by Celeste Hackett
One of the things I absolutely love about hypnosis is how easy it is to utilize in helping us hypnotists with our own problems. There just isn’t enough room here to write all the ways hypnosis has changed my life, but let me tell you one way that I think is pretty fascinating. This is kind of personal, and this is the first time I have ever written about this to the general public, but here goes.
I started my period when I was 14 years old. Since the very beginning of my cycle I never had regular periods each month. (Sorry, I said this was going to be personal!) Amazingly, it was not unusual for me to go 6-8 months at a time without one. To combat this, for many years I took birth control pills.
On the pill, I could get my period to come. Later in life I gave up the pill for health reasons and just lived with my body’s own “natural” crazy rhythms. I got tired of the craziness, after awhile though, so, I also tried hormone cream which I rubbed on my arms, with good results, but after about a year of that, I started bleeding too much and had to stop using it. When I stopped the cream it wasn’t long before my periods stopped again.
At age 46 I began having trouble with premenopausal symptoms, and I knew I needed to really figure out how to get my periods straight. Since, I had been reading an interesting book on ideomotor finger response (Ideomotor Signals for Rapid Hypnoanalysis by Ewin and Eimer) and in it I found a method of self regressing and uncovering problems, I decided to give their method a try.
Now, I’m kind of snooty about regression and how it should be done with someone else helping you (I own a state licensed school for Hypnotism in Dallas, Texas, but since I didn’t have much else to do and there wasn’t anyone in town who was an adept regressionist, I decided while sitting at the kitchen table reading the book to give it a try.
I actually half-heartedly embarked on the self-regression method not really thinking it would yield anything, but to my surprise, I was wrong quite wrong. It did yield something, and I finally found very helpful information about my menstrual problem which seemed to center on an event that happened when I was 8 years old!
Here’s what happened. The self hypnosis session took me back to being a little girl sitting on the toilet. In my mind I became aware of myself just swinging my legs and singing as I sat there. I used to love to sing even on the toilet! As I was singing I looked over and saw the bathroom’s waste basket. In that basket were balls of toilet paper. They looked like big, beautiful snow balls. Being that I lived in a place where there was rarely ever any snow, Louisiana, I just had to pick one up to examine it. Of course, at the center of this snow ball of tissue, was my mother’s soiled menstrual pad.
My little mind went wild as to where all that blood on them “bandages” had come from. I decided someone was bleeding to death in the family and since no one had told me about anyone bleeding I decided someone in the family must be hiding it. I had seen that on TV. There was always someone dying from something and not telling the family, so as not to scare them, on shows like Gun Smoke or on Soap Operas.
In a heightened state of emotion, I called out to my mother in a panic, so we could help the dying family member. When my mother came running into the bathroom and saw what I was holding up all the color went out of her face and she gasped!
I cried, “Momma someone in the family is bleeding!”
She said, in a quite flustered way, “Just throw that away!”
But momma, where did all this blood come from?” I asked still very worried.
Not knowing what to say she gave me a quick, nervous answer she hoped would suffice, “You don’t need to know about this right now. You’re too young.”
Well, I was really scared to begin with, but she was looking suspiciously like the lady on TV who didn’t want anyone in the family to know she was dying, so I asked her one more question with tears in my eyes, “Momma, are you dying?”
“Of course not!” Was all she cried over her shoulder while high-tailing it as fast as she could out of the bathroom.
Well what she had just said was exactly what the lady on the TV had said. These dying TV people were always saying they were fine and everything was okay when they weren’t’ and it wasn’t. They always seemed to want to spare the family or scare them, and since I had the best and most self-sacrificing mother in the world, I figured she was doing the same thing. I wanted to ask her more questions, like how long did she have to live and who was going to take care of us, but she was going to be madder than a hornet if I asked her one more question, so I dropped it.
In fact, the fear that my mother was dying was so great, I did what any kid would do, so they could get back to happily eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking Kool Aid. I pushed it out of my mind.
My subconscious, however, never forgot, and somehow when I learned about menstruation, a year later, my inner mind got it all mixed up and thought that to have a period was dangerous. Therefore, my periods had to be forced with medication or with hormone cream if I ever wanted them to come regularly.
While in self-hypnosis, once I understood what had happened, I knew I had an opportunity to fix it, so I told myself in hypnosis, that now I was all grown up and now I knew that having a period was very healthy. And in fact, I really wanted to have regular periods and that it was safe to do so. I used a non-verbal suggestion on myself, too. After emerging from hypnosis, I put on a clean menstrual pad for my period which I affirmed WOULD be starting soon.
A few hours later my period did start. Since that day for over about a year I never skipped a month and my period started on about the same day each month. My periods had been irregular for over 30 years!
Now, I am starting to have them a little further apart due to I think either being 48 years old soon (age) or possibly there being another earlier event that needs to be dealt with. (Age 8 is usually not the very beginning of any problem.) One of these days I may try to find the very beginning, but, Frankly, I’m just not motivated to have a perfect menstrual cycle since I feel just great now and it will all be over with soon anyhow.
I’m not the only hypnotist out there who has overcome major issues with health, habits and mood using self-hypnosis. If you are a hypnotist, just know that there are wonderful ways you can indeed work on yourself and get great results!
In the coming articles we’ll be looking at some of those ways. In fact, in our very next article, we’ll be talking with Montreal’s very popular Certified Hypnotist, Steve Gruber, about a wonderful hypnosis method he recently used to completely revamp his diet, lose weight and change his life. (Google Stephen Gruber, Montreal hypnotist or ask the hypnotist dot com for more info on Stephen. Speaking of working on your self with hypnosis, check out his free self-hypnosis MP3 while there.)
I hope you’ll join us for that article early next quarter. Thank you for reading!
You can find more information about Celeste on her website for Hypnosis in Dallas.
