Hypnotherapy: Transforms a Life

Posted on May 1, 2014

Listen to Health Professional Radio with host, Neil Howard and guest, W. Dennis Parker

Transcript of the show is below:

Neal Howard : Hello. You’re listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host, Neal Howard, glad that you decided to join us today.

Our guest in studio today is W. Dennis Parker, a certified hypnotherapist and author of Spiritual Mind Management, a book in which he outlines several of his techniques for improving our mind, thereby improving our health and all around well-being.

How are you doing today, Dennis?

Dennis Parker : Fine, thank you.

Neal : Glad you could return and speak a little bit more about your area of expertise, being a certified hypnotherapy trainer. You train others to do some of the things that you do, as far as breaking habits, managing pain, managing self-image, a number of other life-improving techniques.

Could we talk a little bit about where you … you do your training at the Certified Hypnotherapy Training School.

Dennis : Yes. We are attached to the Advanced Health Clinic in Farmington, Utah, where I work as the Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist. I work there in conjunction with other doctors and medical providers, as well as alternative healing modalities – massage therapy, and nutritionists, and so on. I’m there as a clinical hypnotherapist.

I get to practice on a regular basis the very techniques that I also teach in the school. In the school, we have students come from all over the country. We’re an online school as well as a live school in Farmington, Utah. We actually broadcast the classes live over the internet, while we’re actually teaching there, from Farmington, Utah.

Neal : You’ve been on this path for the last 23 years or more. What was it that piqued your interest in spiritual mind management or mind management in the first place?

Dennis : What happened to me was that about 25 years ago, I was struggling in life, and I had become what I call and describe as an “angerholic.” My personal story is on the school website. If you go to the “Meet our Team Group,” go down to my tab, and then down at the bottom of my tab, there’s another tab that says, “How Dennis became a hypnotherapist,” and it’s a fairly lengthy story.

But it talks about how I had developed anger-a-holic rage, if you will. It didn’t hardly take anything to set me off at that time. I was having personal problems and not doing so well, because I was in sales and sales management at that time, and I found that being an angry salesman just was not … wasn’t …

[crosstalk, laughter]

Neal : Not a lot of sales there, yeah?

Dennis : Yeah, it didn’t help me out. What happened was, I started to seek help, and somebody had recommended a hypnotherapist to me. And at first, I’d laugh and thought, “That’s goofy. I’m not going to go be hypnotized, have somebody have me quack like a duck or …” you know, the silly notions that are still out there, and based on the way stage hypnosis portrays things to make a stage show entertaining.

But what happened was … because I went to this hypnotherapist, and she was very skilled, and helped me understand what was buried in my subconscious mind that I had no idea, at a conscious level, what was driving my behavior.

Neal : Okay.

Dennis : So what we find is that, hypnosis, if you will, allows access through the critical factor filter, which is the barrier between the two minds. Once you have access to the subconscious mind, now you can go down and find out what are those things that are bothering you, and holding you back the most.

If I were to ask you right now and I said, “Neal, what’s that thing in life, what’s that experience you’ve had that’s still holding you back, binding you down, and keeping you from being all you want to be?”

Consciously, you may not be able to tell me, because you buried that years ago with amnesia and denial. But in the right level of trance – and we talk about six trance levels that people can read about on my website – actually, we have a video there that talks about these, at the certifiedhypnotherapytrainingschool.com website. The first page, there are some educational videos that will tell you all about the six levels of trance.

On the fourth level down, if I were to ask you that same question and I had you in that level of trance – I would ask you that same question, “What is it that’s still holding you back, binding you down, and keeping you from being all you want to be?”

In that level of trance, your heart, mind, spirit, your spiritual mind as we call it, it knows what that is. We’re able to break through those amnesia and denial barriers, and actually have that information pop up.

Neal : So now, even if I have forgotten, though, as you say, denial and pushing it down, even I genuinely have forgotten, it can be accessed through this technique, and be brought up, just as if I remembered it from yesterday.

Dennis : Exactly, and that’s what happened to me. I’m in the chair, and she hypnotizes me, and she prompts me back to this experience, and it ended up being around an experience where, when I was 16 and my sister was 18, she was killed.

Over a period of years, I had continued to build anger around that experience that I didn’t even know was building within me. I found out, you know, I was angry at God. I was angry with this. Why did that happen? Why, you know…

So that anger and rage had been building in me for years and I didn’t even know it. And yet, when I went into this state of pondering and was able to access the subconscious information, it all came out. I was able to vent off that anger. I was able to release it. It totally changed my life.

How I got into this was through that experience. And then, I started to study it, utilize it, and now I teach it and help other people do similar things.

Neal : You’re talking about a life-changing experience that you had forgotten, that was able to be accessed through trance, through one of these six levels of trance. You were skeptical going in, but coming out; you realized that you had come across something extremely beneficial to yourself. Did it prompt you immediately to begin compiling notes or beginning to think about a book? Or is this years and years later that you decided to writeSpiritual Mind Management?

Dennis : What happened was … [laughs] it’s funny you ask that, because what happened was, I went back to this lady and I did six or eight sessions of hypnotherapy, I cleared up all kinds of issues in my life.

Neal : All right.

Dennis : I cleared up childhood issues. I cleared up all kinds of stuff, completely changed my life and my career. I was no longer angry. I was happy. I was able to talk to people. I could never talk to you back then like I am now, because I was too inhibited. I didn’t have the confidence. I was too unsure of myself, those types of things.

But as I got through that experience and life changed, over about a-year-and-a-half period time – and you can read the story sometime if they’d like to. It’s on the website. But I completely changed, and then I decided that I would go to school and learn how to do this.

Over a period of years of actually doing clinical hypnosis and clinical hypnotherapy, I learned many new things that … actually, we’ve now developed a number of new hypnotherapy protocols and techniques that are very effective for psychosomatically induced illness, that are effective for shutting down pain, that are effective at shutting down allergies, that are very effective in many, many behavioral modifications and habits. That’s what we’re talking about in the techniques in the book, Spiritual Mind Management. It’s kind of a proprietary thing that I’ve used for a number of years, but I’m old enough now.

I realized it’s time for me to be more public, be open about these things, help as many people as I can, and kind of leave my little legacy in hypnotherapy, whatever that is, by helping others with these new techniques and abilities that really, everybody has. I mean, we all have a spiritual mind. It’s a matter of how do we access it, use it, understand it, and release that deep down potential that we all have that’s been suppressed.

Neal : Before we wrap up, I’d like to ask you to give our listeners another piece of information, as to how we can access your book, a little bit about your website.

Also, I’d like to ask you a question. You said that we all have a spiritual mind. In your training, once you decided to go to school and become certified, and things of that nature, did you realize that there were abilities that you had naturally, that simply, maybe we all have, that just need to be honed, as far as spiritual mind management as it pertains to stress management, pain, weight loss, things of that nature, or simply self-esteem improvement? Or, are these things that actually need to be taught to someone that has no experience or inclination whatsoever?

Dennis : Both. What happens is that we all have a spiritual mind. That is actually how we think and function. Most people have no idea that that’s available to them yet. I learned it back 23 years ago, and I spent the 23 years of doing clinical hypnotherapy developing the techniques with it now, that we now are using as Spiritual Mind Management Hypnotherapy.

Everybody that’s functioning and thinking has a spiritual mind. This information is so powerful. Once they understand it, once they utilize it, and once they learn how to use these new mental skills, so to speak, they can change all kinds of things in themselves, their behaviors, their health, very quickly and very effectively, by shutting down their over-amplified imaginations, altering the perceptions of their previous memories, which now collapses the emotional content that they’re experiencing, which has been driving the negative behaviors.

So those things like … we were just talking about with me and the anger – most all of us have two or three things that we call fixations, is what I call them. My mind was fixated on the death of my sister and all that whole thing. I had no idea I was even doing it at a conscious level, because I had buried it in my subconscious memories and emotions, and so on.

So we have this unwanted emotional content that we want to release, we’d like to be free of, but we don’t know how. That’s what this book will teach you. Also, if somebody wants to come into the school, we teach our students how to help others with those kinds of things.

It’s amazing. It’s just a fascinating and amazing work to do. I love to do what I do. It has totally changed my life, and I enjoy helping other people change theirs.

Neal : Well, when you love doing what you do, it’s never a job.

Dennis : Right.

Neal : You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host, Neal Howard.

It’s been a pleasure to talk with W. Dennis Parker today in studio, talking about ways that we can improve our lives, mentally, spiritually, and physically, through hypnotherapy. Dennis is the author of Spiritual Mind Management and also an instructor at Certified Hypnotherapy Training School.

It’s been great having you here with us today, Dennis.

Dennis : Thank you very much.

Neal : Transcripts of this program are available at hpr.fm.

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?

Dennis: It can be both. The thought can be continued to be amplified by having experiences in life where we continue to gather data in our memory that says, “Yeah, I did this and I wasn’t good enough to do that, and then I did that and I wasn’t good enough to do that either.” So, the thought process really is that we have a thought that comes into our conscious mind first, if we accept it as being right, true, and correct for us, we’ll allow it to go through this critical factor filter into the subconscious.

Once it gets through the subconscious filter – or, not the subconscious filter – the critical factor into the subconscious, the first area of the mind it hits is it hits our imagination. We’ll amplify it from zero to 2,500 times in our imagination. Now, we go in to our memories, and in our memories we’re looking for justifying, validating and defending data that says to us that we’re right, because nobody wants to be wrong. We all want to be right in our thinking. You want to be right, I want to be right.

So, however much data we can come up from our memories that says to us that we’re right, that combination of the amplified imagination and the data justification from the memories is what creates the amount of emotional content that the person actually experiences, which now drives the behavior.

Neal: And, that seems to be an actual formula that could be written out on a board.

Dennis: It is written out, and it’s actually in my book that we call Spiritual Mind Management. You can get it on Amazon and so on. But, in the book Spiritual Mind Management, we explain all these principles very clearly, and help people start to learn how they can manage their own mind, their own imaginations, and start to desensitize their imagination, alter the perception of those memories, and start to collapse those emotions that have been driving their negative behaviors.

Neal: Many of our doctor visits are attributed to stress-related illness. Now, those illnesses could be anything from congestion to body aches and pains. Some people believe that things like fibromyalgia are all stress-related or diseases that are generated within the mind and then manifesting themselves in a physical nature. Do you think that this hypnotherapy could eliminate the use of traditional medicines as you apply it?

Dennis: Yeah. Actually, we do that. I work in a health clinic as a clinical hypnotherapist there, and so I deal with those issues on a regular basis. And, we see clients who come in and who learn how to control their mind in the ways that I am discussing here, and they literally have shut down fibromyalgia pain, shut down migraine pain. They’ve learned how to do … rheumatoid arthritis pain. People can learn how to utilize their mind to desensitize from any sensory perception.

So, it’s just like … We know that, like, I’ve been out lecturing or something for the week, I come home, and I clean my horse corrals. For the first few minutes, the smell really reeks, but after a minute or two … or you change your baby’s diaper, in a minute or two, what happens?

Neal: Yeah, you’re used to it.

Dennis: Well, yeah, we say we get used to it. But another way to describe it is that the subconscious mind that deems … one of the purposes is the preservation of self. If it doesn’t deem that it’s necessary to continue to process all that olfactory stimulation as necessary for the preservation of self, it just shuts it off. We teach people that they don’t need that pain, those levels of pain for their preservation of self. So, pain is normally a warning system, so to speak.

Once the person can acknowledge that they’ve been warned, they understand that the pain is there – and then we teach them how to desensitize from pain in the same way we desensitize naturally from smell and sounds and other kinds of things. People can control that very effectively, and in many cases eliminate it altogether if they choose to.

Neal: Now, as we wrap up this segment, I’d like to ask you a question concerning the safety – not necessarily the validity of the hypnotherapy or the pondering or any of the other techniques that you mentioned in your book – but, when it comes to desensitizing, for instance, if I desensitize myself to, say, the changing of a baby’s diaper, and I’ve been desensitized because my brain has determined that continuing to process that aroma is not necessary for preservation of self.

What about a pain that could be potentially life-threatening? I am now desensitized to it, but the cause of that pain and the progression of the problem could still persist. Is there a cut-off or some type of protocol that will eliminate that type of possibility?

Dennis: Great question. And that’s one that comes up all of the time, because it is a valid concern. But my experience is this – is that I’ve never had anybody come in to me for major pain, of any kind, who hadn’t been to other doctors first. In other words, they’ve attempted to use of all of the other remedies, and they’re still looking for an answer. And one of the things that we do as hypnotherapists – if somebody does come in for pain control, I always require that they get a prescription from the doctor, whoever is prescribing the medications, to work with me for pain control and pain relief.

So, we’re doing that in conjunction with the doctor and in awareness of what we’re doing, and teaching both the doctor and the patient what it is that we will be doing to teach them how to desensitize intentionally. And, my experience is that if it’s psychosomatically induced, as you started talking about earlier, meaning that it’s a creation in our mind that is now being manifested in the body as a D-I-S-E-A-S-E IN the mind, eventually it becomes a disease in the body, and we could talk about that process and how that happens.

So, when people come in up, if they’ve ever really had organic pathology there, meaning, let’s say they had a brain tumour and they had a lot of migraines and we were going to teach them how to shut that down, I’ve never seen where a person been able to maintain that kind of pain control if there’s real organic pathology there.

It’s when it’s psychosomatically induced that we teach them how to shut it down, because it’s their emotional content coming out of the stimulated thought process, now we can teach them how to shut that down and change that. And that is permanent, it’s effective, and it’s safe and there’s nothing more to do with that. But, you’re right. You do want to have the person make sure that there is no organic pathology actually stimulating the pain as a warning system first.

Neal: So, if I’m understanding you correctly, there is a natural failsafe in place to prevent such potentially a tragic situation, yeah?

Dennis: Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. The body and the mind would continue to warn you if in fact there’s a real organic pathology or a real problem there. So, with real organic pathology I’ve never seen anybody be able to maintain it. Because, once you go to sleep at night your mind resets, so to speak. And when they wake up the next day, if it’s still there, they’ll still be in pain.

Neal: Great. You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host Neal Howard. Our guest in studio today has been W. Dennis Parker, certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, registered with the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners. He’s been registered with them since 1991, he’s also a board-certified hypnotherapist, examiner and instructor, and approved school operator, in addition to being the author of Spiritual Mind Management, a book in which he outlines several of his techniques in hypnotherapy, pondering and other healing modalities as well.

It’s been great having you here with us today, Dennis.

Dennis: Thank you.

Neal: Great. And, I’m hoping that you’ll come back and speak more about your area of expertise.

Dennis: Yeah. I’d be happy to, any time.

Neal Parker: Thank you. Transcripts of this program are available at healthprofessionalradio.com.au and also at hpr.fm.