My first concern as a hypnotist is to ensure that the client I am working with has a strong sens of self.
The professional term for this is “ego strengthening”, but what it translates to practically is that the client feels safe in their body, and confident to move through the world. That doesn’t mean there won’t be moments that will be scary for them, but the baseline I aim for is for them to have healthy relationship with themselves and the world around them. That the voice in their head is a compassionate one, and that they feel able to experience life’s many challenges (and opportunities) from a place of creative confidence, not disrepair, overwhelm, or fear.
We first learn to interact with the world as infants, as our parents convey to us how the world works. We encode every nuance of how our mother reacts when we cry, or how our father talks about the outside world, as the way in which we should experience the world.
And, since our parents aren’t perfect, and have their own biases, fears, and unmet needs, we often end up absorbing messages about the world that aren’t objectively true, or which don’t serve us.
What serves us ultimately subjective – the world has its risks, there are no 100% guarantees of safety. So, would you rather live in fear? Or live carefree oblivion? The ideal balance is somewhere between those two points, and varies from person to person.
Your Inner Archetypes: A Consistently Profound Experience
Inspired by frameworks like Internal Family Systems, I conceive of every person having at least three core figures that live in their mind – their father, their mother and their inner child. They may not be aware of these figures, and in fact the presence of the figure might actually be a gaping void in the shape of the figure, a marked experience of them not being there; but those figures are always there.
A universal experience I wish everyone could have would be to encounter their own inner child, which can be done via a simple guided meditation. This is an experience that is the most consistently guaranteed to invoke an emotional reaction from a client. Seeing ourselves as a six year old in our mind’s eye, reminds us of the part of us that is innocent, vulnerable, is trying its best, and is acting from a place of unmet needs, not malice.
Here is a guided meditation to help do this:
Similarly, ensuring that you have a healthy mother and father living in your mind can be a powerful tool to instill a greater sense of self-love, safety, and confidence in you. This guided meditation can help you connect to your ideal parental figures:
Upgrading Your Inner World
At some point in our lives, we imprint a version of our parents from real life and create a clone of them in our mind. Our parents might be dead. They might be estranged. But the parent in our mind keeps talking to us the same way. Other times, we simply live without one parent, because our real life parent was absent, or so unsafe for us that we wrote them off.
Either way, taking the time to create an ideal fantasy parent in your mind can do wonders, and be an equally moving experience.
Sometimes this simply involves a process of completing any “unfinished business” you may have with your real parent. Using a technique such as a Gestalt Empty Chair technique, you have a dialogue with the parent in your mind, clarifying any issues you have with how they have treated you in the past. They apologize, you make peace, and you move on with a voice in your head that is more aligned with your needs.
Other times, you need to move on, and craft a parent that is better than your real life could ever be. It could be an amalgamation of strong masculine or feminine figures you have encountered, merged into one ideal being. It could be a god, a deity, or a fantasy character. It could be a color or a sense. It doesn’t need to make any sense at all, it just needs to feel right to your subconscious.
And when you take the time reconnect and heal these characters, you can go through the world with a greater sense of confidence and peace. My own subjective experience is that connecting to my inner child gives me a greater sense of compassion and defuses self-judgement; connecting with my ideal mother gives me a basic sense of self-love and acceptance in the world, and connecting with my ideal masculine archetype as a father gives me a sense of safety.
Even if you don’t feel like you’re missing anything, even in cases where your parents failed you and you feel like you managed to move on, I encourage you to take some time to try on these different experiences and see if they shift anything inside you. You might be surprised.
Wishing you all the success in your journey of healing, and crafting an inner world that best serves you to engage with yourself and the world around you.
If we at Navya can assist you in that journey, please do reach out!
