There are many physical laws that we live by. Jump off a building (that’s not a suggestion!) and you’ll experience the physical law of gravitation. As we have physical laws there are also mental laws. These laws are just as real and we can use them for either our benefit or detriment. When it comes to the mind, especially the subconscious mind, one of the most important mental laws to get to grips with is ‘The Law of Reversed Effect’:

The Law of Reversed Effect states; “The greater the conscious effort, the less the subconscious response” or understood another way “Whenever the will (conscious mind) and imagination (subconscious) are in conflict, the imagination (subconscious) always wins.”

It’s helpful to understand that the subconscious is infinitely more p...

Continue reading...

As children we are sensitive, vulnerable and dependent on others for our survival and well being.

Sometimes contact with our caregivers and with the outside world wounds us or fails to meet our needs. To cope with the painful or the unbearable we build defences that make our lives more bearable and thus help us to survive. These defences then stay with us and become parts of our personality structures so that we continue to meet the world with those same defences in place. But those defences may no longer be necessary. And the walls we have built often keep us from contact (with others and with our selves) and from living fully. Problems of today were often once solutions to problems in the past. For example being angry may have been a source of attention when you were younger, and it may well be th...

Continue reading...

The point of this title is not to minimise or play down the impact anxiety has on the sufferer, far from it, rather to explain the ‘nature’ of anxiety and just why sufferers become so entrenched in the cycle of fearful thoughts and symptoms that is the quicksand of an anxiety disorder.

I specialise in anxiety and I understand only too well how debilitating anxiety can be, how it blights lives and can leave sufferers mentally exhausted, self-medicating with tranquillisers and alcohol and in some cases unable to leave the house for fear of an anxiety attack.

However, one of the worst things about suffering from anxiety is that whilst anxiety always begins for a reason: a prolonged period of stress, emotions you ha...

Continue reading...

I’m talking about how we can use money here. If we have unmet needs on a deeper level, and we don’t acknowledge and identify these, we can walk around with a subtle or not so subtle persistent, feeling of ‘hunger’ or lack of fulfilment which is actually a deeper sense of deprivation. Attempts to fill the hole of deprivation can take many forms such as over-eating, drinking, partying hard and excessive working but one of the most common ways I have seen it play out with clients in my decades practice is financially.

If a sense of inner personal security is what is missing from your life, no amount of internet shopping will make up for that. If you’re craving intimacy excessive gift buying won’t meet that. In a nutshell: if you’re not getting the proper ‘nourishment’ you need from li...

Continue reading...

If you haven’t been in a relationship for a long time despite a deep desire to be, it could be down to one of the following;

1. Your (subconscious) fear of getting hurt is stronger than your (conscious) desire to be in a relationship – this could be due to being disappointed or betrayed in a previous relationship or relationships, but if often goes back to childhood fears about love and being loved, based on your relationship with your family or your parents relationships with each other.

2. It’s a self-esteem or confidence issue – perhaps deep down you feel you don’t deserve to be in a happy relationship, don’t feel ‘good eno...

Continue reading...

The control / release cycle is talked about in John Bradshaw’s excellent book ‘Healing The Shame That Binds You’.

The control / release cycle is this: a period of rigid control and boundaries around an area of your life – stringent dieting and exercise for example, followed by a period of release – when you fall into a ‘binge’ pattern: eat all of the foods you forbade yourself in the ‘control’ period and avoid the gym like the plague!

The control / release cycle means you either have total control ‘compulsivity’ or you have no control ‘addiction’, they are interconnected and set each other up as the more intensely you control, the more you require the balance of release and the more you self destructively release (undoing all your hard work) the more intensely you r...

Continue reading...

During my decade as a Hypnotist I have worked with thousands of clients who come in looking to build their self-belief or self-confidence, lose weight, overcome a phobia, lose unwanted habits, become more successful or effective in certain areas of their lives, but it’s extremely rare that someone walks into my office and says “I’d really like you to help me accept myself”. When I suggest that self-acceptance would be helpful as part of their process of change it’s often met with real resistance.>

However when we accept ourselves, it feels really good, it’s like we’ve called a truce with ourselves.

So if acceptance feels so good for us then why the resistance? I believe the answer is motiv...

Continue reading...

One of the first things I tell a client is this: the subconscious mind doesn’t understand time. Linear time simply does not exist in the subconscious. I feel it’s really important to understand this as it explains so clearly the irrational fears, phobias and anxieties that plague the individual whose lives in the present are actually in pretty good shape. They may be happily married but plauged with fears of their partner leaving them, despite their other halves consistent reassurances. They may be thriving at work but left sleepless at night with irrational fears of facing the chop. All too often people have good lives but for the deep undercurrent of ‘generalised anxiety’ that leaves them fully unable to enjo...

Continue reading...

Abundance is a big issue for many people and being friends money is important if we want to live a comfortable life. Money itself is neutral – sounds obvious but how many times do you get angry and frustrated money? the thoughts and beliefs we have about it that cause the problems, so much of the time we put ‘our stuff’ on money and then blame money for it. If you don’t feel subconsciously that you deserve it, you can end up throwing it away through overspending, or underearning through not charging enough for your services or by not valuing your time by continually giving it away for free. If you were brought up with toxic beliefs around money (such as ‘money is the root of all evil’) you may find this is especially true for you. One of the easiest ways to find out what your subconscious b...

Continue reading...

Most of us desire to be more confident in a certain area or areas of our lives. Many clients that walk into Zoë Clews & Associates, looking for freedom and resolution from their problems in life, are confident in some areas but lack it in others: they may be confident in relationships but will do anything they can to wriggle out of public speaking, or they may find it relatively easy to excel at work but are riddled with self doubt when it comes to intimate relationships. Saying that, we also see clients who are lacking confidence in all areas and that’s when life really does get pretty painful.

Because self confidence is such a natural and basic resource, lack of self confidence is often one of...

Continue reading...