Positive Affirmations v Subconscious Programming
Positive affirmations v subconscious Programming. One question that I have been asked before as a hypnotherapist/Psychotherapist is about the difference between Positive affirmations and positive suggestion used during the hypnotherapy process. Positive affirmations have for a long time been very popular. Although positive affirmations are a good way to direct our thoughts away from negative thoughts what a lot of people don’t understand is that the conscious and subconscious parts of our mind are interdependent. The conscious mind is creative and can conjure up positive thoughts and the subconscious is a repository of ‘tapes’ brought together by instincts and experiences. The subconscious mind is strictly habitual and will play the same behavioural responses to life’s signals over and over again often to our annoyance. How many times have you found yourself getting ‘wound up’ over something trivial like what way round the toilet paper should hang? You have been trained since childhood that maybe the toilet roll should hang over the front. Your partner, however, may have been trained that it should hang from the back. When you find the roll hanging on the wrong side then you can automatically get annoyed as your buttons have been pushed. What you are actually experiencing is a stimulus response to a behaviour program stored in your subconscious mind.
When it comes to neurological processing abilities the subconscious mind is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind so, if you use positive affirmations with the conscious mind and it conflicts with the programs of the subconscious mind which of the minds do you think will win? You can repeat a positive affirmation, for example, that you are loveable, to try and boost your confidence but if, as a child, you were told over and over that you were useless and would amount to nothing those messages that have been programmed into your subconscious mind will undermine your positive affirmations and best conscious efforts to change your life. Just think about how quickly your last new year’s resolution lasted? Whatever habit or addiction that you may have tried to break consciously soon gets over ridden by subconscious programming. The subconscious will always ‘jump in’ before the conscious mind. ‘ So, consciously you may have every intention of losing weight throughout January but before you know it you can find yourself reaching for the leftover Christmas cake before you really start thinking it because of that subconscious ‘urge’ running in the background.
But, all is not lost. There are ways of accessing the subconscious mind and reprogramming positively. Hypnotherapy, Emotional Freedom technique and EFT Matrix Re-imprinting are all ways of strengthening your will power. Sometimes when negative patterns are so deeply ingrained within the subconscious mind hypno-analysis can be used to access these negative experiences clearing negative feelings and re-framing positively before backing this up with positive suggestion.
So, although I have no problem with positive affirmations, after all, the more positive we can put ‘out there’ the better as far as I am concerned, the real winning solution for positive thinking and positive change is to work with the subconscious.
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