Reverse Dreaming Hypnotic Rehearsal

We try to be calmer, healthier, or more successful, but can we really change the way we are?

Changing a habit or a way of thinking is difficult, some would say impossible. Everything you do without your awareness of doing it, is considered a subconscious belief system - from the growth of your cells, to your accent. But belief systems can change. What about Santa Clause? Or where babies come from? Throughout our lives, our minds go through thousands of changes in "beliefs", large and small. Neuroscientists describe the ability for the brain to adapt to change as neuroplasticity.

Nothing is written in stone. The processes that created a subconscious belief system also has the power to change it.

Neuroplasticity

The material which informs our brains and our belief systems comes from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuition (the 6 senses). What is important is remembered, what is not important, or outdated, is vented out of the mind in the process of dreaming. Dreams are hallucinations consisting of sensations: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuition, the same 6 senses that caused the belief system to develop in the first place. The brain uses the same process of experiencing sensations to vent an obsolete belief system as it does to program it.

For example: An individual had a childhood fear of water caused by a near drowning experience in a neighbour's pool. During that experience his mind took in these senses, associated danger, and constructed a belief system around them. He felt anxious every time he saw a swimming pool, smelled chlorine, or heard the sound of splashing. His belief system triggered the warning feeling to protect him from danger. In his teenage years, due to his group of friends, he trained himself to overcome his fears in order to go spear fishing, diving, and enjoying water sports with them. Around this time he experienced panic dreams of the incident in his early childhood. When he felt safe in water, his dreams reconstructed the childhood event so that he could let go of the danger (fear) associated with water, in the form of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and intuiting the event that programmed the warning (anxiety).

Hypnotic rehearsal, or reverse dreaming, is the technique whereby using the dream state (hypnosis) specific sensations can be experienced, with the effect of building the desired belief system. Reverse dreaming describes the process of using the dream platform for subconscious input, whereas dreaming is a platform for subconscious outlet.

"Repetition of suggestions in hypnosis reinforces the new conditions, until they become subconscious habits."

Dr. John Kappas

The NBSR Reverse Dreaming Hypnotic Rehearsal Technique:

• NBSR provides a safe, controlled environment in which the individual can rehearse positive feelings or actions without interference from the conscious mind
  
  
• Rehearsal in hypnosis allows the individual to approach resistant beliefs in layers. Each layer of rehearsal strengthens the neural pathways that form the positive belief system, and weakens the resistant belief
  
  
• Rehearsal is always emotionally positive and empowering, since repetition of the positive program builds the desired neural network
  
  
• The subconscious mind can not tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, so it accepts the reverse dream material as actual experience
  
  
• Symbolism is the language of the subconscious mind. The reverse dream material has great symbolic meaning to the individual.

Reverse dreaming hypnotic rehearsal is one of the most widely used NBSR techniques, applicable to virtually every case where transformation is desired.

"When people think "Hypnotherapy" most expect a one-treatment miracle, as if Hypnotherapy is some kind of magic. I explain it like this: How did you learn maths? Or music? Or your golf swing? Did you have just the one training session? Garry player said: The more I practice, the luckier I get..."

Andrew Wilding

Copywrite 2012, William Shand marketting@NBSR.co.za

Idiopathic or Psychosomatic?

"95% of the people on this planet are sick, or are taking some form of synthetic medication."

Ramesh Ramkumar

Idiopathic: "We Don't Know"

When something goes wrong and we experience trauma or grief, most people believe that a prescription from the doctor is the only reliable treatment, even if the side effects are unpredictable or problematic.

The view that each of our problems is separate and unrelated causes confusion: instead of seeing the connection of one illness with another, and treating the cause, we can easily become lost in a wild goose chase of medication and treatments. But in the meantime our body's amazing, resourceful, and intelligent immune system is no closer to identifying the cause, and resolving the problem.

One has also to bear in mind that in 2011 the value of the global pharmaceutical market grossed 880 billion dollars...

http://www.abpi.org.uk/industry-info/knowledge-hub/global-industry/Pages/industry-market-.aspx

Synthetic medication is a central mechanism in medical practice, both for psychiatric treatments and for anaesthesia used in surgery. How could it serve the medical world, the accepted authority on healing, to promote the knowledge that the mind and the emotions play a causal role in illness? Or that wellness can be achieved through natural, non-synthetic processes?

"When we take responsibility for our own healing process, we play the role of director with our illness, instead of being directed by it."

Andrew Wilding

Psychosomatic: Mind-Body Connectedness

It falls to each of us then, as individuals, to re-search this area, and recover ways of well-being that are thousands of years old. As the increasing archive of case studies and anecdotal evidence comes to light, and accumulates around the topic of psychosomatic illness and holistic healing, there is a growing increase in public interest, and more individuals are asking the question:

What effect do my emotions and belief systems have on my body?

Considering the relevance of this question is already to have taken the first step in healing.

"Psychosomatic disorders are characterized by disruption of normally occurring mechanisms of the body which involve the nervous system, physiological functions, endocrine system and the immune system... Studies have shown that stress has a direct effect on disease risk."

Lucce Lopes de Mello, MD

http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/encyclopedia/en/article/139/consumer/

Translation:

Psychosomatic illness (psycho = mind, somatic = body) occurs when cells in a certain area behave dysfunctionally, being disrupted from their natural order by stress (anxiety, depression, insomnia). The effect of stress in the cells can manifest in any of the body's systems:

• The nervous system, e.g. anxiety, insomnia, concentration
• Physiological functions, e.g. digestion, blood pressure, cell growth
• Endocrine system, (hormones) e.g. emotional imbalances, thyroid, pituitary
• Immune system, e.g. bacterial or viral infection, white blood cell count

The Value Of Thought

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, astonishing and shocking discoveries shook the field of modern science. Quantum mechanics showed atoms to be infinitely complicated and unpredictable, and later experiments (G. Jahn, Princeton) revealed that the human mind has a noticeable and undeniable effect on the behaviour of atoms. Newtonian science remains valid, but only to a certain point of magnification: molecular. The rules of atomic behaviour are so unimaginable, that modern string theories read quite a lot like science fiction! 

Continue reading...

Neural Networks of Belief Systems and "Neuroplasticity": Our Ability to Change

An unfortunate misconception regarding the brain is that we are "hard wired" to behave a certain way, much like a radio. The resulting belief system is that we can not change what we think or do, any more than a radio can become a calculator, or a leopard can change its spots. This belief system is unfortunate in that it provides an easy excuse for negative behaviour:

"I get my bad temper from my father"

or "depression runs in my family".

This belief is not only wrong, it is spectacularly wrong, because it dis-empowers the believer into a pigeon-holed life style of inevitability, and overlooks the individual's ability to thrive.

Belief systems are difficult to change because they are subconscious structures - we are not aware that they even exist - and yet they are the underlying rules that govern every aspect of our personalities, from our cultures to our favourite colours.

Neuroplasticity

While some areas in the brain have specific functions, when it comes to belief systems, neuroscientists since Freud acknowledge the brain's quality of neuroplasticity, meaning its ability to adapt to the surroundings. Beliefs are not set in stone, they change according to the level of knowledge that we possess about our surrounding world. (Consider Santa Clause, or where babies come from.) We may believe that anxiety is inherited genetically, until we become convinced that it is nothing but learned behaviour. At such an "Aha" moment, our belief system changes, and we subconsciously adapt our behaviour according the new information.

Genetics vs Behaviour

According to scientist Gerald Edelman, the human cortex alone has thirty billion neurons capable of making a million billion synaptic connections.

Exactly how this many neurons (brain cells) co-ordinate and cause human behaviour remains to be explained. What can be seen using current scanning equipment is that neurons from all areas of the brain contribute to behaviour, and that "neural networks" can be said to form within the brain, connecting neurons to accomplish certain actions, reactions, and thoughts.

"Neural networks form spontaneously, by association. If I ask: "Do you like fish?", within nanoseconds your brain produces a set of connections to information stored in diverse areas of your brain. Some information is conscious, like memories of your experiences with fish, or of people who are associated with those memories, and some of that information is subconscious, like the response of attraction or revulsion, like or dislike. Psychologists refer to this set of thoughts as a belief system, neurologists call it a neural network. This is your belief system about fish. You like it or don't like it based on your knowledge, memories, emotions, associations, and so forth, and all of this is merely learned information."

Andrew Wilding

Creating Neural Networks (Belief Systems)

In his research at Harvard Medical School, neuroscientist Alvero Pascual-Leone gave his volunteer subjects a simple piano exercise to learn, using TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to map the motor cortex of each participant. After just one week of practising, new neural networks were observed. The repetition of practice was rewiring the brain.

"Neurons that fire together wire together"

Hebb's Law

Behavioural adjustments occur when the brain creates a neural network that causes the suggested (desired) behaviour. Over a course treatments during which the desired behaviour is practised, (hypnotic rehearsal) the number of neural pathways in the network increases, thus strengthening the behaviour pattern into a habit.

"Neuroplasticity is an impressive sounding word, but it really describes a very simple process. It refers to the ability of neurons to always forge new connections. Neuroplasticity, at its essence, is the process of the brain wiring and rewiring itself."

John Kehoe

Copywrite 2011 William Shand marketting@NBSR.co.za

http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge.com/MAIN.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html

The Bemusing Triangle - anxiety, depression, insomnia

“Chronic insomnia is a marker of both anxiety disorder and depression”

Dag Neckelmann, MD, PhD

The irony of the human condition is that we are protected by the very same phenomenon that can seemingly turn against us. Our subconscious defences against any threat, real or imagined, are nicknamed "fight and flight", and these are our options:

• if the threat is manageable, we can fight it
• if the threat is too dangerous, we can escape it.

The behaviour triggered by this primitive area of the subconscious mind is impossible to ignore because the body responds to danger automatically, releasing adrenaline. The heart and breath rate increase to allow more oxygen into the system; the blood flow carries oxygen away from the central organs and into the limbs and the brain to prepare for action and quick mental responses, which means that functions such as digestion are temporarily stalled until we feel safe enough to allow the body to return to homoeostasis.

This built-in survival program is suited to a simple, primitive world, where the strongest and fastest survive, but the modern world is complicated. It is not acceptable to punch your boss, (fight) or run screaming from your office, (flight) no matter how strongly you feel the desire to do so. As a result, the natural defences are suppressed, and become dysfunctional.

• When the "fight" reflex is suppressed, energy that would have been exhausted by fighting remains unused, and we feel trapped and desperate.
  "Fight" becomes anxiety
• When the "flight" reflex is suppressed, the subconscious mind tries to escape, to remain unseen, attempting to hide from the threat, like hibernation.
  "Flight" becomes depression

• An individual who's "fight" reflex has been triggered and who is suffering with anxiety, will experience episodes of depression, as the subconscious mind becomes overwhelmed by the attempt to fight, and switches to the opposite defence tactic in an attempt to survive.
  Anxiety becomes depression
• An individual who's "flight" defence has been triggered and who is suffering with depression, will experience episodes of anxiety, as the subconscious mind switches to desperation in an attempt to escape.
  Depression becomes anxiety

"Anxiety and depression may seem like opposites, but they are really opposite sides of the same coin."

John Kappas, PhD

The Bemusing Triangle

After the threat has been removed or defeated, or we have escaped out of harm's way, we are designed to return to homoeostasis through the natural process of dreaming. Sleep allows the body to heal, and the mind to dream. Dreaming allows the subconscious mind to unpack the traumatic events that have occurred, to understand what has happened, accept that the threat is over, and move on with life. But if anxiety causes depression, and depression causes anxiety, how is anyone supposed to sleep with so much adrenaline coursing through the brain?

"If we do not sleep well, we can not dream effectively. If we do not dream effectively, the mind becomes overloaded and unable to cope through the day."

John Kappas, PhD

Sleep deprivation studies (W. Dement, 1960) have shown that the effects of insomnia are short temper, emotional sensitivity, introversion, and social discomfort, characteristic symptoms of anxiety and depression. Insomnia is not only an effect of anxiety and depression, it can also be the cause. The bemusing triangle now appears:

• Anxiety can cause depression and insomnia
• Depression can cause insomnia and anxiety
• Insomnia can cause anxiety and depression 

Continue reading...