Can hypnosis help self-esteem? Hypnosis can help a person with self-esteem problems to fight negative thoughts. There are times when people feel bad about something they've done and that's the motivating...
There are times when people feel bad about something they've done and that's the motivating process that continues to move people towards doing better things. There's a very famous hypnotherapist, Noppen H. Ericson. Noppen Ericson had a guy that he was working with and it was in front of an audience of doctors and this fellow didn't have much to recommend him to anybody. Ericsson hypnotized him and took him back through some memories and finally found that as a boy he was very, very proud of his penmanship. So he had this guy write something down with his nice penmanship and had him go around and show it to all the doctors and make all the doctors comment on how wonderful the penmanship was. Eventually, Ericson gave him suggestions and said "you will continue to review your life and continue to find these experiences in which you had pride, and in which you accomplished something that you were happy with. These experiences will spread throughout your life and will guide you in your future life;" and that's exactly what happened.
A lot of how we are and how we feel as humans depends on the thoughts that we have, and what it is that we focus on. We have all had negative events in our life and we all have positive events in our life. You certainly can learn from the negative ones, but if you are continually thinking about them, that's what you are going to produce in your life. The unconscious mind is target oriented. When you have images or thoughts you tend to move towards it. When people are driving down the freeway you will notice a few seconds before they decide to change lanes they start to drift to that side and it's because they are thinking about changing lanes. If they make up their mind up to do it, then maybe they put on their turn signal and move over. So you can see that when they have a thought; the unconscious begins to manifest it immediately and so you want that tendency in you working for you by thinking about the things that you want to accomplish the kinds of things that you want to accomplish as opposed to what's stopping you. And other people may have been at fault originally, but you are in control of the thoughts now. Sometimes we have thoughts that are more automatic in nature. They are difficult to control and that's where hypnosis can come in because we can get in there to the part of the mind that generates automatic thoughts and automatic behaviors and patterns and have some influence.
