Dating...Who Hypnotizes Whom?

You can learn to enjoy yourself pursuing relationships if you know the secrets to relating and practice them. Beyond a common sense clean physical presentation (you should know most women like this), the essential secret is to be yourself.

When you hear this, do you usually start imaging how you would act and speak if you were being yourself? If so, it is probably very frustrating because imagining acting like yourself is an artificial activity.
The first step is to relax into yourself and appreciate yourself. You will notice lots of thoughts, lots of thinking about yourself. Start to pay careful attention to how you talk to yourself. All language is hypnotic and you are already a master at self-hypnosis – just an unaware master.
If you have trouble being yourself, it is not only an awkwardness about how to speak or act. This awkwardness is a by-product of not allowing yourself to feel what you really feel and to know and pursue what you truly care about. Lack of awareness of these crucial aspects of self-knowledge is maintained by your inner hypnotic self-talk. Awareness follows...read on.

Fear

When it comes to approaching and meeting women, what is there to fear? Rejection?
That’s half the fun! Seriously!
To be successful in connecting with women, the first approach to make is to approach yourself and your fear – your fearful thinking. Fearful thinking literally turns your perceptions and judgments upside down. You think black is white, good is bad, front is back, and down is up.
For example, what makes rejection so bad? Nothing, really, but fear blinds you to this fact. Notice how creative you are in generating vivid internal movies and fearful voice-overs that keep you terrified of the possibility of being rejected.

Cause and Effect and Perception

One way you hypnotize yourself is by mistaking perceptions for causes. You perceive through your 6 senses. The 5 outer senses and the inner mind sense which perceives thinking and emotions. Perceptions are just objects in awareness. They do not do anything and they do not mean anything. If a woman smiles at you or glares at you or walks away from you or laughs at you or hugs you, you simply perceive the behavior. It doesn’t mean anything about you. It just is what it is, a perceived behavior.
Even though you think your are afraid of them, you are not afraid of perceptions. You can only be afraid in reaction to meaning and perceptions have no inherent meaning about you. What you think about a perception gives it its fearful meaning. That meaning can affect your emotional state only according to the degree to which you choose to believe in the meaning you have created.
You create the meaning and then you react to it.
The good news is that you, therefore, are in total control of the production and annihilation of fear. Your belief in your thinking is the cause of your emotional state. The perceived object is not the cause.
If a woman smiles or frowns you can keep your self respect if you don’t play the inner game with yourself, the self-hypnotic game, of convincing yourself through some inner creation, that her response gives or takes away your value and respect.

Unknown Process/Unconscious Fear

A common response from clients, when I point this out, is, “It doesn’t feel like I’m in control.”
You don’t feel like you are in control of keeping your balance when you walk or ride a bike either, but you are. It doesn’t feel like it because you have mastered the control and don’t have to focus conscious attention on the process as you once did.
Your conscious attention and effort taught your body, your unconscious mind, to master the process and now it is very difficult for the conscious mind to take back the control. Try to intentionally fall over.
It will take some effort to take back control that is located in another “part” of you.
You create meaning by scanning perceptions and relating them to past similar perceptions to which you have already attached a story of meaning. You assign to the present situation the same meaning as that already attached to the past similar perceived situation.
The ability to create such equivalence is a valuable ability – creating anchored associations. Anchored associations make it easy to recognize general classes of objects such as tables and chairs so you can easily navigate the world.
But this scanning and associating function causes fear and suffering when it highlights superficial similarities and misses significant differences.
If you hear someone speak in a loud angry voice similar to the one your father used when you were a little boy, you may become terrified on the spot because your mind immediately brings up the memories of angry.
To the degree that you are feeling afraid and small, your mind is giving great value to a superficial similarity – the angry voice, and it is overlooking significant differences, such as the fact that you are grown, that it is 20 or 30 years later, and that this is not your father, and you are not in the living room of the father and little boy.

Perspective

I define ‘Adult’ as a being with a functioning, moment by moment, self-validating awareness. In the example above, the consciousness in the grown up body is not self-validating. Fear is present because the “person” in the body has instantly regressed to the perspective of a naïve child in the presence of an all powerful mysterious god-like being.
(As a small child, you instinctively sensed your parents had the power of life or death for you – that is the definition of a god.)
It makes sense for a child to be afraid, but not an adult.
Self-validating function has many important aspects:
1) It accurately labels fearful emotions as being child states of mind
2) It holds these child states as objects in awareness, not as self
3) It holds present time awareness of self-identity and stays connected to all the accumulated wisdom of having lived many years into “adulthood”
4) It appreciates it has the power to take care of oneself.
5) It understands the naïve gullible mind of the child and its lack of power
6) It nurtures the child state as if being sought out by a child needing protection -- instead of disappearing into the child state
7) It responds appropriately to present time perceptions without projecting the “reality” of the child’s situation and emotionality on to the present time situation.

Reconsider feeling afraid of approaching a woman in the light of these points. To feel afraid you would have to give the woman’s behaviors and presumed judgments tremendous power over you. You would have to make her responses and possible value judgments the source of your validation in the world.
Do you see that this is the anchored reaction from the perspective of a small child – an instant hypnotic induction into small child trance? The mere perception of a female body triggers the mind into lightening fast associations with childhood mother dynamics full of hope for love and validation and fear of losing them.
If you are not in a self-validating state of awareness, the child state, the hypnotic induction, takes over, desires support, and gets desperate if support is withheld (“I can’t take care of myself!”).
When you approach others, not just women, keep in mind that child states are powerfully anchored and that fearful ones get triggered very easily in most people by perceptions of essentially harmless behaviors, like a frown. In my book, Finding True Magic, I have coined a term for these states: “Chronically Regressed Trance States of Identity.”

Create Resourceful Present Time Anchors

To antidote Chronically Regressed States, think of several memories where you were at your best in various ways, such as very relaxed, very joyful, very witty, very curious, very alert, and very generous. As completely as you can, relive each memory so the good quality comes alive in you and then anchor the quality by pressing your thumb and forefinger together (or some other anchor of your choice). Rehearse this several times with each memory until the feeling comes back automatically when you press your fingers together.
Do this with several of these qualities using the same anchor each time so that you stack the anchors. In other words, when you press your fingers together, all the qualities come alive in you.
This attacked anchor will enable you to quickly feel interested, alert, at ease, joyful, witty, and generous. Now imagine a future movie with you approaching and talking to a woman. Trigger the anchor and experience yourself maintaining these qualities of your self-validating state regardless of her responses.
If she “rejects” you, that indicates something about her or about her response to the way you interacted, but it does not mean anything about you, about your value, or about your ability to stay cheerful and to approach someone else. First, you may cheerfully analyze your behavior and verbal communication to determine if you communicated your real intentions to improve upon your ability to do so. But it is an enjoyable learning process, not a life-threatening drama –thus the delightful adventure continues.

An Invaluable Secret

People do not reject each other. People reject behaviors based on meaning assigned from past experience with similar behaviors.
People’s rejection of behavior can be accurate in present time, like saying “No” to unwanted magazine solicitation. The problem comes when people reject behaviors that have triggered chronically regressed states in which they experience fear and suffering.
When people are negative to each other, they are not seeing each other. They are seeing projections from their chronically regressed states – there is no real contact in present time between self-aware, self-validating adults..
When people truly see each other, there is recognition of another being meeting the challenge of the human experience. A natural respect arises, even love, and collaboration is easy and enjoyable.
If you feel fear and then believe the “reality” created by fearful beliefs, you are being ruled by a chronically regressed trance state of identity. These trance delusions become very convincing and rapidly more intense when people get swept away in reactivity, reinforcing each others fearful regressed child states.

Relating not Performing

Trying to perform to get acceptance is a form of fear.
As a self-validating adult, you are at ease in your body and being. You allow thoughts and feeling to enter into awareness without fearful monitoring. As a self-validating adult, you do not perform, you relate, which is an activity of generous honest sharing of ideas and honest revealing of feeling without concern of being judged. Remember, as a real adult you know what you value and feel and are unafraid to share.
You have the clarity to understand that people only judge their own projections, their own fearful fantasies. You understand you are never the target of judgment or rejection unless you pretend to be the projection instead of yourself.

Approach Yourself First

The anchoring exercise outlined above can be a very quick and powerful way to change your state and behaviors in a given situation – to bring you back into a self-validating state. You will make the anchoring process much more lasting and dynamic if you resolve to approach and accept yourself.
There are men who seemingly easily approach and connect with women, and, yet, they have a live full of short-term or broken relationships. This is a sign that the real person was not truly relating. It is a sign of men in child states skilled at seeking out and “connecting” with women in complimentary child states. So don’t be too quick to pick role models based on another’s apparent ability to approach women without the kind of fear you feel.
It is crucial to realize your primary relationship is with yourself. You are never alone – that is a deluded hypnotic suggestion. You are always with yourself. If you do the introspective compassionate work of becoming your own best friend and thereby transform your inner self-talk to be a constant stream of honest, constructive evaluation, encouragement, and support, you will live free of fear and fearful judgment. You will recognize the organic rush of energy you feel approaching a woman as a sign of being alive and you will appreciate the rare intensity of being alive. You will refrain from channeling that rush of vivid aliveness into enervating fearful thoughts of humiliation and
abandonment, or into the struggle to possess someone.
You see relating with a woman as a dance of exploration. Then the possibility of “rejection” truly is half the fun of approaching them. Good luck!