Tomorrow I start this years intensive hypnotherapy diploma and welcome a new group of people into the hypnotherapy fold… As with so many of my previous hypnotherapy students and current hypnotherapy students, several of my new students are nervous… It happens at the beginning, and it also happens at the end when they go out into the world to ply their skills and trade… And much of it comes doen to trusting themselves.
My huge, very thick and very heavy dictionary on the shelf defines trust as the “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something” and “one in which confidence is placed.”
Sadly, trust can get dented or reduced in a variety of ways. People get betrayed, ill-treated, lied to or hurt by people that they have encountered in their life and their trust gets diminished.
What tends to happen a great deal is that mistrust develops, and not only for the people who have affected us. Individuals often begin to be suspicious of everyone they encounter from then onwards. You are sure to already know that it is to protect ourselves and avoid a repeat of being hurt or upset, so we make a generalisation, we filter out the reasons not to do so, and we carry our unpleasant memories of that original person with us and displace the distrust onto other relationships.
I meet so many people in my hypnotherapy consulting rooms who lack trust and faith in others. For many of those, it has only taken one person to trigger off a distrust of everyone. In the process, we often lose trust in ourselves, maybe due to our judgment (on that occasion) being misplaced or incorrect. This leads us to wonder how we can believe our own judgment.
People need to be able to trust in order fall in love and to feel loved…. Not just by people, but in subject matter, yes I am referring to a chosen subject of study… When you trust yourself, you can love and embrace that subject massively more. You can then enjoy your application of the skills even more.
The first step to recovering our sense of trust is to learn to trust our own judgment and feelings again. To round this week off, here is a somatic exercise to learn increase trust in yourself:
– Sit or lie down so that you are comfortable and in a safe place. Ideally where you won’t be disturbed for a while.
– Now, how can you make it even more comfortable? Get a blanket, a pillow… Whatever makes you feel relaxed and content.
– Once you are settled, ask yourself: “How do I know this is comfortable?” This might appear to be a silly question, and perhaps even confusing. However, it is an important one in increasing your skills of building trust.
– Continue to explore what sensation you feel that you recognize as comfort. For example, you might think, “I do not feel any pain,” “I breath easily,” or “I feel relaxed.”
– You might be anticipating that this feeling won’t last, which is true. We can’t control or grasp on to this pleasurable feeling. It’s only important that you are in the present moment right now, not drifting into thoughts of the future or the past. Thinking of the future can create anxiety; thinking of the past can create depression.
– Remain aware of any sounds, the temperature, the light, and your physical sensations. Can you let yourself simply enjoy the moment?
You can practice this exercise for as long as you prefer and as time allows you. Just keep checking in with your level of comfort. What feelings indicate that you are comfortable? With time, you’ll start to trust your feelings again.
When you start to say to yourself; “I trust myself,” you begin to restore faith in your judgment of others and situations, and as a result, you open your heart to love, joy and feeling safe again… And trusting yourself is the best place to start to develop the trust of others… Which is incredibly important if you want to be an effective hypnotherapist.
have a marvellous weekend… I’ll be blogging when I can next week…
