148. Can Hypnotherapy Heal Childhood Trauma, Anxiety & Limiting Beliefs? | Craig Meriwether

Can hypnotherapy help heal childhood trauma? Does it work for anxiety? Can it change your personality—or simply help you understand yourself more deeply?

In this episode of The Quiet Warrior Podcast, Serena Low speaks with clinical hypnotherapist Craig Meriwether about the science, misconceptions and practical applications of hypnotherapy.

Craig explains how subconscious beliefs formed in childhood can continue influencing confidence, relationships, anxiety and emotional wellbeing long into adulthood. He also addresses common myths about hypnosis, including whether people lose control, whether everyone can be hypnotised and how hypnotherapy differs from stage hypnosis.

If you've ever felt intellectually aware of your patterns but unable to change them, this conversation explores why lasting change often happens beneath conscious awareness.

Questions Answered in This Episode

• What is clinical hypnotherapy?
• How does hypnotherapy work?
• Can hypnotherapy help anxiety?
• Can hypnotherapy help childhood trauma?
• Does hypnotherapy change your personality?
• Is hypnotherapy safe?
• Can hypnotherapy help introverts?
• What is the difference between hypnosis and stage hypnosis?
• Why do subconscious beliefs affect adult behaviour?
• How many hypnotherapy sessions do most people need?

Key Takeaways

• Hypnotherapy is a collaborative process—not mind control.
• The subconscious mind often develops protective strategies during childhood that continue into adulthood.
• Anxiety and fear can be viewed as protective responses rather than personal flaws.
• Healing often involves updating subconscious beliefs that no longer serve us.
• Trust, safety and client autonomy are essential components of effective hypnotherapy.

Chapters (approx)
00:00 Introduction to Craig Meriwether
02:15 Craig's journey through anxiety and depression
06:30 What hypnotherapy actually is
12:30 Myths about hypnosis and stage hypnosis
18:00 Can everyone be hypnotised?
27:00 Conscious vs subconscious mind
33:00 Why childhood experiences shape adult behaviour
36:30 Can hypnotherapy help introverts and social anxiety?
42:00 Serena's biggest insights from the conversation

About Craig Meriwether
Craig Meriwether is a clinical hypnotherapist who helps people work through anxiety, trauma, confidence issues and subconscious patterns that may be preventing them from living the life they want.

Connect with Craig
https://releasethepast.com 

About The Quiet Warrior Podcast
The Quiet Warrior Podcast is a show for introverted professionals navigating visibility challenges and what leadership looks like when you’re quiet by nature.

If this episode resonated, please rate and review the show on your listening app. Your support helps more introverts become Quiet Warriors.

Work with Serena

Host Serena Low is a trauma-informed coach and former lawyer who brings lived experience to every conversation, meeting quiet women leaders at the edge of The Transition and guiding them towards clarity and congruence.
Book a paid Diagnostic Call with Serena to determine if your next career move is stay/go: https://calendly.com/serenalow/diagnostic-call

Work with Serena Low at serenalow.com.au. 

Loved this episode? Leave a review to help other Quiet Warriors find the show.

This episode was edited by Aura House Productions

Transcript

Meeting Craig And His Story

SPEAKER_02 0:02

My guest today is Craig Merriweather, a clinical hypnotherapist helping people explore deep healing and subconscious transformation. For over 16 years, Craig has been helping people heal from early childhood trauma, helping cancer patients with pain control, veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, students with test anxiety, entrepreneurs with confidence, athletes with peak performance, and anyone who may be dealing with overwhelm, fear, and anxiety. Welcome, Craig, to the Quiet Warrior Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Oh, thank you so much, yeah. I really appreciate you inviting me. I've been looking forward to this for a while. So I appreciate you having me on.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Thank you so much for coming along today because I'm very curious about what you do. But before we talk about what you do, can we talk about what instigated this inner work and this path to becoming a hypnotherapist? What were you doing before?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Uh struggling with anxiety and depression is the main uh reasoning behind um moving into this work. And uh this has been a kind of a slow walk up the mountain, if you will. It's been a slow drip of healing and resolution of the things I I was uh dealing with. But in my teenage years, I struggle a lot with depression and anxiety. And this is back in the 1980s. I graduated high school in 1985. And of course, there's no internet back then, and there's uh, you know, even the SSRI drugs like Prozac and Zolof and things. Those all that stuff came out in the 90s. And so in early 80s, it's just you know, whatever book you might find at the bookstore or the library, whatever, you know, psychotherapist, talk therapist you might find in the phone book. And uh, you know, if you're 14, 15, 16, you're not gonna probably do any of that stuff because you really don't understand what's happening. And and back in in those days, in those times, you just didn't talk about it. It was kind of shameful to be going through this. And you see other people, they seem to be happy and doing well and don't understand why you don't feel that way, and so there's something wrong, and and kind of nobody to talk to about it. And so I just kind of struggle with that. And but in the 1990s, as I was moving into my 20s and uh in the late 80s, and as we merged into the 1990s, a personal uh development movement kind of had a second wave, maybe a third wave, of popularity. And Tony Robbins became super popular with his book, Awaken the Drama Then Oprah, became super popular, thinking of a superstar with her TV show. Uh Prozac came out there. Prozac was on the cover of Newsweek. Uh if people remember magazines back in the day, but Prozac was on the cover of Newsweek, and so this the conversation opened up about depression. You could talk about it, and people were really fascinating and interested in becoming better and self-help and self-growth. And the internet came about, and we're, you know, we're all on the internet and our 14.4 computers, uh, you know, modems, I mean, and um, you know, taking 12 hours to download a picture through the phone lines. But there's these things, blog posts coming out, and forums uh and and groups, discussion groups, and you start talking with people, and and you could be anonymous if you wanted to be. And you could talk about your issues and and what other people have done to help their issues that may be kind of similar. And so all this started forming and swirling around me, if you will. And one of the things I noticed in the blog posts, in the articles, in magazines, and books is you know, they may say, like, here's the five things you can do to really change your life and and to put yourself back on the right track. And one of them was always hypnotherapy. The other four would be different, but hypnotherapy kept coming up again and again and again as a way of accessing healing within the subconscious mind. And it's not that you know, hypnotherapy is doing it or the hypnotherapist is doing it, you're healing yourself because you're tapping into your own healing power, the placebo effect, basically what hypnotherapy is all about in a very, very basic way. And so I found somebody to work with. I started doing my own healing work, and that led to um, you know, uh getting together with some friends. And this, you know, this is the 2000s when I started doing hypnotherapy. So you can already see this is we're going on, you know, uh, you know, 15 years of this kind of long walk up the mountain. And uh some friends of mine, uh, we all were talking about let's change the world. What could we do to help change the world and and uh you know be of service out there? And so we all had our couple ideas and we started a mastermind group. And one of the things I was like, well, I know how to I know a lot about depression, I know all these exercises and techniques that are can be very helpful and all this information. And our uh writing contest started with Hay House, um actually one of his imprints called Hierophant, and it was 2010. And um so I joined a writing contest and I started learning how to write a book, and it was one of those things where you know it started with 500 people and they all submitted a chapter, and uh judges went through all the chapters and they whittled it down to 200 people, and the next month 200 people uh submitted a chapter. And I just I didn't even have my book. I'm sure most of the people already had the book written. I'm just like trying to write write a book while I'm you know, have a you know, family and kid and working full-time, and you know, that it's down to 50 people, and then it's down to 10 people. And so I made it all the way to the top 10. In fact, one of the judges says I I um well came in a close second, and uh it was encouraging enough that I ended up self-publishing as this kind of big package with videos and audio recordings, and that led to being in this um other book, um uh Pearls of Wisdom, and uh through Hay House and had Jack King filled in and Marcy Scheim up, all sorts of great people. And so that just kind of as I started doing that, it's like, well, I need to promote this book, this depression 180 book that I wrote. So I started, I did a telesummit with all these people who um um uh focus on depression, and that led to this new thing podcast. So I started a podcast and and uh had a podcast from 2012 to 2015 because right around then it's like, you know what? I I really am fascinated by hypnotherapy, and I kind of did this pivot in midlife to want to train as a hypnotherapist. So I went to this great program at the Hypnotherapy Academy America, 500 hours of training in hypnotherapy, uh, including medical hypnosis and just you know clinical hypnotherapy and how to deal with trauma and and fears and and uh the things that make us angry, uh angry and anxious, and creating healing through having to empower the subconscious mind. So that's it's kind of this 40-year journey in about five minutes.

The Placebo Effect And Self Healing

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Um and it was just this again, this slow drip, the slow widening of my worldview in terms of you know, healing and how to access you know the mind to help resolve uh hurt and pain I was going through.

SPEAKER_02 7:24

Thank you for sharing all that.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

What I gathered, what I gleaned from all that is it takes time to heal. It takes time to gather the knowledge, to process what you're hearing, what you're learning, to integrate it into your own life, to try out I think you you would have tried out everything that you were learning. You wouldn't have just let it float about at the theoretical level. I think there was a deep curiosity in you, as well as what you were going through at the time that made you particularly motivated.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Yeah. Yeah, it was just it was fascinating to me. Um, well, one, I mean, the placebo effect is fascinating to me. And this idea that you could trick somebody into healing themselves. And I know that's not exactly what they're doing, but you know, if like a pharmaceutical company is is researching their new high blood pressure medication, they know they're going to accidentally influence people to heal themselves. The the brochure about the new medication that they're researching, the website where you sign up to be part of the research, the you go to the research office and the that you know medical cleanliness smell and the white lab coats and the waiver you have to sign, all of this is influencing people to heal themselves, and they have to account for that. And so half the group is going to get that sugar pill, no medicinal value whatsoever. So they can see how many people they're influencing. Let's say 30% of the people in the control group get better, they're healing themselves. Let's say 40% of the people get better with the real medication. They actually have to subtract 30%, because maybe they're accidentally influencing them to heal themselves as well. So really only 10% got better, and they'll put on the market at $80 a pill. But in at least in this example, you know, more people got better through through mind. But yeah, I get it. There's no big you know, windfall at the end of the year. Um, there's no billion-dollar profit uh because you can't copyright somebody's mind, you can't patent somebody's mind. So I get it, but we have the ability, these abilities, and so how are you able to tap into it? And it's it's not unlike um the extraordinariness of um multiple personality disorder, and uh it's now called dissociative personality disorder, but that's a real thing, and and it's not like you see in the movies or TV show where somebody you know changes their voice and kind of hunches over like a like a really good actor is playing all these different parts, these multiple parts, and they do a really good British accent or they do a really good Christopher Walken impersonation or something. Like when people who really suffer with this uh extraordinary mental illness, one what researchers have found is about 97% of them have gone through some extraordinary abuse uh in their life when they're children and horrific abuse that they think the mind splinters into these different parts, only, you know, so one part doesn't have to hold all of it, has to have to deal with all of it, splits in these different parts to handle uh various aspects of the hurt and pain they've gone through. And when they switch personalities, it's not again, it's not like they're faking an accent, like an actor, but the muscles around the vocal cords will expand and contract and literally change the voice. Uh muscles around the eyes will expand and contract and change eyesight. So you maybe need glasses or don't need glasses, or you need a different prescription. Moles and scars will appear and disappear, allergies will appear and disappear. So nine personalities who may be allergic to nuts or orange juice or something, and the tenth can drink orange juice and eat nuts all day long. If an adult personality takes adult level medication and then switches to the personality of a child, it could overdose and literally have to be resuscitated because they OD'd. But what's extraordinary is eye color will change. And the you know, chromosome, the human chromosome is half mom, half dad. If mom has brown eyes and dad has blue eyes, and the you know, genetic switch for brown eyes is on, and the genetic switch for blue eyes is off, switching personalities, those switches may flip. Eye color will change. And so you're literally having this extraordinary physical changes, and all that's happening is they're having a profound change in belief and who they are. And so while that's extraordinary and extreme and horrible that they have this um they struggle with this mental illness, it's also fascinating. It's like, well, they're just a human being. Their cells divide like ourselves, and and and they their physiology operates the same as our physiology. Again, all that's happening is they have a profound change of belief in who they are and they are affecting instantaneous change. And so is that possible without the extreme, you know, mental illness around it? And that's where uh you know a lot of people have been studying mind and consciousness and hypnotherapy and other ways of accessing the healing potential of the human being. And you know, hypotherapy does it in a gentle and safe way, and it's not that it's magic or you're making people do anything, you can't make people go into hypnosis, you can't make people do you know silly things like be up on stage and cluck like chickens and dance like Michael Jackson or whatever. People who get up on stage to do the shows in Las Vegas and comedy clubs, uh they volunteer to get up there. They want to be up there. Well, your whole show. I mean, it's like uh who's going up on stage? The introvert at the back, you know, hiding in the shadows, sinking down to their chair because they don't want to be picked, or the extrovert who got there early and is sitting in the front row and saying, you know, pick me, pick me, jumping up and down. You know, who are they gonna pick? The introvert or the exhibitionist who wants to be star of the show? One's gonna do a better job on stage and have have more fun. And they'll have a big smile on their face. And you actually watch one of those shows, um, like go on YouTube or something, because they'll pick like 13, 14 people to go up on stage. And the reason they pick so many people is some are going to be excused because they don't want to do it. Um, they they thought it was a good idea when they raised their hand and got picked and walked up on stage, but now there's a hundred people, they got their phones out, they're all videotaping them, and they're and um and they got stage fright, and there's lights and all this stuff, and they get nervous. They get into the stress response, the fight or flight response. That's not a good state to be when you're supposed to be relaxed and having fun, and so they'll be excused from the stage because the hypnotest can't make them do anything they don't want to do. Uh something that hypnotherapy is is really famous for is helping people quit smoking. I just can't make people quit smoking. Otherwise, it'd be 100% guarantee. You know, I just you know go into Las Vegas bars and casinos and just make people quit smoking. You can't make people do anything you don't want. And maybe somebody's husband or wife makes the appointment. I'm tired of you smoking and the cost and the health implications and that it stinks everywhere. I made an appointment next Thursday at 2 o'clock, you're gonna go to a hypnotherapist and quit smoking. They don't want to quit smoking. I can't make them quit smoking because their wife or their husband made an appointment. They may be using it as a negotiation ploy to smoke in the garage because they enjoy smoking. Uh, you know, otherwise I could I could hypnotize my way into the United Nations and hypnotize all the world leaders to create world peace, and I'd be the guy who made, you know, created world peace here on planet Earth. You know, and I'd be celebrated. You know, I I could hypnotize I could hypnotize Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to write me a billion-dollar check. But the reason I don't have a billion-dollar check from Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whoever is because they don't want to write me one. You know, so you can't make people do anything they don't want to do. However, if you're interested in healing, if you're interested in trying out some medication for high blood pressure medication, you may actually heal yourself instead. Medication may have nothing to do with that, because you maybe you got the sugar pill. But you know, they even tricked people, um, tricked, and I don't know that's not the right word. But um some incredible research with with um Parkinson's. And that that uh you know, big the big issue with park Parkinson's is dopamine, not enough dopamine. They actually fooled uh the brains of Parkinson's patients to release dopamine through a placebo. That's that's extraordinary. It's extraordinary what what can what the human being can do. We've all heard of the miracle stories of you know people who have cancer, have tumors, and through some visualization exercise, maybe something's all on YouTube or listen to recordings or meditations or whatever they do. A month later they go and finally go in for the surgery and all the tumors are gone. Where's where's that? You know, and that's not just one or two stories, there's a lot of stories like that. And so can you do that on purpose? And that's what a lot of this work is trying to figure out. Can you heal on purpose? Uh you can again you can't make anybody do it, but if you want to heal just like somebody may want to get up on stage and act silly and have a funny video to put on TikTok or Instagram or something, and at the end of the show have a big smile on your face because it's so much fun. Well, you know, why what about healing? Is it possible? So it's it's fascinating. And and I you know, I don't know if we have all the answers or anything um like that, or even close to all the answers, but it seems possible that we are extraordinary as human beings. And how do you tap into it?

What Hypnosis Really Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

That is the question for the ages. So as a hypnotherapist, you've established that you do not hypnotize people, you do not make people do anything they do not want to do, which means that throughout the process, it is a gentle, it is a safe process, it is in a sense self-autonomous. They are fully conscious, are they, of what is going on. And they can say at any time, I I want to stop now, or I'm not comfortable with this, or I don't think I want to go through with it today.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's people, people maybe listening, who uh say, oh, I tried uh do hypnosis once and it didn't work. I'm one of those people who can't be hypnotized. Because the the academics um who study this stuff, they uh like specifically hypnosis, will say, like, oh, 20% of the people can't be hypnotized. That's not a thing. Everybody can be hypnotized because you're going through stuff, aren't you? Uh you're dealing with anxiety or anger or maybe patterns that you notice in relationships, patterns within help, procrastination. You hypnotize yourself into that. Yes, maybe through a traumatic experience in childhood that you don't even remember. And you're trying to keep yourself safe through procrastination or repetitive patterns in relationships or something else. You've hypnotized yourself. Well, let's undo it. It's almost like de-hypnotizing you. And and in those cases where I could be hypnotized, it's like, well, then you didn't feel comfortable in that situation. Like the studies at universities and things, okay, well, 28% of the people couldn't do it. It's like, well, yeah, they couldn't do it with you in your research lab, in your office at the university, because they were uncomfortable with you or in the room or at the Zoom call. Everybody can be hypnotized because you hypnotize yourself every day. I mean, we see it leaning with politics, not to turn this into politics or anything, but we we see that with our friends in politics or religion or something else. And not to say one or good or bad or whatever, in terms of any of that. It's just that you know, you're influencing yourself all the time, and you choose how to be influenced. Uh going back to I know it's a very sticky subject, but let's but I think everybody can identify with this in terms of politics and news. Uh the left rolls their eyes at Fox News. The right rolls their eyes at CNN. And yet the people on the right are influenced by Fox News, the people on the left are influenced by MSNBC or CNN or whatever the thing is. And so you choose how you want to be influenced. The shows you watch on TV, the news, where you get your news, who you get your news from is all a way of influencing you to feel a certain way about certain people, certain politicians. And you may not be doing the influencing, you may be watching somebody on Instagram about politics or spirituality or religion. And again, some people may just like roll their eyes at it, other people are like get really heavily uh emotionally involved in that. Is that not hypnosis? Even though their eyes are open, they're fully conscious and can repeat and even argue with uh the person on the screen. Uh and so you don't have to be this stereotypically cliched asleep thing. But in and of itself, it's just brainwave state. And uh, you know, the famous ones we learned about in school, beta, alpha, theta, and delta, it's really just how fast your brain is processing information, how fast a lightning storm in the brain. If we've seen those videos of on YouTube of the of when neurons fire, um millions of neurons firing when, you know, I wave my hand around or you walk down the street or something. Uh, how fast that lightning storm happens is what brainwave state you're in. Just like being bored back in school, maybe there was a class in high school or somewhere, bored at a meeting at work, and your mind drifts off. Well, you just altered your state of consciousness. And you start daydreaming about the weekend coming up, or you got people coming over, or that big report's due next week, or that vacation you took last year. Maybe you're driving your car. Has that ever happened to people? It's like you're driving, you don't remember the last minute or two, driving to the store, you're driving home, you're driving to work, driving to school. And your mind drifts off. Oh, I got people coming over. Oh, that report's due on Thursday. Oh, I got that phone call coming up at 10. And you miss your exit, or you just find yourself at your parking spot, or you find yourself in your garage or something. You just altered your state of consciousness, put you in a hypnagogic trance state. It's a fancy term. Probably lowered your brainwave state to the alpha brainwave state. Still drove because you know how to walk down the street, you know how to tie your shoes, you know how to drive a car. Because you've done it so much. You've hypnotized yourself. You know, or you know, it's not so much hypnotize yourself, but you put yourself in that hypnosis state. Driving a car, you know, and so it's it's not uh a magical state, it's not a mystical state, even you know, like that that trope, that um that cliche of I don't I don't have a pocket watch, but you know, if you're like waving a pocket watch uh back and forth, you are getting sleepy, is that not just the boring teacher at school? And your mind just uh you know, if people remember that movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the teacher in that movie, Bueller, Bueller, Bueller, he's doing the economics lecture, voodoo, voodoo economics, anyone, anyone, all the kids in the class are just dozing off and staring out the window, and he put them all into hypnosis. Why? Because he was boring. Well, that's where that you are getting sleepy and follow the pocket watch or the you know, whatever it is. They're swinging in front of you a pen. And you just lose focus. Why? Because it's boring watching a pocket watch swing back and forth while somebody goes, you're getting sleepy. That's all we do. It's it's not it's not magic. It's really just being a you know, running a boring meeting at work that has nothing to do with your department or you know what what you do there. It's just like your mind drifts off. Simple. It's really not that hard. And so everybody can do it because we all get bored somewhere. We get bored watching TV. TV itself puts you in the alpha brainwave state, therefore puts you in the hypnagogic trance state. So if you can watch TV, if you can get bored at work or at school or you can do it. You know, it's just it's just that thing if you have, you know, just find somebody you're comfortable with and you know, and you can do the work. You might start with you know videos and recordings on YouTube. But you know, just like listening to a recording that may have like a nice waterfall sound or a nice lovely stream in the background and lovely music, and then maybe just positive affirmations. That's a technique of hypnotherapy. Relaxing the mind and the body, moving into the alpha brainwave state and installing positive suggestions. You know, if people do yoga uh at the end of a yoga class, you usually do that savasana, you're lying on your back, it's everybody's favorite part of a yoga class. If the uh yoga teacher was to like, and now imagine uh a beautiful healing light coming from the edges of the universe, around you in a loving embrace, moves to the bottom of your feet, and starts renewing, restoring, rejuvenating every cell of your body so you feel rejuvenating, you feel that's hypnotherapy. You know, you're putting somebody in a relaxed state of consciousness, and you're installing, you know, healing suggestions. And so it's and it's not like you turn people into zombies or um, you know, uh it's not mind control, it's not brainwashing, it's not turning people into men cheering candidates so they assassinate the prime minister. It's it's just you know, doing what you're already doing, being influenced in a specific way that that aligns with you, and and all we're doing is for healing. You know, and so it's it's really powerful because it's you doing it. I don't fix anybody. And hypnotherapy in and of itself doesn't fix you. You fix yourself. Placebo effect. Just how are we going to influence you to do that? We're not gonna trick you into it, like the placebo effect in a in a research study, uh, like with a sugar pill. We're gonna do it on purpose, and that's where the intake form comes in, that's where having a consultation call comes in, making sure it's a good match, you know, and understanding what the person wants to work on, and then gonna design a session or two or three or four uh to create that healing. And that that's what's extraordinary about hypotherapy. It's not 80, 90 sessions over two years, uh, like maybe talk therapy, not to say talk therapy is bad. I don't mean you put talk therapy on blast, but you know, generally I see people three or four times, you know, and that's an average, so yeah, maybe one or two times, maybe seven or eight times, depends on what people want to work on. It's it's powerful stuff because it's you doing it and you're tapping your own healing power. You don't look outside of yourself for this healing work. You may have a facilitator and a guide in the form of a hypotherapist, but they're not doing the work. You're doing the work, they're lifeguarding you doing the work. Yeah.

Subconscious Safety And Updating Old Patterns

SPEAKER_02 27:08

I think what I've noticed is when someone says they have a mental health struggle, typically they go to their GP, the GP gives them a referral to a psychologist, for instance. And the psychologist, well, here in Australia anyway, um, tends to recommend talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, which from speaking with clients who have been through that, it sounds to me that we're still approaching it from a rational, logical brain approach, which is that I have to explain, I have to justify, I have to tell a story. And that engages me at the intellectual level. And probably as an introvert, acquired achiever, people are already very high functioning in that area. But what they don't have access to is that connection to the deeper parts of themselves. I think you talked about that. And for us to get there, we need to be sufficiently relaxed. We need to trust the person we're talking with. We need to be sure that it's a safe environment, that this person is on my side, they're not going to judge me. So I don't have to tell a good story. I can say whatever is on my mind. They're not going to tell me I'm a bad person or shame me. And I think there is a lot of that undercurrent that keeps people stuck at the intellectual level.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and I I know this is the new research and and the way people describe mind is is is different, but just to make the point, um they were saying, you know, like that conscious mind only makes up 5% of mind. Subconscious mind makes up 95% of mine, which makes sense because it's running the the digestive system, running the immune system, being in your heart. You know, you get a cut on the finger, it heals that. If you ever had that um uh strange uh situation where somebody, your friend comes, hey, you got a big scrape on your arm. How'd you get that? And you're like, Well, I don't know. I didn't even know it was there. Like the subconscious mind knew there was a problem, started the healing process of creating new skin and a scab and new skin under that. And you even know it was there. Subconscious mind started the healing process before you're even consciously aware there was a problem. And and so the subconscious mind is handling all that stuff, taking a day-old baby to that of an adult, all things we don't have to think about, splitting our cells. Don't they say the dust in our house is like mostly dead skin cells and all that crazy stuff? We don't have to think about any of that. Walking down the street now that we know how to do it. We don't have to think about walking down the street and balance and falling over and left foot, right foot, um, riding a bicycle, tying our shoes. But the main job of the subconscious mind is to keep us safe and protected, which doesn't necessarily mean happy and successful. It's to keep us safe and protected for survival, and it's using what we've experienced in the past as a guides, as the blueprint on how to keep us safe. We may have been through great hurt and pain, through great trauma, embarrassment, humiliation, bullying at school, growing up in an unsafe home. And it's using all these files, like in the top drawer of a filing cabinet, to understand our world and protect us from any danger, perceived danger. Because the mind can't tell the difference between what we all want to imagine. That's why a nightmare feels so scary. Even though something ridiculous, like a hamburger's chasing down the street, throwing coconuts at your head, is ridiculous. And yet it will have a physical change on your body of creating the stress response and maybe waking you up with a scream. So you can imagine what's happening in your waking world. Something as ridiculous as a hamburger chasing down the street, throwing coconuts at your head, can literally turn on the stress response, adrenaline cortisol dumping your bloodstream, your heart racing, all the, you know, not all, but the break amounts of blood and nutrients and oxygen moving to the big muscles to fight and escape. And so its main job is to keep you safe and protected. And it's just using what has happened in the past and what you've learned about that, maybe as a child. It's just that the instructions you learned as a child on how to keep yourself safe may not work anymore. Keeping yourself small and your voice low and to hide may not be, it may have been the best thing when you're seven, eight years old. I mean, that's not gonna work when you're 30 or 35. It's just that the instructions haven't changed. That's subconscious mind. It's this highly emotionalized mind because emotions are the warning system. The alarms, you know, when somebody pulls a fire alarm in a building, sirens go off, the strobe lights go off, warning everybody that there's danger. We also have a warning system, feelings of anxiety, feeling of fear, feeling of anger and overwhelm, warning everybody that there's danger, you need to get to safety. Well, the subconscious mind is this highly emotionalized mind here to keep us safe and protected while running all those systems in the background. That conscious mind you're just talking about, yes, that logical analytical mind, the mind that creates our goals and the plan is to achieve those goals and the willpower. But conscious mind, they were saying, is 5% of minds. Subconscious minds, 95% of minds. So when there's conflict between the logical mind and the emotional mind, the emotional mind wins every time. You know, so this doesn't have to make any sense. And it may not require the logical mind analyzing it for years to find healing, you know? And so that's where this work comes in. I think talk therapy is very, very helpful and very useful. Relationship counseling, life coaching, all that kind of stuff can be extraordinarily helpful and useful. But it's like anything, there's there's lots of tools in the toolbox. You go to the hardware store, there's lots of different kinds of screwdrivers, lots of different wrenches, lots of different hammers, blowtorch, there's all sorts of things, tools to help you build your cathedral. Hypnotherapy is one of them: talk therapy, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, death psychology, you know, all that stuff, as well as acupuncture, as well as yoga, as well as massage, and you know, uh, all sorts of different things are there to help you achieve your best life. Hypnotherapy is one unique tool because it's all these different techniques to help you access your subconscious mind to create healing, that placebo effect. Subconscious mind is for you. It may not seem like that sometimes, but it's for you because it's trying to keep you safe and protected. And it wants you to get your best life, but it may need to armor you against perceived danger, and that sometimes that armor can get really heavy after a while. It may be time to let that armor go. Because it doesn't serve you anymore. Served you when you were a child, when you were a teenager in your early twenties. Now you mo know so much more about life. You you you have so much more wisdom and knowledge understanding. Maybe time to change the instructions on how to keep yourself safe. And you're the one who did it, and that's not say it was your fault. Certainly not. You know, but even as a child under great trauma, how to protect yourself and keep yourself safe, even unconsciously installed in the subconscious mind, you're the one who did that. It's not to blame you, say it's your fault, it's not to blame the victim, but it actually becomes very empowering because if you're the one who did it, the one installed those instructions that are now maybe kind of hindering you in moving forward, then you're the one who can change them. You're the one who put them in there, you're the one who could change them. Amend them, edit them, you know, shred the file and create new files. Why not?

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

And so that's that's the healing potential of hypnotherapy. And you know you can be hypnotized because if you're still listening to this, you know, there's like a lot of people say, Well, I'm struggling with anxiety, I don't even know why I'm anxious. Well, you hypnotize yourself. I guess not to blame you or say it's your fault, but it's just your subconscious mind is reacting to a trigger in your world, in your environment, at work, in home, and family. You may you may know why, you may not have any idea why. And I'm gonna guess, even if you're chronically feeling anxious, you feel anxious a lot. I'm gonna guess you're not anxious all the time. You're not anxious 16 hours a day. It may come and go, and it may be anxious a lot, and the and the volume knob may be at 10. But I'm gonna guess there's parts of your day, maybe it's the last part of the day, maybe it's watching a funny movie, maybe it's in the morning when you're working out, maybe lunch with a friend, but there are times when you are not anxious. So your subconscious mind knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off. Your subconscious mind knows what the problem is. You know, you may be anxious at work, but not at lunch with a friend. If you're anxious with lunch at a friend and not at work, it knows when to turn it on and to turn it off. Therefore, your subconscious mind knows what the problem is. Your subconscious mind knows what to do about it. Just like it knows how to heal the cut on the finger, the scrape on the knee, to be tricked into lowering blood pressure with a sugar pill. It knows how to do this. And so it's just with these different techniques and tools, it's you know, accessing your own healing power.

Shyness Social Anxiety And Confidence

SPEAKER_02 36:20

What would you say to someone who is introverted, socially anxious, maybe shy as well? How would hypnotherapy help them? Would it change that personality? Would it help them be less shy?

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Yeah, see, I mean it depends on if the shyness is due to um maybe a fear or an issue that happened in the past. Um, sort of like, you know, oh, you why don't you get up and tell that funny story uh about vacation last year? And it was like 10 people at the shy. Well, maybe that when that person was in, you know, eight years old or 10 years old at school for show and tell or the book report, they got up in front of class and everybody laughed because it didn't go well. And they put an instruction in that it's unsafe to be in front of people. Now, is that why they're shy? Because yeah, now hypnotherapy can help that. If they're shy for another reason, it just kind of depends. Are they shy because when they were dating, first started dating as a teenager, it didn't go well. They're kind of awkward and didn't dress well and didn't have a nice haircut or whatever, and so they felt awkward and embarrassed and humiliated. Is that why they're shy? That can be healed too. So it really depends on the issue. You don't want to change people just to change people, and you can't, you know, hypnotize people into this. This may be a really old uh um example, but there's a movie called The Nutty Professor. The original version had Jerry Lewis back in the 60s, and then I think they remade it with Eddie Murphy uh in the 1990s. But the the basic idea is, and I forget how they do it, but the basic idea is he's an he's a nerdy scientist, uh goofy, nerdy scientist, and then he drinks the potion. It's a Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde thing, only it's kind of reversed, is he's a goofy, nerdy scientist, and he becomes this hip cool cat when he turns, you know, um turns into the um Mr. Hyde kind of character. You can't really hypnotize somebody into that. Now there's training, you can go to dance classes to feel more graceful, you can take communication classes to talk more eloquently, and you can use hypnotherapy to help release the fears and and the anxiousness and the worry and the overwhelm, especially if it's related to a specific uh incident that you maybe you don't consciously remember. Your subconscious mind remembers it because you're anxious getting up in front of people, not you know, lunch with a friend. So it knows when to turn it on. So yeah, you can deal with issues around shyness if it's related to something. You may just like being by yourself. You know, you know, and and so I you don't want to change that. It sucks sometimes, you know. But I like being by myself. And I understand it a lot more now that I'm older in age. I you know, even as a kid, I would like tell them, you know, the the neighborhood kids would come, hey, can Craig come out and play? And my mom would invite them in, and she'd come to my room and say, Hey, you know, Ellen Fred from next door came over. I'm like, I don't want to play with them. She'd have to send them away. I was doing that as a kid, let alone as a teenager, trying to make my way through high school, let alone, you know. I I just I just feel more comfortable by myself. And yeah, sometimes it's lonely, but it's like I'm sure there being an extrovert has some you know crappy things around it too. But I just I'm at a point where I I like who I am and I've I've leaned into who I am. I don't want to change who I am. I don't want to like it sounds exhausting being an extrovert, honestly. And so um but if people, you know, may want to have more confidence in getting up and speaking in front of people. You want more confidence in asking for the raise at work or asking for the promotion. You want more confidence in asking the beautiful man or woman out on a date. Um yeah, that that hypnotherapy can actually r help really well with that. Because it's within you and you want it. But it you know, if it's it's not something that you just like change core personality traits. So you know, so um you know, I guess and a lot of that's molded with family and just how you grow up and things like this. And of course, again, you can like you can learn how to dance or you learn how to do martial arts, or um, you can learn how to be more engaging and more charismatic and things, but it's it's a practice, you know. Um, and there's certain aspects of maybe hypnotherapy who can help with that, but it's not like a magic wand where you tap somebody on the head three times and you know they're the most charismatic person in the world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:31

What's

How To Work With Craig

SPEAKER_02 41:32

the best way, Craig, for people to find out more about your work?

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Yeah, sure. The the best way is just go to the website releasethepast.com, find out more about me. I'm happy to do consultation calls with people and work with people, you know, around uh I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona, and work with people around uh my area, but also around the world. And uh, you know, or just to be, you know, throw out some unique places, worked with people in Iceland and Puerto Rico and Costa Rica and Tahiti and Bulgaria and some other really kind of unique places. And it's just so is the power of what we're doing right here is is is how easy it is being comfortable in your own home. So releasethepath.com is where you found out all about me.

SPEAKER_02 42:16

Brilliant. We'll make sure that's in the show notes for people who are listening. Now, what I've taken away today is a deeper understanding of what hypnotherapy does. It doesn't hypnotize someone to become someone they are not, it doesn't change personality, it doesn't make you something you aren't already. Instead, it helps you access, I think, what is already inside you and it does that through the process that you guide people through, which is safe, it's gentle, it retains full autonomy of the person as they go through the process so they know what's happening and it taps into the unconscious and the subconscious as part of the mind, which you said is 95%, and not the conscious mind, which is only 5%. And it's I I suppose it also does is a kind of updating of the underlying code.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

So you you know that's a great way of putting it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

You are writing, rewriting, I guess, your own narrative, your own perspective, your own story. So even if it's something that's gone very deep, let's say something you experienced in childhood, perhaps now you look at it with new eyes, maybe you extract a new perspective from it, maybe you draw some new lessons that you you didn't see before. And so that gives you a different way of looking at the situation and it helps you maybe accept or make peace with what's happened and to grow from there. I think the important thing is that we do not get stuck at the at the level of whatever stories we told ourselves when we were five or seven or ten.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

Because those stories are outdated now.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

Yeah, and of course, a lot of that's behind the veil of the unconscious, but again, subconscious mind knows what the problem is and it knows what to do about it, just may think it's better to hold on to that old code. The old code may be two plus two equals five. It doesn't work. And so change the code. You're the one who put it in there. It's not to say it was your fault that that code got installed in that way. And maybe the best thing as a child was two plus two equals five. But your equations aren't going to equal out. It doesn't matter how much you're how frustrated you are with that or how much you write two plus two equals four on your computer screen, you have to go into the code and change it. So change it. You know? Yeah. I think we mentioned I don't mean to make it sound so simple and easy, but sometimes it's simple and easy.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

Yes. And that takes courage to be that honest and to look at it squarely and say, yes, that that's where the problem is. That's the root cause. If you go back far enough and your subconscious mind floats up that scenario or you know, something you may even have forgotten already, but it was there. And that's the seed of all that has happened since. And then to be able to look at that and say, ah, so this is what it is, this is where it came from. I think there's a great, there's a certain peace that comes from recognizing that too.

SPEAKER_00 45:16

Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. There's a great relief, a great peace that comes from from that.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Yeah. So I think the most important thing of that that I've learned today is that there's nothing wrong with who we are, what we are, you know, whatever situation we find ourselves in. The important thing is not to judge ourselves harshly for things that have happened in the past, you know, things that may have been outside our control, things that happened when we were very young, when we didn't have the language or the resources or the power to do anything about it. But the important thing is that with the help of a tool like hypnotherapy, we can look at that situation in a new way, a compassionate way, and then we can find a way through it. So we don't get stuck there in that old story. We can update the code, we can keep moving, we can keep exploring, enjoying life, and not let this thing hold us back.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Yeah. So thank you so much, Craig, for coming on the Quiet Warrior Podcast. Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

That was a great way to sum it all up, um, an eloquent way, graceful way of summing it all up. And yeah, thank you so much for inviting me onto your show. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Thank you. And to everyone who's listening, thank you for joining me on the show today. I invite you to head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review to tell us what you're loving about the show. Your review will help other introverts to discover the Quiet Warrior podcast, too. See you on the next episode.