The Bigger Picture

Jane is an enthusiastic and hardworking person who started her own web design business. There is no doubt she is talented and creative. She is also very personable. She came to see me because after an initial burst of work, all of which had been well-received, she found offers of work grinding to a halt. She felt this had nothing to do with the economic climate; that many of her colleagues were still making a good living. She did however feel it was a bit of a pattern. Previously, she had tried to get work projects off the ground and something similar had occurred. Her instinct told her there was probably some unconscious reason for this.

I took Jane into a light state of hypnosis and asked her to think about her problem. I then asked her to come up with an image that represented this problem for her. Jane reported to me that she saw 2 images of herself. As she focused on these, she became aware that one of them was feeling disappointment and the other was scared and frightened. At the same time, Jane became aware that these feelings stemmed from the past. Her enthusiasm was being blocked by these unresolved feelings.

Out of hypnosis, this all made sense to Jane. She talked about some of her upsetting experiences from the past, times when she had suffered a great deal. The information from the imagery work seemed to indicate that there were parts of her that were preventing her from moving forward with her life in order to protect her from further disappointment or situations that might cause her stress. With this information from Jane’s unconscious, we were able to work with these unresolved aspects of herself.

This is an example of how we can get to the bigger picture of what is going on. In many ways, the conscious mind is limited. Added to that, we are generally taught to use the thinking part of our brains and the imaging faculty of the brain is neglected.

This means that when we have a problem, we can get frustrated because simply thinking about it doesn’t allow us to see the bigger picture. The quiet state of hypnosis can really help us here by engaging the totality of our minds in a helpful way.