We’re harder on ourselves than anyone else.
We beat up on ourselves. We drive ourselves. We tell ourselves things we would never say to someone we love.
Where does that critical inner voice come from? And how can we break its spell?
Hypnotherapist Dorrit Karlsen has the answers.
Dorrit is a certified Leadership by Heart coach and Ericksonian hypnotherapy practitioner. She helps women struggling with their confidence, self worth, and self image to eliminate those negative voices inside and find their core strength and full potential to achieve happiness and success.
In this week’s YBTV interview, you’re about to learn why self-help books are often ineffective at changing the way you think inside.
You’ll discover why you have to be SO careful about what you say to kids under the age of seven.
And you’ll find out why REAL hypnosis has nothing with swinging pendulums and feeling sleepy.
Dorrit even takes us through a real-life hypnosis session with a claustrophobic client that went in a VERY unexpected direction..
What You’ll Learn
Don’t let your inner voice keep you from happiness. It’s just a tape recording, and it can be altered.”
If you’re like most people, you’ve got two kinds of voices inside your head.
One kind of voice is negative. It tears you down. It makes you feel like you’re not good enough.
The other kind of voice is positive. It makes you feel good. It spurs you to try harder. If you listen to this voice, you can achieve amazing things.
That’s why hypnotherapist Dorrit Karlsen doesn’t want us to ignore our inner voice entirely.
“The inner voice is actually trying to keep us safe,” she says. It dates back to the dawn of human history, when all we had were our instincts to keep us alive.
Where Your Inner Voice Comes From
But our own personal inner voice has its own personality and flavor. Weirdly enough, it tends to sound like our parents. Why?
“It actually comes from our childhood,” Dorrit explains. “From when we are within the womb, in the third trimester, up until the age of seven years old, we are little walking tape recorders. We actually record everything that’s being said to us and around us.”
We’re basically in a hypnotic state. We’re not able to think critically about what we hear. We just absorb everything.
This is the source of many of our blocks later in life.
If you hear your parents arguing about money, for example, you may begin to associate negative feelings with money, leading you to struggle financially as an adult.
Distinguishing the Positive Inner Voice from the Negative
Unfortunately, the negative messages you picked up as a kid may have more influence over you than the positive ones.
“It’s the negative ones that are the most powerful,” Dorrit says, “and they grow because we feed them. We feed them by doing as they say.”
So if you listen to the negative voices telling you to stop doing that and don’t bother anyone, you reinforce that negative programming.
How do you know if your inner voice is hurting you or helping you?
“If you hear a voice, try feeling what it wants. Why is it here? What does it want you to do?” Dorrit suggests.
If it wants you to do something that will ultimately benefit you, then listen to it.
But don’t listen “if it tells you, ‘Don’t apply to that school, you’re never going to finish it anyway,’ or, ‘You can’t have that job, because you’ve never worked with that before.’
“When it keeps selling us stuff like that, then it’s preventing us from growing, from expanding, from finding our full potential and happiness.”
In some twisted way, the negative voice inside your head is trying to keep you safe by discouraging you from taking risks.
“To stay where we are is the safest, so our mind will always try to keep us where we are,” Dorrit says.
But we have do a reality check. Is it really dangerous to try for a school that you really want to attend but is a bit above your level? Is it really dangerous to apply for a job in a field you’ve never worked in before but want to explore?
Tracing Your Inner Voice Back to Its Source
What Dorrit does in her hypnotherapy sessions is lead her clients back to the moment when that negative message entered their consciousness.
For example, you might have been in a shop with your parents and asked for a doll. Your parents told you that you couldn’t have the doll, because you’d been behaving badly. They told you, “You’re not worth it.” Then, for the rest of your life, when a big opportunity comes up, you sabotage it because you don’t believe you’re worth it.
If you’re a parent reading this, you might notice a sudden sinking feeling in your gut….
Does this mean you need to watch everything you say to your kids like a hawk?
No, says Dorrit. “Kids are really resilient, and they can handle most things as long as they know that we love them just the way they are. But,” she adds, “it’s important for us to remember that children under the age of seven are not able to reason; they just absorb.”
So you don’t want to say things to them like, “You can do better than this. What you’re doing isn’t good enough.”
Kids just hear that they aren’t good enough and they can’t do it. They don’t understand you’re trying to push them to try harder. “They just hear the words, and the words get stuck in their mind.”
Changing Our Old Programming
That old programming wouldn’t be a problem if we could consciously choose each and every thought we think.
But we’re only consciously in control of 5% of what goes on in our minds. The rest operates beneath the surface, on a subconscious level we can’t reach.
“That’s why it doesn’t help us to read ‘think positive’ books or ‘better yourself’ books,” Dorrit explains. “Because you understand what it says, and you got the information, but you’re getting it in your conscious mind.”
She gives the metaphor of talking over a tape recording. The tape recording is your subconscious programming. You can try to talk over it or shout over it, but none of that makes any difference. The recording keeps playing. You’ve actually got to go in there and alter it if you want lasting relief.
That’s where hypnotherapy comes in.
What is Hypnotherapy?
A hypnotherapy session takes you into that theta phase of brain waves and alters the messages stored in your subconscious.
Hypnotherapy is nothing like the popular media portrayal of hypnosis. A hypnotherapist can’t hijack your mind or make you do anything you don’t want to do.
Instead, she takes you into the back of your mind, so to speak, where she guides you to find the root of your problems by asking questions and listening carefully to your responses.
A hypnotherapist will help you enter into a dialogue with this part of yourself, so you can get advice on what to do and integrate your new understanding into your subconscious.
When you come out of a hypnotherapy session, you feel lighter and freer than before. Deep-rooted issues can resolve themselves after only one session.
Dorrit works with clients all over the world. To get in contact with Dorrit and try out hypnotherapy for yourself, visit her on LinkedIn.
Jump to Topics of Interest
1:57 The good and bad voices inside our head
2:55 Why we have an inner voice
3:49 Where our particular inner voice comes from
5:47 Negative programming
6:21 Distinguishing between the negative and positive voices
8:10 The voice trying to keep you safe
9:11 Identifying the source of your negative programming
10:40 What this means for parents
11:53 Why self-help doesn’t always get results
13:58 What is hypnosis?
15:52 Client case study: claustrophobia and fear of the dark
20:01 Working with Dorrit
20:31 You can change your programming
Dorrit Karlsen
Dorrit is the founder and Transformation Coach at Dorrit Karlsen Heart Guide in Norway. She is a certified Leadership by Heart coach and Ericksonian hypnotherapy practitioner. She helps women struggling with their confidence, self worth and self image to eliminate those negative voices inside and find their core strength and full potential to achieve happiness and success. Her mission is to be a force for good in the world, helping women realize that they might have been programmed that way but they don’t have to stay that way. Find out how you can work with Dorrit.
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