Who Else Struggles with Anger? From Anger to Action

Hi Makiko. Welcome to our first episode of Rays of Light. Thank you so much for joining us in the Village of Sunnyside.

The fictional village of Sunnyside.

Right. The village is fictional and everyone in it is fictional.

It’s a cloudy Monday morning in April when Sunnyside resident Marie Lou gets a text message from her friend Ruth saying the mayor has announced that he’ll be removing all bicycle lanes to get people to drive more.

Immediately, Marie feels sick with rage. Her stomach and chest hurt and she’s unable to slow her breathing down. Her mom went to a hypnotherapist years ago when she was having trouble sleeping. It helped her mom a lot, but Marie isn’t sure it’ll work with anger. She’s considered making an appointment for a consultation, but hypnosis seems so weird.

I used to think that… Hypnosis? Weird.

Yeah, me too.

You know, like some kind of a trick to manipulate people kind of thing. But then, I was recommended to look into HMI actually by my biofeedback trainer, and so I took this initial free class “Foundations in hypnotherapy” and HMI, you know, basically where we both studied for two years, including psychology. And you know, that’s when I was really shocked to find out that hypnotic state was actually very natural physiological phenomenon that all of us go through at least several times every single day. That is as long as we’re breathing.

Yeah. It was the same. It was the same for me. Like I thought it was a very weird thing. And then a therapist I knew, I was telling him how my meditation had kind of reached a plateau and I wasn’t making improvements. And he’s like, you just gotta learn hypnosis. It’s a shortcut to the subconscious to everything you want. And I was like, oh, I was totally shocked. ‘cause he was this very practical, reasonable person in my mind. And he was mentioning hypnosis to me, I think the first person to ever mention it to me. Oh, it still wasn’t until I went to HMI school also that I realized how natural and common it is in our lives. But that started the thinking in my mind that, huh, it’s a tool, you know, which is really what it is.

Exactly, and in this case, Marie is having this anger, but there are a lot of other things that hypnotherapy can be used, for example, like procrastination, smoking cessation. What else? self-confidence, weight loss.

So many things.

Yeah, so many things.

Yeah. Anxiety, sleeping like her mom, like Marie’s mom used it before. It’s really good for that.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. A lot of different things.

So a week later, Marie has a phone consultation with Hypnotherapist Reina Ibarra. Marie explains that she’s just so angry all the time, and it’s been this way ever since the election of the new mayor. A man Marie’s afraid will destroy everything that is good about her village.

“I know being this angry is bad for me.” Marie says, “can you help?” Reina reassures her that she can help. And then asks if Marie has tried anything else so far.

Marie lists guided meditation, venting to friends and exercise.

Reina asked if Marie has had a recent medical checkup as hormonal fluctuations can have a big impact on emotions.

“That’s what my mom said. I did. Everything’s fine. I have a real reason to be angry, you know. My doctor’s angry too.”

“I get it.” Reina says. “So the first hypnotherapy session’s a bit different than later sessions, as I’ll be learning how you taking information so I can give you your suggestions in just the right manner for you.”

“Great.” Marie says, “when can we schedule?” The following Tuesday at 2:00 PM, Marie is nervously ready for her first appointment. The night before she alternated between writing lists of things she wanted to discuss, scrolling through her very political social media accounts, and watching infuriating news clips.

“It’s so horrible.” She tells Reyna after a brief greeting. “It’s much worse than I ever imagined.”

“What do you mean?” Reina asks.

“The mayor and it’s not just our village, it’s all over. It’s like the whole world’s lost its mind.”

“You mentioned that you’ve used guided meditations. Are those helpful?”

Marie sighs. “They used to help a lot, but now I just go off into angry thoughts while they’re playing.”

“Do you have any physical activities you enjoy?”

“Sometimes I hike with friends. I have a little trampoline I used to use a lot.”

“Doing something physical before you meditate can be useful. I’ll also give you a recording from our session today. The more you listen to it, the more it will help.”

“I’ll listen to it”, Marie says.

So on this recording, this very much depends on the hypnotherapist, but we always record the hypnosis part of the session and then send the recording to our clients afterwards, usually.

Right. Usually, because sometimes we have people talking in hypnosis, there’s more like engagement. And in those cases we don’t send the recording or we don’t necessarily record it because you don’t wanna hear your own voice in hypnosis; that’ll just take you out of it.

And on that too, some of the listeners may be surprised that, you know, there’s a engagement in hypnosis, right? And yes, there are times that we do imagery where we would ask questions, asking the clients what they are experiencing right now, you know, right then and there, what they’re feeling, what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing, kind of thing. So, you know, it is one form of imagery that we use. And so when we do that, then we cut out the spoken part and then send the recording sometimes.

And also the importance of listening to these recordings I would like to mention, so we send these recordings to reinforce the positive suggestions that we plant or drop into the subconscious.

And these positive suggestions are like the seeds or the seedlings planted in subconscious, you know, the very rich soil. And so these seeds or the seedlings need to be watered and nurtured so that it’ll grow and flourish, so to speak.

Right. That’s a really good metaphor. And it’s really important ‘cause just like, if you plant the seeds and just leave them, you know, nothing’s gonna happen unless you’re getting enough rain naturally or whatever, you know? And that’s what a lot of people think. They think one session and I’m done. No, it needs to be reinforced.

Right. Yeah. It’s not hypno-miracle, as some instructors say. Right. It’s not hypno-miracle.

So after this, Reyna asked Marie, “is there anything else that you could do to help yourself feel better, maybe help you feel more in control?”

Marie, thinks for a moment. “Well, there’s a political action group I heard about. It sounds like it’s focused on helping vulnerable people who are losing their rights, things like that.”

“And if you join the group?”

“I wouldn’t feel as guilty anymore. I feel like voting isn’t enough and I can only afford to donate a little to good causes. I do those things, but it’s more urgent now.”

“So maybe this next week you could look into that group more, see what you need to do to join.”

“Definitely.”

Now the type of questions or what the therapist may ask in each session really widely vary. There’s no right or wrong. Another thing that I might ask Marie, in a session, would be like other emotions that she might be feeling about this issue. So. Anger is the main issue here for Marie. But now she mentioned guilty, feeling guilty, right. And you know, often we have these complex blend of emotions.

So I may also ask what other feelings she might be feeling whenever she’s hearing or thinking about this particular issue.

Right. Yeah, that’s really good. It’s really important to get at everything a person’s going through, because like you said, it’s very complex.

So going back to the session, Reyna asked Marie how she would like to feel about the political situation that’s making her so angry.

“Being angry feels right.” Marie responds. “It would be worse not to care. I think it makes me more productive, but it also makes me less productive and I’m miserable. I don’t know. I feel like I might burn out and be useless or have a nervous breakdown.”

“What would you like to be feeling?”

“Um, relaxed and determined.Yeah, like hopeful and relaxed.”

So if you imagined yourself as relaxed with the determination and hope, how does that feel?”

“Good. I guess I can’t really believe it’s possible, but I like the idea.”

This happens quite often, especially early on in the hypnotherapy. When clients are so deep into their issues, then it can be really difficult to shift mindset, you know, to think about how we’d rather feel instead.

And so, you know, we keep coming back to what we don’t want, right? I think That’s pretty typical of everyone, or anyone. So in hypnotherapy it’s very important, what positive state that clients would rather feel or they desire so that we can drop that particular positive suggestion into the subconscious.

And so we gently encourage them to think about the positive outcome and over time it becomes much easier to think about or feel, you know, what they rather have instead of all these negative that they don’t want. Right. So like if Marie had said, and this would’ve been very common, and probably more likely if Marie had said, “I don’t wanna feel angry, or I wanna feel not angry.” And in this case, she went right to the positive of how she wanna feel, but that’s actually quite uncommon. And even I, I used to think that way too, and now I’m more quickly shift, but I still sometimes will go into, I wanna not be anxious, you know, or whatever, instead of, I wanna feel at peace. It does become more natural, like you said.

I think we are wired to sort of place focus on negative, you know, because we’re trying to mitigate risk or mitigate negative, so we are always thinking about, you know, what we don’t want. But in fact it’s more helpful to think what we’d rather have.

Right, exactly. So after this, Reina asked Marie, “the idea of being relaxed with determination and hope. When you focus on that, on how great that would be, just see if you notice some place where you feel it in your body or where you feel it the most in your body.”

“Um, this might be kind of weird, but I think in my throat.”

“That’s great.”

So Marie actually feels this sensation in her body, but I would like to mention here that there are, you know, many people who don’t really feel in their physical body. It’s not good or bad, it’s just, you know, different types. Just the fact that some are more in their bodies, meaning they feel the emotions through their bodily sensations and others don’t.

In fact, I am actually the latter. I don’t often feel in my body. And so when a therapist asks this question, it’s okay to say “No, I don’t really feel it anywhere.” And that’s perfectly okay.

Right. And for some people, this is something that they will increase, they’ll start feeling it more in their body, except especially with doing something like hypnosis, um, which is very much in the body, but not for everyone.

Like you, you know, you’ve right, done a lot of hypnosis and you still don’t feel much in your body and that is perfectly fine. And it’s probably about half of people that don’t naturally go into feeling in their body. There’s nothing wrong with that. And Marie is a bit unusual, especially to so quickly know what she’s feeling. Because like even for me, who tends to feel stuff, I wasn’t that quick at it. It took me a long time. Marie’s, she’s really fast, isn’t she?

Yeah, she is.

And also, one more thing that I would like to mention here is that the body parts where we do feel the emotion can at times tell us something. So like symbolizing the issue. So in this case, Marie is feeling it in her throat. Could be that there’s actually something that she wants to say. And so with this positive outcome that she’s visualizing, she feels like she can maybe say that, you know, say what needs to be said. Or it could be that, you know, there’s something that she cannot quite swallow.

Right. Like something she doesn’t wanna take in. ‘cause it’s unappealing. Right?

Right. Exactly.

So after this, Reyna takes Marie through some steps to figure out how Marie takes in information.

Just quickly on this.

Okay. This, figuring out how Marie takes in information is actually quite important in hypnotherapy session. Some people take in information very literally, and then others tend to sort of read between the lines. And so that’s what we would like to find out so that we can give suggestions appropriately in ways that they can take in the information.

Right. It’s really important.

So after doing this, Raina does a hypnotherapy session using Marie’s ideas about how she has said she wants to feel afterward. Marie sits quietly for a few minutes, then says, “I’m really relaxed.” After another moment she adds, “but how do I know I was hypnotized? I can hear everything you said.”

So this is another very common commentary. So, as we mentioned at the beginning that hypnotic state is a very natural physiological phenomenon that all of us go through several times every day. And so that means we can actually go into hypnosis during the day even with our eyes open. And so the point here is that hypnotic state is not necessarily an unconscious state. In hypnotherapy sessions, more often than not, we hear everything that was said, and we may feel as if we’re just listening to the therapist in a very relaxed position. Hypnosis, especially in the therapy setting, is deeply relaxing.

Right. And so the way we know that the suggestions are getting through to us is we’ll start seeing changes in our life and our thinking pattern. Exactly.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today for Marie’s first session. Our next episode will be about 17-year-old Akimitsu Takada, whose parents think he has a social media addiction. And then we’ll return to Marie in the following episode and catch up on how she’s doing. Thank you so much for joining us in Sunnyside.

If you enjoyed this episode of Raise of Light, please follow or subscribe so more people can find us.

And thank you to High Street Jack for providing our theme song. You can check the band out at highstreetjack.com.

Rays of light is created and produced by us, Karisha and Makiko.