Fear is a terrible four-letter bad word, absolutely terrible.
All of us experience fear as it’s our body’s way of alerting us to danger: physical, emotional, real, and imagined (yes — many fears are imagined and sometimes irrational!).
The “dark” side to fear is when it hinders us from living a full life. Our fears overwhelm us and can place barriers and blocks that affect our behaviour, and that’s exactly what happened when a client came to see me. Let’s call him AA.
AA felt that he was constantly giving to others, often without hesitation or regard for what this constant giving could do to him. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it!
Many who seek help learn logical and useful tips and tools to say “no” or to wait before jumping in to give. This makes perfect sense if we could always remain calm, rational, and detached. Of course, life doesn’t work this way.
After talking with AA, it was clear his behaviour was to always say “yes” to everything because he felt completely and utterly unable to say no to anyone. And the reason for his “yes” behaviour?
He had a fear of criticism!
Anyone with a fear of criticism cannot use logical and rational cognitive tools as our logical minds cannot cope. But with hypnotherapy, we indeed have a useful and powerful tool to help AA overcome his fear of criticism.
What did we do in our sessions?
Using hypnosis, I brought AA back to the time when he first experienced a life event that shaped his fear of criticism. We discovered it was during his childhood, and we explored the role his parents played in building and adding to this fear as he grew up.
What I next did was to shatter his old and worthless fear of criticism and install a useful and lasting sense of self-worth and self-esteem using powerful hypnotic techniques. As always, I gave him a hypnotic audio to listen over the next week to reinforce his newly installed positive feelings.
After a few weeks, I checked-in with AA, and to my delight, his fear of criticism had indeed slowly left him, and he was able to say “no” and instead, to receive from others.
A lovely ending to this story
