Terence Watts Hypnotherapy

I was revisiting Terence Watts' book 'Advanced Hypnotherapy and Hypnoanalysis', and came across his short section regarding the childhood learning process and thought how relevant the ideas are for everyone, including the both hypnotherapist and client. He goes on to explain that when we are children we are learning all the time as the world around us is revealed through experience. This is great, although when we discover something new there is the potential to interpret it 'wrongly', each experience we have forms a mental template which we refer to when experiencing future related experiences. These errors of judgement and understanding colour the way we perceive the world and unless we are able to be aware of this skewing we continue as we grow to experience the word in a distorted way.

Terence then goes on to say that we actually have two sets of templates which we refer to; the instinctive, which we are born with and the learned, which is constantly being changed and added to as we go through life. These sets of templates act as filters from which we perceive, think and interact with our environment, if initial summations are wrong then we continue to move through life from the standpoint, and in reference to, these mistaken assumptions. We are behind this distorted filter of experience and are only receiving stimulus which is agrees with them and is allowed to pass through.

His broad point is that everything within the psyche is connected by virtue of the distortions we have accrued throughout the experience of our lives. So if somebody has developed a tendancy for indecision because of an early experience of always having their decisions made for them and thus developing a template that someone other than themselves should be taking decisions, this can potentially be deciphered through any scenario of them having to decide somthing, from choosing clothes, to travel routes, to life decisions. Of course, some caution should be exercied as it would be presumptuous to make such an important assumption to inform therapy without investigating further although the fact that everything in the psyche is connected and our distortions are made up of 'experience templates' is potentially a great piece of working knowledge for the hypnotherapists and therapists at large.

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