when you add into that adult onset or I should say adult life
traumatic experiences we're looking at the vast majority of people who have had emotionally upsetting experiences and most people by no fault of their own do not process that experience fully and effectively and as a result it leaves residual baggage which over time
causes emotional and behavioral problems and when those emotional behavioral problems are persistent you have hormonal imbalances stress hormones sex hormones all these things can be imbalanced due to certain emotional behavioral Tendencies plus weight gain plus weakened immune system and so on
and then that leads to Chronic and degenerative illnesses not to mention any number of other social problems and as long as we are committed to just treating medication or as helpful as it is for some people just talking about it and talk therapy at a rational level
then we're not really solving the cause and the cause is not you know solved by preventing kids from being in upsetting environments growing up because that's inevitable that's part of life the cause is what the person is thinking every day that predisposes them to emotionally and
behaviorally reacting so everyone no matter where they are in life has the potential to unlearn these disempowering very often disabling and debilitating mental programs and once that happens then you're basically pulling the weed out by the roots and everything that comes from that root
which is the thought process and everything that comes from it emotionally behaviorally goes away and then you have a real shot at resolving that state whether it's Financial dependency or codependency relationship sabotage obesity addiction uh chronic grief or depression and so on uh the my
current guest on the podcast that's up right now as we're recording this uh is a consultant uh on decision making and he had a really interesting comment uh that what you just said remind reminds me of and his comment was that habits are what create your personality
and I and I thought that was like really interesting because it's tangential but it's adjacent certainly that kind of this idea of what you consistently and persistently think becomes your reality right not always of course like if we were delusional and we thought we were
on you know uh aliens from Sirius maybe that doesn't become a reality but it maybe gets us institutionalized but as as I listen um that seems to make sense to me and it almost seems I I was approached not too long ago by a friend who we used to be on the speaking circuit together and it
was like dude I can't make speeches anymore and I'm like what do you mean you're not doing it you're retired from because like that was like a main source of nisenko yeah and he's like no no no I literally am terrified I like I have the world's worst stage fright and I was
really really shocked because like for I don't know however many years he's younger than I am but so say for 10 years anytime I was speaking with him I was always taken by like how good he was he was a natural you know what I mean um and and it sounds it I don't know why
the the he just got uh Jarred In My Memory but listening to you it sounds like he might have had some sort of like uh one of these seeds that then got water yeah and that's interesting because um you know I've worked a lot with people with fear of public speaking which I have
maybe infamously said is not at all about speaking in public so um it's it's usually a fear of generally a fear of judgment or criticism or rejection which ultimately comes from a fear of not being good enough smart enough ready enough whatever so the seed could have been
you know here's what's really interesting the seed could have been something a parent said I'm not saying in your friend's case but I've had clients where their parent warned them a lot don't talk to strangers yeah that's really funny but but that's that's who you're talking
to when you're definitely speeches because you know you ask these people do you feel nervous when you uh when you talk to people you know very well no do you feel nervous when you talk to people you don't know yes no it's not always that way but sometimes my point of mentioning this is
that this is not always the case but sometimes something really seemingly harmless don't talk to strangers uh you know good advice for a child not good advice for an adult in business clearly um or um you know the world is a dangerous place bad things could happen um these kind of things
um now that's useful as a child it's it's very protective but that seed that idea gets planted and may or may not germinate later on as a weed that's actually actively growing in the garden of the person's mind there's a poem or a little thing called um it's very short poem my mind
is a garden my thoughts are the seeds my Harvest will be either flowers or weeds um Mel Weldon don't know who he is but he was the one who wrote that and and I use that a lot as an analogy because our mind is a garden and what we allow to be planted sometimes it's not our doing it was
planted before we had conscious awareness hence children who were traumatized by something but it's our responsibility if we don't play victim and we have self-awareness and the desire to improve our life and take responsibility it's our responsibility
Jim to go in there and do some weeding and you know weeding can be done by um you can sit there when you have weeds in your garden and you can analyze and you can you know label the species and uh the the typical Direction it might have come in through on the wind and uh
its effect on other plants in the garden and what causes it to grow quickly and what will happen as a consequence if you don't get the weeds out of there now this is sometimes like talk therapy it's very interesting but you're still after the weed no matter how much you analyze it
and some people say well just just you know spray herbicide spray weed killer on it and that does usually work but it also can poison other flowers it can poison the soil it can create a toxic environment for anything else you want to do and for some people that's like
psychiatric meds which can have side effects and be addictive now let me first say that those two approaches are appropriate in certain situations but in my experience and as a hypnotist that goes back to 2007 um they're overused and they're not dealing with the real issue
which is the subconscious thought pattern the thought pattern becomes habitual creating emotional and habitual emotions habitual behaviors creating a certain state but you're right about the personality I've heard that as well so what you do what you think feel and do consistently
in a way comes to Define you because we are basically the sum of all of our patterns behavioral patterns emotional patterns thought patterns most of which are actually unconscious or subconscious we may be aware of them after the fact but not why we're doing what we're doing
and often not how we're doing it so if someone becomes anxious or has a phobic response you know they become terrified in a certain environment or feel this overwhelming urge to engage in some unhealthy Behavior or substance they're usually not aware of how they're doing it
um they're just aware that they're doing it and if they don't understand how which is really more important than why then it's really hard for them to stop because willpower doesn't control the subconscious mind and willpower is a short-term remedy if you want to call it that so
the point is that so so you know you can use weed killer you can analyze and category catalog the weeds you can use you know positive thinking which is a farce and and and it harms a lot of people excessive one-sided thinking and you can convince yourself you say oh
the weeds are gone the weeds are gone and then you look and oh they're still there is that doesn't work um you can use behavior modification which was my chief tool as a nutritionist very briefly um with overweight clients and that's just control your control yourself don't eat this eat that
um well that's great in theory if we were all unemotional but that's like trimming the weeds or stomping up and down on them and all of this goes to say that as long as the damn roots are there usually it's going to come back and so rather than we don't need to go on this
journey of figuring out where this came from or why you have all these issues or what's going to happen if you don't change I mean that may be interesting a little self-indulgent perhaps but it's not going to solve anything you know one of my mentors once said Revelation is
not resolution so just having speculating about the origin of something which may be incorrect but even if it's correct that doesn't by itself usually solve the symptom and so the only way is to look at the weed and all you have to see is the weed growing to know that there
are some Roots there so as a hypnotist I mean I'm going long on these metaphors but your listeners are going to remember this because these are very relatable metaphors and it's it's very accurate I believe in how the mind works as long as we know there are roots
doesn't necessarily matter how they got there we just got to pull them out once the roots are removed once the weed has been uprooted the entire weed all the symptoms everything that's apparent on the super on the you know conscious level go away it all goes away
and that weed does not return now there may be another seed that blows into the garden and another weed will take root but once the real issue is resolved at the root mentally at a subconscious level okay it doesn't come back I mean it's that simple I I so you can jump in but as I was saying this I was
thinking of a few clients that illustrate some of this that I've had in the past I think might be kind of interesting and one's kind of entertaining Let's uh jump right into them and let's start with the entertaining one okay so um maybe around 10 years ago more or less I
had a client who was a flasher and um I mean it's okay to laugh um you know it had a good ending but I don't mean the flashing episode I mean the release yeah I didn't I didn't see any post video and you know this was before people were video videotaping everything on smartphones
so basically this guy um and and a lot of my clients were you know our business owners um CEOs Executives and a lot of people you know listening to this may not realize like they walk among us everyone has some unresolved emotional crap it's not it's no one's fault it just
happened that's a casualty of living you know I mean childhood is that period during which we get screwed up so that when we're adults we can if we choose to get unscrewed up so this guy I don't even know if there was a traumatic experience um I wasn't focused as much on trauma at
the time like I am now but his symptom was that he would you know he had a very good job he was an executive um and he would um he would go out on his lunch break about three times a week during work and he would drive around looking for an age-appropriate woman
so not no miners or old ladies according to what he said um and he would you know I didn't ask him if he wore a trench coat or you know that kind of stuff I don't know the details but he would basically get out of his car he would you know exhibit himself um and there would be some kind of
response from the woman and then he would go off and masturbate somewhere and that would be his pattern then he would feel guilty ashamed and irritable for like a day or so and then the he would start like picturing it again he would start feeling this urge and the
only way to alleviate that uncomfortable craving or urge was to go out and do it he called this having fun that was his euphemism for it now his wife didn't think it was that much fun because he had a two-year-old at the time his marriage was on the rocks his wife was this close to divorcing him
because she you know she actually only knew he did it once a week so she had known it was almost every day but he had been arrested twice he was this close to losing his kid his marriage his career and he came to see me and he said you know I have this sexual compulsion
and I you know I've been to a therapist I've been also given meds I've been diagnosed as anti-social personality disorder and whatever other stuff and he said I'm I've been told I'm mentally ill and I don't know where else to go um you know I sometimes wish I were the
first recourse and not the last for a lot of people because it would save them a lot of time money and and hassle anyway long story short I said to him if you he he explained to me how the whole cycle worked and I already explained it and I said if you didn't think about it
you wouldn't feel like doing it is that right and he said yeah because it starts with you know picturing it remembering a time and he did it and if you didn't feel like doing it you wouldn't do it right and he said yeah because I feel guilty I don't want to do it but I can't help
myself like the Angel and the devil battling on the shoulder and so I said well this is really very simple I said you're not mentally ill I don't diagnose people but in my you know just as I look at it you just have a thinking problem and he looked relieved and I said well
we just need to change how you think about it and when that happens it will change how you feel and change what you do so to me I just it looked very simple and I kid you not after two sessions um he stopped doing it actually after the first he walks around the outside of his house naked
um he reported back to me and I said well that's that's that's better he wants to add a really big piece of property no neighbors to see him or uh well actually that's what one of the women that he flashed said [Laughter] sorry you pay for the you pay for the subconscious skills you get the bad joke
for free so anyway um and then after three or four he stopped even thinking about it and then um like he didn't even there was no urge no thought but right away he stopped doing it and then at the end I think I saw him five times at the end of his last session he was
going on a cruise with his wife and things were improving in that area so but the reason I mentioned that is because it wasn't important to know why he did it we could have spent months a friend of mine who was a psychotherapist when I told about this uh told her about this
she said you didn't ask about his childhood his relationship with his mom and all these sort of things I said no um I mean I could have but I said that doesn't really matter because what he was doing the how the recipe that he put together in his mind unconsciously is
the reason he did it and once we did some work using NLP primarily to change how his mind played with that imagery it it eliminated the the desire and then the uncomfortable craving because he didn't have he lacked what he wanted right it just stopped right there so basically we took the Vicious Cycle
and just you know cut it and then he came to the epilogies he came back to me maybe two years later a year later um to quit smoking which I honestly wish was the first thing he did because he stunk I mean the guy smoked like two packs a day but he you know he wasn't
ready he wanted to deal with the flashing first which I agree was more urgent but then he quit smoking I said well how are you doing with that whole thing we dealt with a couple years ago he said oh I never did it again so I said well this will be easy and we work on smoking so
um it reminds me of wittgenstein's Maxim don't look for meaning look for use and so it seems to me I don't quite understand why like to me that Solution that's a real solution right instead of you know spending hours or days weeks months you know who knows trying to
figure out why he was doing that I love the pragmatic approach of well who gives a why he was doing it that is obviously a behavior that's going to cost him dearly if if you can figure out a way to end that behavior it seems to me that that seems to be very very sensible which leads me to the
question like what is it because you have documented uh use cases and and proof cases like the one you just mentioned okay uh where uh you're able to quickly swiftly end a behavior that is potentially ruining somebody's entire life why do we take the other path first
um well it's actually similar to what I believe you asked me in our in the previous episode where um we were talking a couple months ago about you know why and I think I said this is the best kept secret that's not really a secret and you said why isn't
this more widespread or why doesn't everyone do this and I I've heard that a lot from clients and there's a number of reasons so in order to not repeat myself I would encourage whoever's listening go back and listen to the first one because we cover a lot of foundational Concepts there
I think it's it's part of it is just an entrenched outdated Paradigm why is it that why is it that when people are um ill that changing nutrition is not the very first thing they do before taking medications or or whatever it might be why isn't every person who's diagnosed with cancer
given a nutritionist now I can say as a former one that that alone is not necessarily going to help that much but at least it's trying if a person has cancer there's a number of potential causes one of which could be malnutrition or certain toxic substances that they're eating
that's one possibility others emotional issues not dealt with other is environmental toxins there could be some genetic issues but usually your your lifestyle will promote or inhibit a genetic tendency just like obesity no one is naturally fat they might have an obesity Gene
but they have to actually act as an overweight person Act to become obese so why do people take medication because it's easier than trying to figure out what the real issue is why do they go to talk therapy which again is useful for some people and and maybe for many people
in a very limited dose but it's not transformative for a lot of people because it's a conscious level intervention and the problem any persistent problem is a subconscious pattern what we learn whether it's you know you and I have spoken about learning to drive or
you know learning to do any complex behavior is a subconscious program and that's whether it's useful or not useful our subconscious doesn't necessarily judge something as this is going to be helpful in my long-term Arc of my life it's just we do it again and again and again and so as we don't waste
mental resources or brain resources trying to consciously control everything the subconscious takes over says let me handle that for you and then it just becomes automatic and by the way it's not just the physical behaviors like driving juggling um you know walking it's emotional habits
so we might say well I put one left one foot on my pants on one you know left leg first then right leg and and most people do it the same way every single time and that's just a unconscious habit but when people become anxious or they have a tendency to have a panic attack
or they react to something that you know with a strong emotional reaction like a phobia that is usually a habit and that means it's an emotional habit that's usually caused by a thought and so it's again get back to what's causing it this is endlessly frustrating to me Jim
why don't more people do it that's the best answer I can give you and by the way so it's a paradigm think about how many medical doctors there are how many psychotherapists there are compared to how many naturopaths nutritionists or hypnotists and not only that there's a piece of
training because the you know medical establishment has certain um influences what's in the textbooks that medical doctors or that Med students learn uh and even people in pre-med programs learn certain things so they they're they're raised with a bias of training that favors a very narrow
approach as opposed to a more holistic or you know Funnel Vision approach where you can see all possibilities you know allopathic medicine is very useful in some contexts talk therapy is as well medication is as well but so is nutrition so is dealing with the
subconscious and anything and I don't exclude those conventional approaches I just feel like that should be part of the solution and not the sole solution it uh reminds me of Samuel whites I'm sure you know his story oh yeah and and uh for those who don't know the
summer wise story very briefly um he was a doctor with Banner right I think in BMW I believe so uh and so who was uh put in charge of maternity ward there and this was during the early 19th century I believe um and at the time it wasn't fashionable for men to wash their hands
and he he came in and noticed that the women who were being attended by surgeons or male doctors were dying at a rate which was alarmingly higher than those who were being helped by Midwest women and so he thought up you know a lot of the reasons for why that could be and
the first thing that sprang to mind now remember this is before germ Theory so it was seen as kind of an unusual Insight but he thought well maybe it's because they're going from dissecting cadavers to learn about the human body not cleaning their hands and and attending the the mothers to be and so
he made a rule that all male surgeons had to wash their hands in a solution of I think lie and some other things that would you know super clean right and all of the doctors were absolutely just insulted by this you know he wants us to not be manly he wants us to be like
women this is outrageous and they came up with all these alternate explanations right like no it's not this it's because the priest is ringing the death bell after a woman dies and that makes other people the other women you know they they're mimetic and they die to it so
someone was like was like cool he told the priest don't ring the bell anymore then the priest didn't the women kept dying and he goes let's try my solution and uh as you know uh after being forced to wash their hands the death rate of the women being attended by them
plummeted but the the so what of this story that really underlines why this is so scary and dangerous is Samuel whites was also political and he was arrested at a demonstration in favor of democracy removed just the the head of the um that the maternal unit replaced by a
guy who was very conventional he saw he saw the data this is what kills me he saw all of the empirical evidence made them wash their hands death rates plummet and he just went this is nonsense stops the male surgeons from washing their hands women's death rates went
back up where they stayed for like 70 years until somebody Revisited the research and we had the germ Theory and and so it's this cultural lag and it kind of makes me think like if you could amplify I don't know a show uh a TV show a nut clicks whatever where you kind of show you know each episode is you
helping somebody with a seemingly intractable problem do you think the socialization putting it into the overted window would would increase people using this technique and and and the way of solving these problems well for sure um in fact it's interesting that I
um years ago when I when I lived and worked in Miami I did work briefly with a TV producer who was interested in doing a reality show on the kind of work I did and I I was very upfront with him and I said look I'll be honest what I do is pretty boring to a camera
I mean even even if they weren't trying to create drama as they often do in reality unscripted shows I said a lot of the most the magic if you want to call it that the magical aspect of this work happens in a person's mind camera's not going to pick that up and so the sessions that I
do with people with some exceptions there are some exceptions where where it's like within minutes sometimes seconds there's a shift from you know tears and and anxiety to you know laughter and relief um but generally most of the work that I do is boring to look at from an outside
perspective and so I said this is not going to play well on TV you know so well let me put my producer hat on and say you're familiar with the show The Dog Whisperer get it okay um so I love that show I love dogs um and uh I also sort of took his attitude about how to interact with the
dog uh whereas my my family my wife specifically and my kids like oh well that's just the way he is I'm like no no no no you've got to establish that you are the alpha male or female and you know don't understand the way a dog processes this but if you just visually set it up if I
was producing this show I would first show the participant engaging in this Behavior show the ill effects of that kind of like they do on that show cut to you working with them showing how you do it and then showing them after and not engaging in that and you know I
can just see the visuals already like we have an agoraphobic person right and and they can't leave the house and like that's scary Julia did you ever did you ever see the movie The Aviator with uh DiCaprio playing uh yes yes and there's a great scene in that that I
often think about where he had this obsessive compulsive disorder and uh the scene is he's in a men's room and he can't touch the handle to leave and so Keith just shows him like trying to multi-san you're trying to will his hand to grab the handle doesn't that work for the reasons which you've
already articulated and and it just the scene is so compelling to me because DiCaprio does a really good job of showing like the onks the you know just the the palpable beer that Hughes was feeling and then the rush of relief when somebody comes in and he dashes through
the door um yeah and but that highlights the power of the irrational subconscious mind whose prime directive is self-preservation so if he had a belief which is often the case with OCD that there's um they obsess about a certain it's fear-based often trauma originated in
trauma but there is um the belief that they're not safe in a given context and that their belief is that if I don't engage in this Behavior hence the compulsion then something bad is going to happen and so trying to control it from the top down which is the behavior is really
hard because by the time it manifests as a behavior like an action or inaction um it is a physical Behavior the emotion is already full on and it's really hard to control but if you can change the thinking and the beliefs that lead to the uh fear and the obsessing
about the object of the fear or the environment then the emotional part goes away the Mind becomes more clear so it's not obsessing and then there's no compulsion kind of like the Flasher except I you know I don't diagnose people so I don't know if he would be I don't think that
would be considered an obsessive-compulsive disorder but it was definitely a compulsion or addiction but he was obsessing about it and the only way and he had a compulsion so you know labels are great you know I just don't label people I also think that a lot of the time diagnoses while
useful for categorizing things like you know what species is this weed growing in my garden it is very disempowering for a lot of people because there's a lot of baggage that goes with diagnoses and a person can identify with I'm an addict I am you know I have major depressive
disorder I'm an anxious person I'm a smoker whatever and then when their identity gets tied up in the unhealthy Behavior it makes it much harder for them to change their behavior because the identity is going to dictate the behavior and like what you talked about
about the person you know and you know your personality another way to look at that might be your identity because it feeds on itself right the personality is ultimately the sum total of all the different thoughts feelings and and actions because that dictates how you show up in life
so if if there is um an identity however it got there maybe childhood um then you are this kind of person or if the person is very suggestible and an authority like a therapist with very good intentions might diagnose this person as having a disorder and the
person latches on to it so if a person believes they're an addict and they're powerless over their addiction let's say a common one of the the steps of the 12th step is to admit that the problem is if you believe you're an addict or an alcoholic or whatever and I mentioned this in my book I wrote
about quitting smoking using it as a smoker then you may temporarily quit the behavior but as long as your belief that you are equivalent to that behavior is intact it's only a matter of time before some catalyst is going to cause the person to relapse and go back into it
so why not change the self-image the self assessment change the identity from I am an addict to I am a person who on some level chooses to engage in this Behavior but I am choosing it which means I can choose differently not through willpower but through changing the underlying
mental programming that's causing the emotion and the behavior because most addictions are emotionally compulsive behaviors which means there's an emotional urge or desire to have something when they don't have it they feel crappy and then the crappy feeling goes away when they engage in
that behavior but it's a temporary solution which is why it repeats again and again and then that becomes habitual and there we are so I I want to can I mention a few um I want to mention a few examples of this as it relates to trauma because as you know in recent years I've focused a
lot more on the traumatic origin of emotional and behavioral challenges and by focusing on clearing the emotional charge from traumatic memories that's usually the shortcut to pulling the weeds out by the roots please do okay so like I said I don't diagnose people with
PTSD they usually have already been to a therapist or a psychiatrist who has diagnosed them or they've gone online as you know we all know you can diagnose yourself which is not necessarily a good thing but you know people come to me typically having already tried some form of talk therapy
or cognitive behavioral therapy maybe EMDR um or antidepressants anti-anxiety meds and so on um so a couple clients one one who was diagnosed with PTSD this is a pretty impactful traumatic story um with a with a good ending she um she came to me and she said my main problem is
that I can't sleep without taking I think it was ambien or one of those pills and she had been doing this for about eight years and she said that's my problem but of course you know if you've listened to our first podcast you know that's just a symptom now she was mostly just interested in
being able to sleep well and every time she tried to sleep without taking Ambien she would just feel panicky and so she just she was like she was punished for going off the meds not because of the medication but because of her own beliefs and her own mindset anyway it turned out she also abused
alcohol cocaine and smoked all as ways of managing a her emotional state to deal with her life um otherwise she was she was an executive at a company in in Miami and was very you know high functioning otherwise amazingly um and I you know we were talking and it
turned out that when this started it started when she in the middle of the night you know her husband left bet the bed he didn't come back she went down stairs um saw the light on in the car car was in the driveway she went out to the car and found that he
um had shot himself in the head in the driver's seat and he was laying there dead in a bloody car um you know so that was what she came to it you know two in the morning or something so needless to say she was inconsolable and was severely traumatized and for months she you know
was taking meds and doing talk therapy like every day and it was really upsetting you know not to mention the logistics of dealing with you know I think she was probably 30 at the time when that happened so you know as a young marriage and everything so all of the the grief that she was dealing with
um the uh the flashbacks the guilt you know maybe she could have prevented it maybe she could have seen the signs whatever so the the the flashbacks the she couldn't get the image of his head in the car and the body and all that awful stuff out of her mind so when
these flashbacks would come uh which just happened throughout the day you know she'd feel awful she would grab some alcohol she'd have a cigarette she clearly couldn't sleep at night without Ambien which is also an anti-anxiety drug and so um or very similar to Xanax so she
basically was self-medicating with the help of a psychiatrist understandably and that was keeping her level but the real cause was um the the flashbacks and and thinking about the the Flasher Flash flashbacker the Flasher was he had actually um Pleasant flashbacks of when he last
flashed so with her it was like most people unpleasant and that's one of the Hallmarks of PTSD is hyper vigilance and um and just you know being hyper aroused and having these uh flashbacks so she couldn't stop thinking about her dead husband and then all of the things surrounding
it then she felt awful and then she would behave in a self-medicating way to keep all of that emotional crap at Bay so um what we did is we basically cleared the memory we we uh remove the emotional charge using neuro-linguistic programming like we talked about NLP hypnosis and memory
reconsolidation you know all of that is described on our website at goodwinhypnosis.com and we have some videos of clients talking about similar experiences um not objectively like that but traumatic experiences and how from one minute they can go from having a trauma
response to very often minutes later feeling no pain from that thought or memory at all now this woman she did not I didn't erase her mind she knew what happened that didn't change she could still talk about what happened it just didn't cause any emotional pain anymore
and so as a result she was able to sleep without the medication she with the help of her doctor you know got off the Ambien over a course of several months to do it safely stop drinking doing cocaine stopped smoking but if we had just tried to get her to quit
smoking and doing drugs and alcohol first without clearing the trauma I guarantee it would not have worked it doesn't matter how good the hypnotist is it would not work because the trauma had to be addressed first that was the seed now that that's that's an extreme case right
um there are other cases where you know for example I had a firefighter I gave a speech once at the Miami-Dade fire rescue years ago and I met a firefighter who had been reassigned to desk work because a few years before because he was you know drinking excessively and that was
affecting clearly his performance so he said my problem is you know I'm an alcoholic I drink a lot I want to get back into the field but I can't do it because they won't let me because I'm drinking a lot and I said well when did this start um and you said well I was diagnosed with
PTSD after I several years ago I rescued a guy from a burning house and he brought him out to the lawn to the front yard and the guy died in his arms so he could not get that image of the guy's you know charred face I hate to be graphic but you know the smell the
sound the sight all of that was like literally burned into his memory and these flashbacks plus the the guilt maybe he could have gotten there faster maybe he could have saved him usually that's irrational but you know anxiety regret all of this stuff because the the thought Jim
is timeless it's not he knew logically this happened years ago but every time it showed up in his mind every day it was happening now and so he's in the presence of this horrific experience creating anxiety creating guilt regret reliving it replaying it he couldn't get it out of
his head but you know it did work to get out of his head drinking alcohol and so alcohol was a very effective albeit imperfect solution but because it didn't fix anything permanently he had to keep drinking so we basically cleared similar kind of approaches or techniques
did some work using his imagination to change how he remembered it without any loss of the narrative and whereas one minute this this tough guy was crying just for a minute or so remembering that experience as he had many times um minutes later he couldn't even get
the image in his head uh same with the woman with the the husband who died no matter how hard they tried they could not picture it now some people can still picture it but they almost feel like okay so what it doesn't make them unemotional they're simply changing the
way their their mind their brain stores that information and when that traumatic when the memory changes which is basically the thought or a part of the thought then the belief that you know I'm not safe I'm not good enough bad things happen whatever the belief that
is learned as a result of the experience whatever that is that changes more easily that's where a lot of hypnosis comes in is changing the belief and then when they're no longer having this disempowering toxic belief they don't feel anxious depressed resentful angry guilty ashamed regretful whatever
um and when they don't have all that emotional crap then potentially addictive behaviors and substances lose their benefit because if you're already feeling okay well that's good enough but if you're feeling like then you want to do something to feel better and so I often say if you didn't
feel so low you wouldn't have to get so high I think I said that first to the Flasher so part of the solution with him other than the the you know imagination stuff was to build up his self-worth and give him an alternative way to have fun euphemistically and then
the behavior went away because he wasn't feeling so low he didn't have to get so high this is all just as I listened to you it's just so many of the things Link in with the things that I've been interested in in the past for example the the uh I'm uh I study complex
adaptive systems because I think that if you understand them you're going to make better decisions in business and in life Etc one one of the key parts of complex adaptive systems is emergence comes from below not from above right and so as you were saying the will is kind of this
top-down solution right and no matter how often you document it empirically right people still default to that and and it it almost as I was listening to you it's kind of like gee I wonder if you could like hypnotize somebody to to make them understand that they that the
decide this go-to oh we'll do a top-down solution right I mean so many of the things historically that have nothing to do with trauma or anything so for example um the bolstered uh act uh Prohibition in the United States um the the facts of the matter were when that when they passed Prohibition
in the United States making alcohol illegal right there was a very serious drinking problem in America right and it was well and widely known and it was causing all sorts of Heartache all sorts of problems men would go to the bar get drunk go home and beat their kids beat their wife
Etc so they were absolutely correct that there was a very serious drinking problem in America right but the top-down solution okay we're going to make drinking illegal then right had horrific uh secondary and tertiary effects right because it didn't
stop in fact more people started drinking that that didn't drink in the past you you essentially uh made the Judiciary the police force Etc corruptable right because money's money and you basically cement it the whole that organized crime had over Alcohol and Other illicit substances right like
I I'm fascinated by it because like yes there was a problem but the solution caused vastly more intractable problems that doesn't seem to be the case following your your methodology well but there's but the thing is you know thanks to podcasts like yours and um
people's ability to find hopefully good useful information online there's more self-awareness as a result of of talking about this sort of thing because if people don't know it exists they're not going to consider it but brute force is always easier than finesse
and if you can get the cops or the army or whoever you want to enforce something um you know it's easier just to smack the kid and say don't do that well but if you or even the war on terror okay so let's just blow up because they you know did something to us instead of I'm not sympathetic to to
just make it clear I'm not a sympathetic person to terrorists except that in order to defeat terrorism if it were even possible you need to understand what's pissing those people off you can't just say they're evil doers I know I'm going back to 2001 here George W bush you can't just say that
and expect that's going to solve a problem the problem Jim is that most people have no self-awareness about what's going on in their mind and which means they have they they lack effective judgment to understand what's going on in other people's minds and so it's very
easy and simplistic almost moronic to say okay you're either good or evil I mean this is the fundamental aspect to certain religions that will go unnamed where everyone is obsessed with right or wrong good or evil black or white the universe is not black or white the
universe is gray but human morality which is totally a construct is um that it's just easier just you know give me a form and I can say you know what my ethnicity is it used to be the same thing with with gender there were two options now there's like 50 but the point is it's easier just to check off
one box because then I can I can put you in my mind in a certain category and it's lazy thinking it's harder to think and Nuance but that's reality and so it's not hard to clear most traumas it's really not but we've been brainwashed we've been hypnotized by Society to believe in the
victim perpetrator Duality and if something happened to someone they were a victim of someone else's bad Deeds yeah I'm generalizing then the victim becomes disempowered because they accept as the identity I am a victim bad things happen to me and if
and part of the definition of a victim is the person is subject to being hurt and so the identity keeps the person disempowered which means they're not likely to be able to overcome the victim mentality which often means more is going to happen to that person because they're approaching their life
on the defensive or running from Life instead of engaging in it so if people don't understand why people do what they do whether it's blowing up buildings or doing drugs or cheating on their spouse or anything that we have laws against then they're not going to understand how
to change it and just by throwing police enforcement or having laws uh is not going to solve it otherwise you know Nixon's War on Drugs 50 years on would have been a resounding success but there are so many reasons why people do drugs why they sell drugs why they you know all these sort of things if you
don't deal with the underlying societal and ultimately individual issues than these societal problems continue it's easier to Simply start at the top down and try to arm wrestle someone into submission than to actually take the time and either in a preventative way which
is hard prevent those you know Ace those Aces the adverse childhood experiences you know to to prevent the babies from being thrown into the uh the river to begin with um it's easier to just um to do that than I mean to actually figure out what's going on takes a lot of work
to solve it from where I sit is not that hard but to get people to consider that they can face their baggage without being afraid of suffering anymore you know that that takes self-awareness and you know I don't have the marketing budget to educate the whole world
on that you know the uh the emergence of learned helplessness is something that I you know obviously alarms me uh because societies were that are filled with more High agency people bursts low agency you know empirically just do better and the the i i i i back to why right I
I sometimes just try to figure out why why aha are are so many people falling into this really destructive Behavior pattern of learned helplessness and you know there are a lot of reasons um you know certain people like you know they're easier to govern right uh if
people are like uh uh always thinking that they're the victim and it's always somebody else's fault right it wasn't my fault it was that mean person over there it absolves them right of of the responsibility for themselves I wonder about that is is this also just a a another way to give
I don't I I want to be careful about using the term responsibility because that's kind of a loaded word but you know let's stick with agency right it seems to me as I listen to you that another thing you're doing is you're you're giving your client agencies back to them
is that is that right yes yes um it's helping people get in touch with the innate power that they have but probably have either abandoned or never realized they had and you know I was joking earlier about natural intelligence versus artificial intelligence and there's everything's
big about AI right now and yet we have a natural intelligence to how our brain works and most people have no clue how it works why should they no one teaches us and so because if so we all have the ability to change how we think if the situation is approached
properly which can change our life um and so whether you call it giving them agency or helping them regain their power uh ultimately the disempowerment that people learn usually it's learned due to upsetting experiences that can be relearned that can be unlearned you know I I had a client uh thinking
about disempowered um she came to me with a typical pattern of relationship sabotage she was I don't know in her 30s and her pattern was she would you know had a boyfriend for a period of time some number of months and then she would you know text him or call him before
texting was big and just you know be on this guy like 10 times a day now you can imagine the man you know I was like oh that girl was Psycho whatever and ended up dumping her so she had this you know this trail of littered dead relationships behind her largely because
she had this fear of Abandonment and you know she had been in therapy she had tried taking anti-anxiety meds because whenever she didn't hear from the guy she was dating it wasn't like she was thinking he was cheating she just felt anxious and the anxiety went away when
she reached out uh and heard from him so by the way it's very similar to the Flasher he felt anxious he felt icky he felt this urge until he engaged in that you know behavior of flashing and masturbating and all of that so that was his drug experience in this case her drug similar
to social media and the dopamine and everything was finding out you know connecting with that man long story short too late basically there was this um this had been an issue or adult life but we did we did a process of of you know accessing the feeling and then leading to
the memory that trained her to feel that way uh and her memory was when she was four years old or so she got separated from one of her parents at a Supermarket or something and she remembers you know crying hysterically um but it was probably only a few minutes
and then you know nothing really harmful happened physically and she was reunited and that was it well I said you know I think you may have learned that if you're dependent on someone don't take your eyes off them because for a child again that's very self-protective but for an adult
that's really a problem and so she had a belief due to you know low self-worth and a few other issues unrelated to that experience that she was she needed this man for X Y and Z reasons whoever he was that year and so because she was dependent emotionally on him and she was
attached his absence created anxiety um and so we we changed the memory in some capacity using NLP and memory reconsolidation and these kind of things um and whereas At first she was remembering that memory and felt very you know uncomfortable uh within minutes she was fine and the pattern changed
immediately she no longer had any anxiety because the belief that she would be unsafe without the person she needs changed because the belief was supported by the evidence of the memory so when the evidence changed the memory changed the belief changed the emotional
response to the belief changed meaning no more anxiety when there was no more anxiety the behavior brought about by the anxiety went away which was texting calling keeping tabs she felt calm and she was able to have you know relationships without sabotaging them I mean it kind of makes
you wonder how many cases of relationship sabotage I don't like the word sabotage because that's a long-term perspective from the short-term perspective it's self-preservation long-term perspective it's self-sabotage she was keeping she was protecting herself by keeping tabs
on the man even if ultimately she destroyed the relationship that way but you know the her the pattern was something that she had it just become normal for her and she looked back and and said well I remember that experience it wasn't like it was buried she just said but I was a kid
nothing bad happened and it was like a few minutes I don't know why that would affect me and I had to explain that children are much more vulnerable to upsetting experiences than adults you know to traumatize an adult significantly usually you need to have a
very significant experience you know like clients I've seen who were you know raped or found a dead body or um were in a car accident or had severe injury or plane crash any number of you know what we would call objectively large traumas Big T but little T traumas even a dad yelling
at a child or a mother yelling at a child or a child watching a dog get hit by a car that really wouldn't scar an adult leaves a negative imprint on a child and one of the reasons I don't know if we ever talked about this but from a brainwave State children are in a
hypnotic state they're in a state of hypnosis almost all the time that's why they have imaginary friends they have such a great imagination and they learn languages and everything so quickly when adults struggle to do that it's because they're hypnotized most of the time that's just part of the
development and the evolution of their brain um you know um neuron wise so they're hyper suggestible and so something that might make us just sort of shrug it off a child can be negatively imprinted by one little thing um you know even what we would call A minor
almost throwaway experience so you go ahead yeah no I mean I mean there's so many so many other examples I can give you that people can relate to like you know emotional eating being obese or substance use issues or relationship sabotage or grief and phobias fear of death fear you know
anxieties these are all symptoms the uh just so many of the it's so interesting to me because so many of the things that I'm really really interested in you are as I'm listening to you you are just weaving together in my mind right I originally found you because I'm uh fascinated by uh Dr John Sarno and
the Mind Body uh issues having had several and um uh the the idea that a seemingly inconsequential thing like you know being separated from uh your parents briefly as a child like most people don't know that about kids I knew I knew what you said about kids because of uh
actually some uh a PhD in Consciousness research uh basically I had read somewhere that that were born with something like a billion more neurons that we end up with as adults and like I was incredulous reading this and I just happened to have him on as a guest and
that was my first question to him is this true and he went oh yeah and he explained it he's like Evolution has made it so that you can get dropped anywhere and it's giving you a bunch of redundancies in your brain and the term he used which you you say hypnotize he
basically said and tell about the age of five children are tripping balls all the time laughs so so but but that that explains so clearly about how a lot of this stuff gener is generated from childhood experiences that again as adults we can kind of like look at it
and think oh come on really because of you know a separation at a grocery store and we kind of instinctively call on it but the way you've just described it makes it infinitely easier to understand yeah and then that's the thing is part of the problem is people um downplay or disregard the potential
importance of these childhood experiences now that reminded me that there's a a client I had excuse me who um she was referred to me by a doctor and she her she presented with uh being overweight um I you know maybe she was 60 pounds 60 pounds overweight or so and
she her patent I think you know she was 50 or 60 at the time been married for a long time had a challenging marriage she was constantly triggered by her husband uh stress wise and then she would go uh and you know wine cheese and crackers and all of this and this happened almost every day
and so she came to me for help with weight loss now I learned early in my career as a hypnotist if I didn't get the message as a ex-nutritionist that uh you know being overweight is seldom a random act a random State and overeating in this case emotional or stress eating
is a symptom of the emotions something was triggering her she thought it was her husband but that might have just been a reminder of something um we actually did I think a session or so or two on just eating habits you know basic hypnosis for that often that works in her case
it didn't work very well and so then I think it was the third time I saw her I was gonna just see her I think six or seven times um and okay so what I did is I said okay well let's let's focus on that feeling that you get right before you start um stress eating and
the memory that came up for her was uh one time in particular where for the first time she remembered she perceived as a child that her dad didn't love her their dad favored her four brothers or whatever it was so she she had since learned as an adult that her dad did love her he just had a
different way of showing it and all of this sort of stuff you know the generational maybe and he didn't wasn't very affectionate even though she knew this logically and had known it for half of her life you know her adult life she still felt this whole which she
could fill with cheese and crackers and wine or whatever the food was and obviously that's led to her being overweight and so I said well you know we need to we need to just on the Fly because I didn't know this ahead of time she didn't didn't come to me saying this is the cause of my problem
but it was her perception even if it was inaccurate this is the important thing our memories are not accurate at all usually they're inaccurate even slightly and every time we access the memory consciously or unintentionally it can change slightly and this is memory
reconsolidation as it naturally happens it's a form of neuroplasticity so the brain is remodeling itself around use and if you access a thought a memory you're using that you know that neuronal connection you're using that pathway and so just like a very delicate flower every time you
touch it it it can be affected by how you touch it well I use that approach take advantage of that ability in the brain but do it intentionally and directed to direct the mind or the brain I use the word mind to change the way it represents that thought so we uh she remembered that
time when she was a child and it was just one of a few memories she started crying um I sort of improvised some kind of scenario where I was able to help reframe her relationship with that experience her dad's motives his intentions his behavior and so on and basically took
her through her life after that moment quickly up to the present day and she just kept saying wow that was big that was big you know she was crying but it wasn't pain initially it was pain but then it was relief and I said what what's going on you know because I was leading her through a
scenario but I didn't see what was going on in her head and she said I now feel like for the first time in my life that my dad loved me and I feel his love he was dead he had been dead for at least 10 years maybe 20 years so she couldn't get closure or get rely
on her dad to say I love you she felt it now was that accurate was it not I don't care I mean let's be real it may not have been accurate that he didn't love her she learned later on he did but she felt the love was missing so she grew up with the belief
my dad never loved me I'm not worthy of love I'm not as good as my brothers and her husband for whatever reason triggered that when the memory changed when the the hole in her heart was filled with my dad's love which by the way there's no way in hell you can do this through willpower or
analysis you just can't I mean she had been through you know therapy she had tried diets to no avail immediately her stress eating stopped um she even told me her husband started behaving better I think that was just her perception she wasn't being triggered but she didn't
have the need I need in quotes to drink the wine to eat the cheese and crackers to fill the bottomless pit inside of her because it was filled with love so she may have added adverse childhood experience that was not one event but was just the absence of Love affirmation support whatever and it was
all her perception when that changed Jim the stress went away the self-worth improved I mean we had to work on each of these things but right away she wasn't hitting overwhelm you know the allostatic load you know the the the the coupled water was not overflowing
constantly we drained the swamp so to speak I missed mixing all these metaphors but basically she was not overwhelmed anymore most of that overwhelm was caused by the inside not by the husband so it's not because of the external circumstances but her perception of those events and how it
relates to her and her world view and her relationship with herself and others when that all changed through that through a few sessions but mostly that one session we had uprooted the weed the stress eating went away and then she ended up losing I think like 30 pounds over the
next six months or so with no willpower no diets she just wasn't you know quote sabotaging her weight loss by tending to her emotional needs because emotional needs changed I mean there's so many examples of this but does that make sense so it does so
um this is endlessly fascinating to me uh we have bumped up against our time uh I'm I'm taking like the the next time we get together it might be interesting it's your game if we could find like a volunteer and actually show people how this process works it might take more than one sitting right
I'm up for that though if you are sure we can talk about it very cool well listen Todd this is uh this is amazing and I this is something that I just think it's one of those positive Goods in my opinion that if you can put this out into the world this just it seems like
there could be so many things that could be solved and you know you just think of the needless suffering in the case of just the story you just told right um you know misdiagnosis diagnosis bias all of those kinds of things they they affect things far beyond these particular use cases that we're talking
about and they still over in society they still over into you know a lot of dysfunctional uh systems dysfunctional relationships and and they don't have to be that way which is one of the reasons why I'm I'm so passed out uh with this so can I just can I just jump into one
more thing I want to say sure you know part of my motive for self-awareness is not just for people to improve their own state in life but to have some degree of compassion or understanding of other people and their behavior to treat themselves and then others better
um while I'm not going to defend people who are abusive or um you know what are called sex offenders and so on I will say that almost without exception those people who break the law and should be punished according to our laws are suffering and if you get past the Judgment of
those people are bad and you just say these are people who are hurting doesn't mean it excuses their behavior it just means that if we if we just throw their ass in jail okay and we just punish them kind of like prohibition and we're not changing why they have this compulsion
or why they engage in this Behavior why they have uncontrollable anger and they they beat people or they they gamble needlessly or whatever if we don't change the the pain inside if we don't alleviate that which then causes this transformation of how they live their life then
it's just really good for you know it's good for the prison system and it's it just complicates things if we can actually look at these people with a little compassion and say you know I don't I don't like what you did I mean I don't judge people on what they
did they've already done it enough for themselves but you could say look what you've done is illegal what you've done is harmful anti-social dangerous you know whatever but let's let's change what's going on inside you so that you no longer need to act in that way and once that happens
which is usually quickly then they are reformed you know which doesn't happen through conventional means so I I wish that we could I learned that from dealing with that flasher that he was a you know you you would pass him in the street and say wow that's a nicely dressed
albeit Smoky smelling guy but he looked like a normal guy and yet he was you know a criminal based on our laws but I realized he was a decent guy who hated himself for what he did and if we could look at people who we are quick to discard and try to be empathetic to helping them individually
then we could really make a big difference in the criminal system in this country totally agree um we we are aligned in in many ways and I I This Thread goes through a lot of the the things I I think about and and uh try to come up with systems for making things better try to be more
useful um well I thought this has been great um we will we will compare notes uh about this other idea I think it could be really cool I have already envisioning how we might do it but we will be in touch about that uh so until next time thanks again this has been great it was a pleasure