Milton Erickson

A new science and practice of healing emerges, Cerebrology

Cerebrology, the door to a fresh new loving way of healing has opened…

What has been used in the past, to help people grow and what were the origins?

Let us look at where we have been..

Considered one of the largest influences on hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson has been a big influence on self-help. Richard Bandler and John Grinder who created Neuro Linguistic Programming, used Milton Erickson’s help to create N.L.P.

Milton Erickson’s ideas about an “unconscious” were different than Freud’s beliefs. Milton Erickson’s “unconscious” was a complicated explanation of a theoretical system that was a philosophy not neuroscience.

The impressive sounding “unconscious”, gave the impression of a scientific discipline but does not explain brain function. Milton Erickson stated, “In all my techniques, almost all, there is confusion.” Even that sentence is confusing.

In our past, we have seen healer-patient relationships that gave great power to the healer. One reason for the disparity in power was that the language used was not simple, understandable or consumer friendly.

Cerebrology is new, scientific and does something in our brain to help us grow

We have the ability to improve the bad reactions we have.

Recently there have been experiments on animals and humans to rewrite memory. The method is described as “re consolidation of memory”.

In 2000 Karim Nader’s paper on re consolidation sparked a commotion in the world of memory research. He showed that reactivating a memory destabilized it, putting it back into a flexible, vulnerable state.

The memory that was re consolidated or rewritten was not a verbal memory. The work was done on the amygdala, the section of our brain associated with emotional learning. Our amygdala is part of our automatic brain, what I call our operating system.

In recent years, additional studies have replicated Nader’s studies in other mammals, and they have even extended the idea to humans. In 2009, neuropsychologists confirmed that if you activate a person’s fear, the traumatic memories associated with it can, for a brief period, be altered. The key is to provide complete safety during the reconsolidation window-which, in humans opens up minutes after a memory is recalled. The window lasts up to six hours, but then slams shut until the next time the memory is recalled.

When we put a memory into play, it is destabilized, flexible and vulnerable or ready to be permanently rewritten, adding the new information we add to it. This technique is what you are about to learn.

How can the new science of Cerebrology be an effective tool in self-help to improve what happens in our brain?

I want self-help to be user friendly, easily understood and it should have a basis in neuroscience that can be explained simply as well. I believe this type of self help will empower people and allow them the tools they need to grow and be more themselves.

Let me give you some of those tools today.

We need to understand where our reactions and perceptions come from so we can understand why this works so effectively on our brain.

How we react can come from conditioning but most of the time our reactions come from affect. Affect is something we learned before we were verbal, when we empathized with our parents, emulated the relationship they had with others and modeled the feelings our parents had about themselves.

Just as we watch someone dance and feel the feeling in our body, later this feeling is what gives us the ability to do the same dance. This is the way we learned affect before we were verbal.

Learning affect takes place the same way in animals and is what makes the difference between a feral cat and one that is comfortable sitting in our lap. The part of our brain that makes one person react differently than another or have a different self image than another, does not understand verbal language any more than a cat does.

Now we need to understand how to do the work of Cerebrology, to improve the reactions in our brain. Here is an example

I am proud to say Cerebrology exercises give people what they need to open their curtains and drapes, so they can see by their own light.

I believe people want to love themselves unconditionally and with this new science it is easy to achieve.

I predict that people will be attractive because of the beauty within.

I have already worked with people that have made this happen.

An example of an exercise that makes us able to see the beauty within, is the exercise for a better self image. It helps a person find exactly what it is that is impeding them from feeling their beauty and allows them to automatically see their beauty all the time.

THE EXERCISE:  SEE WITH YOUR EYES HOW ATTRACTIVE YOU ARE

Step One

The exercise begins, we start by standing 6-10 feet from a mirror and to the side so we can not see our image. Next we walk up to the mirror but not so we can see ourselves and just before the mirror we stop and close our eyes.

Next we take a few deep breaths and relax.

If we are more relaxed after a few breathes, it may be because we have some apprehension.

If we were to look in the mirror when we are apprehensive, we add the feeling of apprehension to what we see.

After we assess how we feel we go back to where we started several feet away from the mirror.

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Step Two

We do what we did to begin with again, we walk towards the mirror and stop to assess how we feel. We do the relaxation exercise again and assess how we feel. We continue doing this exercise of just walking up to the mirror, until we can go to the mirror and find ourselves automatically relaxed when we get there.

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Step Three

The next step is similar but we add one more thing.

We walk up again and close our eyes before we look at our image. We do a self check to see if we feel beautiful in our body before we look at ourselves.

How we feel about ourselves inside our body is added to the picture we see and if we do not have a feeling we are beautiful we will not see ourselves as beautiful.

We do a self check after arriving at the mirror with our eyes closed,  if we do not feel beautiful in our body, we allow ourselves to feel beautiful in our body and then we return to the starting place a few feet away from the mirror.

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Step Four

We repeat this step until we are able to walk up to the mirror with our eyes closed and feel beautiful in our body.

When we are able to walk up to the mirror and have a feeling that allows us to feel beautiful, we open our eyes and discover our real beauty.

We do the exercise a couple times to reinforce the visual understanding.

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The Next Step

We then do the next exercise, which involves seeing ourselves as beautiful in someone’s eyes.

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What Have We Done To Improve Our Brain and Why Can We See Our Beauty?

Let us discuss what we are doing.

As if it was a nightmare, we allow ourselves to experience this automatic feeling that prepares us before we see ourselves.

We then understand that like a nightmare the feeling we automatically have that is preparing us, is giving us a distorted image of ourselves.

Next we let the feeling we have that is erroneous go, as we bring in the feeling we are beautiful and have it prepare us for the experience of seeing our image in the mirror. The beautiful feeling is “recondensed” and is rewriting the old memory or affect. Now the automatic feeling we have that comes up before we look in the mirror is that we are beautiful and this feeling is the one preparing us, so we SEE our true beauty.

We are able to permanently improve the feeling we automatically have. We do what is necessary to find the exact automatic preparation that inhibits us from having an experience of ourselves that has clarity.  When we connect to the automatic preparation that gives us the altered perception or reaction, we can let go of the preparation or rewrite it.

It is simple, we put the information we want, in the file it belongs in. This technique is similar in some ways to just feeling good but the little extra is worth it.

Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Roger Pitman likened reconsolidation to a file in an office cabinet; if you want to adjust the contents, first you have to retrieve the file. But you can only make changes when it is opened.

Improving how we automatically prepare or react is important, the future will tell us just how important it is.