Product reviews for Beliefs (Second Edition)

On the cover you find a gate and a way bordered by flowers along the road as metaphor of an opening to a future path-¦ The book is illustrates how underlying beliefs and imprints have a dramatic impact on behaviour and health. You learn how changing beliefs paves the way to development, overcoming limitations, making the behavioural changes you want to make.
Right from the beginning you can feel personally addressed, when the author shares his personal story of his mother's relapse in cancer and how changing beliefs and “re-mission” or finding a new mission extended her life.
You find a similar structure in different chapters with some theoretical information, practical demonstrations, clinical examples and exercises: it's as if you personally are attending the training or the workshop and even can do the practice with the clearly outlined exercises!
The authors succeed in conveying difficult concepts in an easy to understand language. A simple NLP formula for change presented (p 5) is “present (problem) state + resource = desired state” Reality shows this is often not enough, because of Interferences, as Limiting Beliefs and/or Inner Conflicts. Discovering these “internal terrorists”, and working with them opens the way for a real and lasting change. That's what this book is all about!
In part I you learn about -˜reality' strategy: from a perspective of working with hypnosis on an imaginary level this is interesting food for thought - What are your reality strategies you use to construct your reality? How can we also make your goals, changes you wish to accomplish become real -” making believe that you can succeed?
Talking about belief strategies you learn that “like reality strategies have a consistent pattern of pictures, sounds, and feelings that operate largely unconsciously“. “Is something believable or not?” How does your brain code the differences? (41)
In the re-imprinting Demonstration it's impressive how layer by layer the author gets to the core of the imprints, underlying a problem. Not what happened is of main importance but” how that affected your belief system” (p. 73). I fully appreciate the way the re-imprinting is explained and performed, the “Essence of Re-imprinting being that: once you've found the imprint experience, you want to give resources to both the person you're working with and any significant others that were present in the imprint experience. -¦” (82)
A very convincing demo with full script on “conflict integration” show the step-by-step work and how to deal with all possible real life objections and obstacles to the process! And how/with which questions you can let the process continue, get unstuck. You see once more how therapy is a creative activity and how therapist can inspire, come up with questions that put the process back on track.
All what we learned in part 1 also can be applied to part 2 as beliefs, methods and tools are also useful in health and disease issues. The authors come up with “two important beliefs -¦ that illnesses are a communication and when you respond to the communication, then symptoms will clear up on their own...and-¦often there are multiple communications as well as multiple causes for illnesses-¦ if you keep responding to all of your communications you will eventually get well (p146).
You find some guidelines on effective visualisations, exploring belief systems, all within the safe context that “working with beliefs is not independent or in opposition to medical treatment: you can coordinate clinical psychological work with traditional methods” (151). The important issue is not to generate an inner conflict as is stated that “cancer is not a foreign invader. The cells are part of you. You need to transform yourself to create health and not get rid of something” (p.149)
When you help the person resolve a conflict at the identity level, you often take care of the internal conditions that create the illness.
The book's epilogue is a story about healing: -˜a woman's recovery from breast cancer' Reading her personal insights and descriptions of her internal changes are rich, moving and enlightening.
In my opinion the concept of changing beliefs and working more explicitly with them deserves a place in hypnosis practice. Doing the exercises brings the focus on inner experiences and can be an additional method for colleagues who want to add more dynamics and activity to their hypnosis practice. The use of language, fine tuning, and creativity shows a clinician at work with an Ericksonian hypnosis background, language patterns, pacing and leading skills.
Despite full transcripts of sessions sometimes are cumbersome, I think many readers will appreciate this style. I can recommend the book to people working in the clinical field of hypnosis, medical hypnosis and professionals working with performance enhancement. The way of working, finding underlying beliefs makes sense and can be a welcome addition to EMDR and CBT working with “cognitive distortions” and exploring “negative cognitions”.