Marilyn Gordon, Cht.
It may sometimes feel as if you’re carrying an
inexplicable heavy weight that prevents you from being creative or from
stepping out of the box you’ve been living in. You can have grand
plans and extraordinary ideas, but somehow you keep plodding along in
your life and just “never get around to” expressing the great
passion that is waiting around in corners inside your soul. If you asked
it why it doesn’t come out of hiding, you might find voices like, “You’ll
never make it. It’s too uncomfortable out there. If you succeed, you’ll
feel like you’re at the edge of a scary precipice. If you fail, you’ll
know for certain that you’re the failure you always thought you might
be. Even if you try, it’ll tax your energy. You’ll never find enough
time. You don’t really have either the talent or the guts to do it
anyway.”
Nice talk! These messages can be echoes of
parental conditioning—or can even be messages that parents carried
within themselves. Perhaps you’ve been conditioned by siblings who
always bullied you. Or maybe these sabotaging ideas come from previous
lifetimes of perceived failure—or from trying a few times in this
lifetime and becoming discouraged.
Wherever they come from, these messages are
oppressions and limitations. They are manacles and straitjackets that
prevent you from being fully alive. Many of us allow these voices to
dominate our existence. Some of us, however, look for ways to break
free.
A Deeper Look
One woman named Ann looked deeply in hypnotherapy
at the influences sabotaging her. She worked a nine to five job; the
bosses wanted more and more overtime, and she was beginning to get
tired. More than this, she had dreams for her life. She’d invented
some gadgets she dreamed of bringing to the marketplace, some products
for business and for pets—but she had layer upon layer of life
experiences that prevented her from doing anything about it. She had a
deep desire to do this, felt oppressed by her job—but she had too many
papers and too many extraneous projects in her office. She needed to
clean it, but she never did. She also felt she didn’t know enough
about how to go about her business.
First we used a technique called ReSourcing, which
helps you to get to saboteurs instantaneously. I said to her, “I’m
going to start a sentence, and I’d like you to finish it, if you
would. It may sound a bit negative, but it’s phrased this way for
therapeutic reasons. Don’t think about your answer. Just let it come
from the top of your head. Here goes: ‘I don’t want to begin my
business because…” And her answer was, “Because I don’t think I’m
good enough.”
We then went into hypnosis, and we looked at her
situation step by step. She felt a heavy weight on her body and in her
mind. Her legs and arms felt shackled with a weight of total oppression.
At first she felt totally enraged at his because it was always holding
her back and making her feel discouraged. The voice within the heaviness
said to her, “How can you even think about accomplishing these things?
What makes you think you can do them?” She flashed in hypnosis to the
realization that she’d felt this way even as a tiny child. Some force
within her seems to be so powerful that it’s controlling her. She
knows it’s the family’s conditioning keeping her within accepted
parameters, shaping her so she doesn’t reach too far.
Instead of continuing to have an adversarial
relationship with this force, she looked at the possibility of first
simply paying attention to it. Listening to it, feeling it in her body,
exploring it, understanding it, finding out what it needs are ways she
can be with it instead of fighting it. She looks at what it might have
been trying to accomplish for her all these years.
She knows this force is trying to keep her safe in
the environments she’s grown up in. Because she was a sensitive
person, she had needed to protect herself from a bullying brother and a
conservative, limiting family. The heavy force has served her in its own
constrictive way.
But she’s no longer a tiny child; she’s in a
new environment. She’s free now, and if she appreciates—and even
loves—this heavy sabotaging force, she just might extricate herself in
a gentle and even beautiful way. She decides to make this force her ally
in creating an experience of a breakthrough. In hypnosis, she
experiences comfort and love and promises to allow herself to make one
small step after another—continuing to keep her safety, yet stepping
out of it and upward one small step at a time.
Loving the saboteur and allowing it to express to
you what it’s been trying to do for you has its rewards. When you find
out what it wants for you, you can create this shift in a much more
affirmative way.
The Experience of Limitation
The experience of limitation is a necessary part
of existence. Limitation defines expansion and freedom. Darkness is
known by the light. It’s simply a matter of how long you want to
wallow in the limitation that determines when you’ll take the steps to
move out of it. Sometimes you just know that you must take the next
step. If you’re standing in a forest and a tree begins to fall on you,
you know you must move. This is how you know when it’s time to make a
powerful shift—and when you know your clients are ready. It’s when
the tree is falling, and you know you have to make the necessary change.
Without this resolve or what I call “the healing
decision,” it may be difficult to move past the powerful saboteurs.
You have to truly want to—even more than you want to stay the same.
There are always so many reasons for keeping the status quo, that there
has to be a firm resolve to change. Often there are perceived secondary
gains (“If I keep this weight, no men will bother me.) Or fears (“If
I get a new job, I might fail to do well.”) - or conditioned
considerations (“If I do that. I’ll be better than my mother or
father or brother.”)
You have to want to go beyond these considerations
more than you want to hold onto them. Your clients have to want to also.
Sometimes you may want to ask them, “On a scale of one to ten, with
ten being the most committed, how committed are you to making the change
you want?” If it’s below a five, take a look at it, and you may want
to re-negotiate the purpose of your session.
Saboteurs as Allies?
Saboteurs are not, in and of themselves, bad. They
are mechanisms to help cope with difficult areas of growth, and
sometimes they are trying their best to take care of you. You may want
to be the one who makes the decision about how you are to be taken care
of—rather than relegating this decision to a force that may not truly
be in your best interest.
Everything in life is an opportunity for awakening
to our greatness and our strength. Working with the inner saboteurs is a
part of the powerful work of personal growth and transformation.
