Beware how you react towards your child
This article is about the relation between children and their surroundings, especially their relation with their parents. Many of the issues that are handled by hypnotherapists are often directly related to situations occuring in the childhood. It's typically something parents have said or done - without having bad intentions - that have caused the issue. The article contains some examples of this and contains some suggestions on how to avoid it.
It is said that children are easier to hypnotize than adults, because children spend a lot more time in hypnosis during the day, since the hypnotic state is a vital part of learning. Children are currious beings and hopefully they can have nothing but trust in what their parents tell them. As a hypnotherapist you can only dream of achieving the kind of trust with your clients that exists between a child and its parents. A great deal of the treatment with hypnosis is made up of trust. If the client doesn't trust the hypnotist immediate action should be taken by the client to either solve this problem together with the hypnotist, or to end the session altogether. There is no point in wasting each others time.
When a client seeks out a hypnotist, it's often to solve some issue like: breaking a habit, stop smoking, release anxiety, and so on. The relation between a child and its parent is very different from this, since it's a process where the parents teach the child how to sometimes adapt to the surroundings and sometimes be critical. The biggest task that parents have is to teach the child how to be an independent and responsible individual.
This process goes on all the time in many different ways. Sometimes the child will unconsciously pick up on certain beliefs and behaviour of the parents, while at other times the parents gives the child a direct verbal message. The focus of this article is primarily on the verbal messages. I reason for this focus is that it is very easy to illustrate by examples, since there are dozens of examples of hypnosis sessions in the literature about hypnosis, where an authority close to the child reacts very strongly towards the child, and thereby causing a future issue. I have read a lot of literature on hypnosis, and I will try to provide references whenever I can remember them. Let's start with the examples:
In the book "Hypnose og hypnoterapi" (danish book) p. 236, Jens-Jørgen Gravesen writes about a woman he treated for anxiety. By hypnotic regression she was led back to a situation she was in at the age of 5, where her siblings are teasing her by crawling under the couch and pretending they couldn't get out again. Because she couldn't do anything about it she screamed in anger and fear. This makes her mother come running, and eventually get angry with the little girl because she was screaming. The little girl interprets this as a prohibition of dispalying her feelings when she's experiencing anxiety, and this is what gives her very uncomfortable symptoms of anxiety later in life.
In the book "Hypnotherapy" p. 155, Dave Elman writes about a man who is treated for his speaking problems. Through regression he finds out that when the man was a little boy he played with some animals that he thought was ducks. He wanted to see these ducks swim so he put them in water. All of the animals drowned because they were not ducks but chickens. When his father found out what he had done, he punished him very hard, and whenever the boy tried to explain what had happened, he was punished even harder. This situation caused him to have problems speaking.
In the book "Transforming therapy" p. 16, Gil Boyne has a session with a client that has problems spelling. The client is led back to some earlier experience in his life, where there were troubles with spelling. The most significant experience in relation to this articles that this boy has is found on p. 25. On this page the client is in a situation where his mother (who is a teacher) tells him that he is a bad speller. This remark turns into a limiting belief in his subconscious mind. A similar thing is described in a book that I can't remember the name of. The author meets a man who cannot read or spell, but he has job that is very difficult to carry out, especially if you cannot read or spell. The author presumed that some limiting belief about reading and spelling was the reason that this man wasn't able to do so. By regression he found out that a teacher in one of the early grades had hammered his hand on the table and told him that he would never be able to neither read nor spell. That turned out to be correct, right until the man met the author.
Nearly every book on hypnosis, where there are description of cases, will contain examples of persons that have had childhood experiences that are affecting them in their adulthood. In most cases the adults who impose these things on their children has very well intentions, but they are not aware of the possible consequences of their actions. In all the examples I have provided above it is my belief that all of these parents act towards their child in a state of frustration or anger, which make their action very impulsive and inappropriate. I'm sure that every normal parent could forgive their child for drowning a number of chickens by mistaking them for ducks.
Maybe some of the readers of this article would like to know how you avoid to be in the same situation with your children as the parents in the examples are. The point of this article is not that you shoud consciously consider every sentence you speak, that you very effectively kill a lot of the sincereness from every conversation with your child, and that may be a lot worse. What I will have you do is to think about what you do when you are emotionally affected by something your children do. If your child wants to help you by getting some eggs in the fridge, and drops all of the eggs on the kitchen floor, you need to be very very calm and consider your actions. Maybe that were the only eggs you had, and don't have time to buy new eggs before the guests arrive, especially not now when you also have to clean the kitchen floor. But your child didn't do this to upset you! You have to consider this whenever you are emotionally affected by your childs actions, even if your car gets scratched or other things of importance to you.
It is these case, when children unconsciously are hypnotized by their surroundings, that makes hypnosis a very effetive tool in the treatment of these issues. A lot of the issues people experienced can be induced by a set of limiting beliefs. Fortunately these limiting beliefs can be reverted by using hypnosis consciously. So the next time you hear someone say that reading or spelling is related to intelligence, or that some issue is determined by genetics, then consider if this could be the cause of some limiting belief imposed by an early childhood experience.