Every Monday, I address a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

I feel I need to warn you. This myth is a Big Myth. In fact, this myth is so pervasive in the world of therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnosis that perhaps it should carry a health warning.

I mean that seriously.

The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that there are many therapists out there – working in many different disciplines – who will tell you that it is necessary to understand why you feel the way you do in order to feel better. Let’s call this myth the Big Myth of Why.

But first, let me ask you something. Are there things going on for you right now that you understand perfectly well – and perhaps you may even have had a couple of years of soul-searching and/or therapy to understand where those feelings come from and you have a very good intellectual understanding of these problems – and yet you still seem to be experiencing them, all the same?

I meet people every day who have an incredibly finely honed and articulate understanding of the history of their problems. They have spent years thinking about it and analysing it. They can understand why that something is happening and yet the why doesn’t necessarily help them to change the behaviours, habits, emotions and responses that they want to let go of. The why doesn’t necessarily change anything.

My feeling is that ‘why ‘doesn’t serve us particularly well when we want to make changes in our lives.

And, indeed, I have met people who are on a search for why. They are on a big mission of why. They are making why their life’s work. Their internal script goes, ‘If I can just understand why this is happening, I will feel better…’ and they have been trying to understand why for the last two or twelve or twenty years. And this trying to understand why has become a painful and tortuous journey in which they find themselves feeling worse than when they started. Maybe they are now obsessed with the idea of wanting to know why or caught up in endless rumination and questioning that is creating a lot of anxiety and feelings of somehow not being good enough.

And this search for why brings them to the consulting room of a hypnotherapist. Because the Big Myth of Why says that a hypnotherapist can go inside your mind and discover why. A hypnotherapist can regress you to the exact time and place in your life where the problem started – and then you will know and then you will feel better. Right?

Well, erm, actually, not necessarily. In fact, probably not.

It’s a seductive notion, this concept of ‘deep underlying causes’ for our problems and issues. If we could neatly pin it down to one formative event – for example, the day our primary teacher told us off in front of the class for getting a word wrong and then we suddenly became unable to read aloud in front of others -  that might certainly be very convenient. But is this a little over-reductive?

Problem One: Now, I am not saying that some issues that people experience do not carry with them the resonances and echoes of prevous experiences. Of course, they can do. Over the years, we can form beliefs about ourselves as the result of our experiences, the things we hear around us,  our interactions with significant others, for example.

However, fears, problems, phobias and habits tend to fade away over time unless we are actively keeping them fuelled with our own thoughts and worries and beliefs and the way that we talk to ourselves inside our minds.

So our primary school teacher may have introduced us to the notion of fear – but that is only part of the story.We have somehow kept the fear going. In order to let go of the fear, we need to understand how we are still doing it to ourselves twenty-five years later, so that we can start to change things.

Problem Two: Even if a hypnotherapist can help us to indentify the so-called ‘root cause’ of a particular issue, this doesn’t mean that it actually happened  or happened in the way that we experience it now in hypnosis.

We still do not sufficiently understand the way that memory works, for example, but it is thought that, in order to experience a memory, our brains need to go back and reimagine or recreate that memory in order for us to experience it again. And we may not recreate it in exactly the way that it actually happened.

Have you ever experienced a situation that really didn’t bother you until you began to go over and over it in your head and it gradually assumed all the proportions and details and colours of a horror story? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In a similar way, dreams and fantasies can be re-imaginings and re-workings of what we have experienced in the day. And although our dreams can feel very ‘real’ to us when they are happening, we wouldn’t dream of supposing that they are representations of truth.

We can’t be sure that how people experience things in hypnosis is how things actually happened either. There may be a feeling-tone, a sensory theme of the hypnotic experience that carries emotions and  memories and associations from way back. But things can get a little blurry and what actully happened and how we re-experience it can get a little mixed-up.

But what really concerns me about the Big Myth that goes, ‘there must be an underlying cause somewhere in a person’s past for the problems and challenges that s/he might be facing in the present,’ is that this assumption can result in long (and often expensive) periods of fruitless searching, over-thinking, rumination and anxiety.

If you’re asking yourself why something is happening for you, a well-trained hypnotherapist can help you to understand how you are doing that thing in the present and what you can do differently to change it as well as any possible emotions, associations and habits you’ve been carrying from the past.

So, I think this is good news. Because if it’s possible that there is no why,  no single pin-downable ’cause’ for what you are feeling, then you may simply have been looking in the wrong direction. The search for why may have been holding you back from becoming more consciously aware of how you can do the problem differently.