I like to compare a person’s life journey to a jigsaw puzzle.
Sometimes by understanding how all the pieces of your life fit together, you can see the full picture being created. You then realize that ANYONE in your shoes might have created the same interpretation of your life… leading to your choices and decisions that followed.
This is so important because typically when clients come to see me, they feel like there must be something terribly wrong with them because things are not working out the way they had hoped.
For example… Perhaps they believe that others are further ahead than them or that they are just not attractive enough, smart enough or ______ (fill in the blank) enough to measure up to others. Or maybe they believe that past behaviors and events have destroyed their life and there is just no future for them.
The best logical conclusion for them is that they are, somehow, “broken” in some way. This is typically a belief they originally created in childhood and then reinforced throughout their lives.
When I work with clients, we metaphorically fill in the edges of the puzzle first so we get the framework, then we find the interlocking pieces so that the picture makes sense.
Then, something inside my client’s subconscious mind shifts to a place where they realize that they are NOT broken or less than others… it was just a natural deduction for a 5-year-old living in those experiences to create. After all, a child has no real information of the world and just makes up justifications for everything in order to survive and have the world make sense.
What that 5-year-old doesn’t realize is that they are creating a “reality” for themselves through the limited information of the real world a child has… AND… that reality will stick with them for the rest of their lives… UNLESS… they do some breakthrough work (like NLP Coaching or Hypnotherapy) to change it.
Once it all makes sense, negative emotions and limiting beliefs that were created in the past melt away. Understanding and acceptance remain in their place. The past is in the past, where it belongs, leaving nothing but a clearing in the present and in your future… to create a life you love… with nothing anchoring you back to past experiences, emotions or beliefs that no longer serve you. You remember you had them, but now, all those negative emotional charges are gone.
I’ll give you one example… I once worked with a woman who was not proud of some decisions she had made in the past to earn money. In fact, as a middle-aged woman, she was filled with such self-loathing that she was driven to extreme self-destructive behaviors. She consciously wanted to stop the negative thoughts, but couldn’t. Easy to understand that when you consider our conscious minds are only about 5-10% of our total mind power. Her negative subconscious program took over.
When I guided her in examining her life… from an objective observer perspective… the pieces of that puzzle snapped together! It was a real AH-HA moment for her. She had a very harsh upbringing and saw herself as a young woman with a drug problem. She had very limited self-esteem and self-respect and would do anything to get her fix. And, she did.
That was who she was then… certainly not who she is now. But… without revisiting that circumstance and gaining understanding… acceptance… and even compassion… for that young woman she was at one time, she generalized her behaviors to mean something about who she is as a whole… her character. People change as they grow. She was NOT who she used to be, but she never incorporated that into her subconscious belief system until our work together.
If you struggle with negative emotions of the past, reach out if you want to learn how these techniques can help you. Sometimes significant subconscious shifts occur in a single moment!
Jayne Goldman, MBA, C.Ht., Founder and Principal of Best Life Hypnotherapy in Los Angeles, is a Certified Hypnotherapist and NLP Master NLP Practitioner and Coach.
