Trilby V – Why Magic Worked

This hypnotherapy stuff has had immediate and far-reaching, damned near comprehensive, results. That isn’t, in my experience, how any kind of mental hygiene works. Normally, one talks things out until several things fall into place:

Define the situation
Determine what actions are creating non-optimal results
Recognize the stimulus that provokes actions
Consider alternate actions that will either preempt the situation or change the reactions to the stimulus
If you’re really on your game, you think up indicators that will mark success

This is, necessarily, a drawn out process. One has to define the world, define oneself, reformulate based on hypothesis, and then change with no more motivation than a willingness to see something new happen — which usually (again, my experience) means gritting one’s teeth and carrying through the new actions without feeling motivated to do so.

And, natch, it doesn’t work terribly efficiently, people being ineffective at concision. A lack of accurate or complete concept at any step will cause trickle-down faults.

I imagine hypnotherapy varies widely from provider to provider, and possibly from application to application. But. What was done with me was asking me to set a scene from my actual past. This was analyzed briefly for relevance and proximity to my issue-origins. When the scene was revealed as not actually terribly close to the origin, we went further back, finding related scenes closer in, and so forth. Eventually a scene came to light in which formulation of behavior was still taking place, and then a fictitious scene was improvised wherein I was asked to step in as my adult self and redirect my younger self.

I’m fairly good at visualization and role-playing, so this was an actual experience for me. The result was that I actually experienced a rewriting of what actually happened, and, without necessarily thinking much about it, carried forward an altered experience of events that I shuffled into my existing life, which provided slightly altered reactions to current events, and when new actions were called for, slightly different motivations were present to let me make changes with greater ease.

What, I wondered, was the difference between the two methods? Both found the situation, the stimuli, the reactions, the new actions.

One was explicit. One was subtextual and inclusive by implied relation, based on a gestalt.

I think I get it.

Talking things out, thinking them out, is only as useful as the thinking. Acting something out includes many factors that are not necessarily consciously considered, and so factors that are not known, not acknowledged, or poorly understood while acknowledged as significant are all worked into the solution. Everything, every action in the scene became symbolic. The symbols bore the meaning they did because I assigned the symbols and took their meaning they had without my having to formulate it in words, thereby granting each symbol and symbolic act greater bandwidth and greater impact because of that.

Magic.

Good stuff. I approve.

Crossposted from Epinephrine & Sophistry