Posted on May 1, 2014
Listen to Health Professional Radio with host, Neil Howard and guest, W. Dennis Parker
Neal Howard: Hello. You’re listening to Health Professional Radio. Thanks so much for listening with us today. I’m your host, Neal Howard. Have you ever asked yourself, how can someone do that to themselves or to others, or how can someone continue to engage in some type of activity or habit that seems to be severely detrimental to them or others, and you ask yourself how can they continue doing that? Is it just a simple matter of breaking bad habits or is there something deeper that’s involved in getting people to abandon some of these negative habits or thoughts even?
Our guest in studio today is W. Dennis Parker. Now, he’s an author and a certified hypnotherapy trainer. How are you doing today, Dennis?
Dennis Parker: Very well. Thank you.
Neal: I’ve talked about asking ourselves how can people continue to do things that many of us deem to be, well, detrimental to their health, both mental and physical health. When it comes to breaking habits, we’ve all heard about 12-step programs, all kinds of self-help books out there, different speakers and whatnot. Now, being a speaker yourself, your area of expertise is family and personal improvement through spiritual mind management or hypnotherapy, some of these practices.
Could you speak a bit to exactly what is hypnotherapy? I know some of us have a picture in our minds, but could you give us a clearer picture of what it actually is?
Dennis: Yes. The way we describe hypnotherapy is basically three forms of it that we use at the school, and I do teach people to be hypnotherapists certified through the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners. But we’ve broken it down in our school to three segments of hypnotherapy. The first segment is what most people out there are doing, we call it Suggestion Hypnotherapy. Suggestion Hypnotherapy is where you hypnotize somebody, they go into a levelled trance, and at a deeper level we want to get access to the subconscious mind, which means that we penetrate through what’s called the critical factor filter barrier, if you will, which is the barrier between consciousness and subconsciousness.
Neal: Okay. Could you repeat that? The critical factor barrier – is that it?
Dennis: Yes. The critical factor is considered to be the barrier between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. So, we need to get access to that, and into that belief system area, because it’s our incongruent beliefs and thoughts that cause us to do maladaptive behaviors, and also allow us to do those things, as you asked in the earlier question – how can people do these things or not correct these things?
And so, we use three forms of hypnotherapy to correct them. Again, Suggestion Hypnotherapy, which has people going to trance and then people use metaphor, stories and scripts, guided imagery, those types of things. And what we’re attempting to do is we’re attempting to overlay a new belief, if you will, or establish a new predominant belief in the belief system, in place of the belief that is there that’s driving the current behavior.
Neal: You say that you need to gain access to this area between the subconscious and the conscious mind – the critical factor barrier.
Dennis: Yeah. What we want to do is we want to actually get through the critical factor, which is the area of the belief systems, into the subconscious mind. And we want to be able to reprogram those thoughts at that subconscious level, because the big driver in our subconscious mind, in our spiritual mind … there’s too many drivers there. The main driver though is the imagination. Most people are not familiar that we can amplify any thought in our subconscious mind imagination from zero to 2,500 times, as we say.
We’ve attached kind of a scale to it to have it make sense. And then, so people take a thought or a belief into their imagination, they amplify it from zero to 2,500 times. And so, we can make any thought, anything a really big deal. And then we have that statement in society we use, ”Well, this person always makes mountains out of molehills.”
Neal: Yeah.
Dennis: Yeah. So, how do they do that? They’re doing that by over-amplifying those thoughts in their imagination to a huge degree.
Neal: Are you saying that – basically, whatever thought is in my mind, if I am amplifying it, I am the one, in essence, that is causing this molehill to become a mountain? Is it just a matter of how I look at it? Is that something that is employed or you’re actually … You say you’re actually gaining access to this area of the mind and it’s much more than just suggesting that I have a positive outlook on a potentially negative situation, right? It’s much more than that.
Dennis: Yes, it is. Because what you can actually do when people understand how their spiritual mind works, they can actually be taught how to turn their imagination back down and get back into balance. And what happens is, when you turn the imagination down and you come back into balance, you are also shutting down and collapsing the emotional content that’s been created around that thought.
So, the main thought most of us struggle with is “I’m not good enough.” That’s the universal, number one behavioral issue everybody on the planet struggles with, because we’ve all had experiences where we weren’t good enough to do something.
Neal: Sure.
Dennis: I wasn’t good enough to make the high school basketball team … We’ve all had experiences where we felt we weren’t up to it.
Neal: Absolutely.
Dennis: But if we amplify those thoughts up to 2,500 times, the further we amplify that kind of a thought, the more inhibiting the behaviors we have and develop and we experience. So, we can … at 500 times, we say, you can create an inhibition. At a thousand times, it can become huge anxiety. At 2,500 times, it becomes incapacitating, it becomes despair. It really shuts us down. The higher we amplify that one thought of “I’m not good enough …”
So, if we take it to 2,500 times, now, we won’t do anything, because we just know that we could never achieve it. “I could never do that, so I’m not even going to try,” right?
Neal: Now, if I may ask you, when we’re talking about the scale that you’ve assigned to the level of amplification of a particular thought, are we talking about in the mind actually repeating this negative phrase over and over again or are we just talking about the level of anxiety that we place upon that thought? Is that what you’re talking about?
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