07/09/2019
Most of us like to bury bad memories rather than dwell on them. It's the British way. Unfortunately our unconscious minds are not so accommodating.
The unconscious mind is more than ten times the size of the conscious mind, so there's plenty of data storage available in that big computer that runs your body. So much so, that everything deemed significant that has ever happened to you in your life is logged and recorded.
There's a good reason for this. Your unconscious mind is dedicated to keeping you safe and anything that constitutes a threat has to be remembered in case something similar happens to you again.
So even though you may have no conscious memory of it, something that happened to you in primary school could have an effect on how you behave at work today.
Let's say for instance that you panic if you have to make a presentation. It could be that your unconscious mind remembers you feeling humiliated in a show and tell when you were five, even though you've forgotten all about it. Wanting to keep you safe, in what it perceives as a threatening situation, your unconscious sets off a fight or flight response, aimed to get you out of the situation, which you experience as a panic attack.
This is one small example of how our unconscious minds affects our behaviour. Most of the time this is essential to keep us safe when there is a genuine threat. But it can mean we find ourselves doing things that we don't want to do at inappropriate times, whether that's becoming anxious, depressed, angry, over-eating, indulging in compulsive habits or any number of other forms of behaviour .
This where cognitive hypnotherapy can be very useful. It allows us to trace the source of a behaviour and simply adjust the way our unconscious mind sees the memory, so that it no longer regards that situation as a threat.
To find out more about cognitive hypnotherapy visit www.daguilarhypnotherapy.com