Perception

The brain shapes our very nature. Today, I want to highlight a core idea: "perception shapes experience." The way we perceive our surroundings directly impacts happiness and well-being. This raises the question: if perception is so powerful, why don’t we deliberately choose more positive perspectives to foster peace, happiness, and success in our lives, no matter our circumstances?

Threat, self-preservation, and fear are among the many reasons perception is a tool humankind uses consciously and subconsciously as a natural survival instinct, but not all perceptions are key to a positive dynamic when the outcome is unwanted. A seemingly harmless situation might have one individual perceiving a threat whilst another is perfectly content. (We will visit fight or flight responses in relation to perception at a later date).

Many things may influence our perception in life, such as negative mindset, fear, trauma and learned behaviours. Perception can be an individual, unique reaction; danger perception studies show survival instincts can be rooted in us, assessing danger and keeping us alive.

A reaction for self-preservation and survival when a threat is not present can lead us to question why our behaviours are this way, when perhaps our peers are not experiencing the same restrictions. One person's perception of fear could be another's perception of opportunity. Not all individuals share the same experiences; knowing this, it would be acceptable to theorise that our perceptions and reactions will in turn be different. When we perceive threat, we seek self-preservation; when we are trying to push past the fear, anxiety or physical symptoms, the reactions we have are challenged, causing conflict between how we wish to react and our instinctual reaction of self-preservation. This conflict can feel like we are being held back, leaving us questioning our abilities.

A counselling therapist may help through talking therapies to help us find the solution to realign a healthy and more positive perception of life, its situations and scenarios.

A life coach might help with guidance and positive affirmations to help us make more positive changes and have the confidence to do so with self-belief.

A Hypnotherapist may discuss your perceptions, why they are rooted the way they are and what you would like to change about this. They will discuss and seek out why the threat perception has been activated in what rationally would seem a non-threatening scenario.

Hypnotherapy can undo unhelpful behaviours and mindsets by finding the root cause of your unwanted reactions.

In Hypnotherapy, when we discuss the conscious mind and the subconscious, it can often paint a picture of something that is not validated; a knee-jerk reaction to the stigma surrounding Hypnotherapy and the word subconscious mind triggers the image of "entertainment hypnotherapy", where they exaggerate and try to build a more magical environment for their audience. In Hypnotherapy counselling, the theory and study of this counselling service is very different and focuses on solutions for ailments and behaviours.

The subconscious has been debated, studied and deliberated on by many academics and the general population for many years. When something cant be physically analysed for eg like a surgeon would when analysing a biopsy, scepticism and doubt can be found in a variety of non physical and visual things. Psychologists analyse human behaviour, test theories through experiments, and attempt to validate findings through careful analysis of data collected and their results. Psychological studies show many different theories on the conscious and the subconscious mind, so what that that show us? One thing we can determine is the mind has many capabilities, vastly studied and ever intriguing.

For the purposes of Hypnotherapy Counselling, you can view your mind as a tool, the subconscious as a vault holding core memories, lessons beliefs, learned behaviours, genetic and environmental impressions. These are all stored in the mind but are not things we are not actively thinking about or are at the forefront of the mind. They sit in the vault.

The conscious mind uses the ideas, experiences and concepts held by the subconscious for the basic information needed to formulate a response to situations and scenarios.

The subconscious does not have the rationale that you experience in your conscious thinking, so it may perceive something it holds in this vault as a fear, threat or negative perception and give you a reaction in your conscious actions which is undesirable or unwanted. Realigning our processes in the subconscious mind through hypnotherapy gives us the opportunity to successfully implement the things we want or correct the unwanted behaviours so our conscious and subconscious communicate without causing unwanted behaviours or reactions.

Perception can be a confusion between the subconscious and the conscious; to overcome the undesired effects, address the confusion and anchor the clarity back into your subconscious to alleviate and resolve the issues being experienced.

There is no right or wrong therapy; much like perception: each path holds an opportunity for personal self-improvement and enrichment in your life. Understand your own mind, the different therapies available, and their possibilities to change your life in the direction you want to grow.

Our mind is a powerful tool which we can utilise to enrich our lives.

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