TP.5
Unconscious Erasure
What your mind deletes before you have the chance to see it
Before you read the article below, test of your selective attention by watching this (very short) video and following the instructions.
So did you get it? If so, congratulations! You are amongst the fifty percent of people who do. Spotting the gorilla might signal that you have a higher than average capacity for working memory (which would make you good at multitasking. More about that here). It could also mean that you weren’t paying an enormous amount of attention to getting the right answer, or that you were expecting a trick like this due to the title of this article… Perhaps you just really, really love gorillas, and always make sure you’re in the look out for one. It’s really not for me to say.
Whether you saw it or not, the fact remains that a staggering half of all the people asked to take this test (under controlled conditions, that is. Not once already reading an article about negative hallucination) manage to completely miss a man in a gorilla suit walking slowly through the video they’re watching intently. So how can this happen? The answer to that question is, in part, through the unconscious utilisation of the next trance phenomenon (TP) to cover in this series of articles: negative hallucination.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, I need to clear up a couple of common misconceptions. First of all, negative hallucination (as opposed to positive hallucination, which we’ll look at in the next article) is not about hallucinating bad stuff. In this context, the word “negative” means “not”. When you negatively hallucinate something you are NOT seeing what actually IS there (like a gorilla on a basketball team).
Secondly, the word “hallucination” doesn’t exclusively refer to the visual sense. You can hallucinate (both positively and negatively) in any of the senses. Meaning that negative hallucination actually means NOT seeing/hearing/feeling or otherwise perceiving something which is, in fact, there to be perceived.
Negative hallucination is a key trance phenomenon because it’s used by all the other TP’s in order to generate their effect. For example, while age regressing, one must not see/hear/feel the present moment in order to be experiencing a past reality. The same goes for age progression (where the present is denied in favour of a future projection); and for dissociation (where the current environment is deleted in favour of alternate reality; or when a feeling is numbed/not felt).
Often, our unconscious mind will utilise this tool in order to sustain a version of reality which fits with our pre-existing belief systems. This saves both time and energy in actively perceiving what’s around us. Why make the effort to see a kettle as an entirely new entity each time you encounter one, when you can just lump in in with all the other kettles you’ve seen in your life to make a quick judgement about it’s possible functions? In Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), we talk about three processes by which the unconscious mind warps the vast amount of information we have available to us into a select batch of relevant, interesting and/or “true” data. These processes are known as “deletion, distortion and generalisation”. Negative hallucination (obviously) primarily sits under the heading of “deletion”.
In the Invisible Gorilla experiment, those who miss the gorilla will have done so because their mind first generalised anything human shaped and black in colour; and lumped it all in with black t-shirt wearing team’s category (distorting the gorilla’s appearance to look the same as the regular players). Then, it deleted most of the information about that team on account of it not being important or relevant to the task at hand (i.e. counting the passes made by the team in white).
Emotionally Stimulated Negative Hallucination
Another term with which I’m sure you are familiar, and which is basically interchangeable with the term “negative hallucination” in the greater emotional context, is “denial”. We use negative hallucination (unconsciously of course) to delete from our version of reality, all that which does not fit with our own personal model of the world (our belief-systems); but also, anything we have learned it would be too painful to experience. Once again, it’s the confused, abused, or afraid child inside of us that tends to generate this response. Once we’ve learned not to see, hear or feel something that was painful to us in our early years, our unconscious is likely to continue to block those things from our adult perception.
Here’s a list of the type of things people commonly negatively hallucinate to maintain a “happier” existence:
— Telltale signs of lies/cheating/deception (in order to preserve the appearance of a “happy” relationship);
— Alcohol/drug abuse of loved ones (for the same purpose);
— Signs of significant changes in ones physical state (as in eating disorders like anorexia or obesity, or anything that involves body dysmorphia);
The following are things that one might delete in order to uphold a personal belief:
— Signs/evidence of one’s own skills, abilities and resources (e.g. people who don’t hear or distort compliments because they believe they’re not good at something);
— Positive reinforcement from others (if someone believes he’s ugly, he might delete any evidence to the contrary);
— Opportunities for personal advancement, or visions of a positive future.
Delusions Of Grandeur
In much the same way (but with a seemingly opposite effect), an individual might learn to block out negative feedback in order to sustain positive self-beliefs. Think of the deluded guy down your local pub who seems to have unwavering confidence in his charm, wit and good looks (although none of these things seem obvious to you). The same guy who chats up girl after girl, all of whom look at him with utter disdain before asking him to leave them alone. How does he manage to sustain so many “hits” to his perfect self-image without losing faith?
One possible answer to this question is that he was born into a family with abusive parents. From a young age, he may have learned to block out or delete the rejection and the insults hurled his way, in order to simply get through the day. Over time, and with repetition, this process may have become automated so that it ran unconsciously whenever he found himself under fire from his abusive mother or father. Later, the stimulus/trigger for his negative hallucination could have generalised to include any abuse from an adult; and then again to include any insult… etc. Et voila! By the age of 35, you have in front of you, a man who seems literally impervious to negative feedback. All because his mind is withholding it from his conscious awareness.
The sad thing is that although this guy might seem to have boundless amounts of confidence — to the point where it can become incredibly irritating — but in order to be doing what he’s doing, he always needs to hold in his unconscious the rejected little boy who never received anything but torment from his parents. It makes that guy a little harder to hate when you think of it in that way doesn’t it?
Trance Clusters: Negative & Positive Hallucination As A Team
In almost all cases, negative hallucination will necessitate positive hallucination in order to adequately uphold unconscious beliefs, or to sustain a particular behaviour. For example, if someone is anorexic, and therefore negatively hallucinating the reality of her emaciated reflection in the mirror, she would also need to positively hallucinate a larger body in order to continue justifying the problem behaviour (the eating disorder). The same goes with phobia: to sustain a phobia of clowns, one must not see the happy and harmless children’s entertainer in front of them, and instead (re)create and perceive the scary, threatening, evil clown that they were traumatised by at the age of four.
So why would our minds choose to distort reality in this way? Why would the unconscious want to hold on to phobias and eating disorders?
The answer, believe it or not, is for our protection. When we’re young (and also as adults but we’re usually a little better at making decisions when we’re older), our minds are constantly learning behaviours and responses that are supposed to keep us safe; or to make our life more bearable… happier. Fear is a great example of this. Fear is an emotion designed to keep us away from threat. It’s a motivator. So, if our mind believes that we’re (successfully) protecting ourselves from a known threat when we run screaming from a spider, why would it choose to get rid of that response? By the same rationale, if a complex set of hallucinations serve to maintain an eating disorder that was learned as a means of making oneself into the type of person that receives love (who is loveable), then why would our unconscious choose to drop that habit? “Problem” processes are seen as solutions by the unconscious, so it’ll do all that it can to keep them running.
When it comes to limiting beliefs (anything from “I’m no good at sport” to “I can’t have what I want”), the same applies. Your mind will delete anything from your present “reality” in order to affirm it’s beliefs, because if it does not do this, it’ll have to move forward into an unknown future. That future (i.e. the one where the individual can indeed have success in sports, or get what she wants), may sound like the better choice to our conscious mind, but to the unconscious it’s often too much of a risk. Basically it’s a case of “better the devil you know…”.
The paradox, once again, is that by denying something, we tend to actually bring it about. The child who learns to negatively hallucinate (reject) his mother’s drug abuse in order to survive a troubled childhood, may later find himself gravitating towards partners who also suffer from substance abuse. His unconscious mind recreates the situation he avoided as a child in order to make it possible to avoid it again as an adult.
Negative Hallucination In Therapy
As with all the TP’s, negative hallucination is neither good nor bad in itself, and it can be utilised for positive purposes by a therapist using the power of suggestion. For example, I once had a client who complained that she under-performed in her kickboxing bouts because she felt the “pressure” of the ringside judges’ observation. When I asked what it would feel like if her problem was solved, she said it would be like they weren’t there. Or better still, as if she was actually performing in a familiar environment; for the eyes of her coaches and training partners alone. As a result, a part of her treatment plan involved setting up and suggesting that her unconscious mind both negatively hallucinate the officials at a tournament, and simultaneously positively hallucinate key elements in her environment that made it feel more like home.
(N.B. This isn’t quite as dramatic as it sounds. The result of this type of suggestion would not be that the judges become entirely invisible, whilst the home gym miraculously appears. Rather, the mind is giving itself permission to ignore the judges in favour of focusing on what’s more important, like the opposition; and to recognise the familiar things present which remind the subject of home turf.)
Utilising Negative Hallucination Yourself
In this series of articles, it was my intention to give you a potential use, or treatment, for each of the trance phenomena when they manifest as problems. However, in this case it’s difficult to do because negative hallucination is so very unconscious. After all, if you were consciously aware of what you were deleting then you’d not be deleting it.
Negative hallucination is also a tricky thing to self-suggest because in order to do so, you’d need to think about the thing you don’t want to experience, and this would, in fact, make you more likely to experience that thing. This is sometimes referred to as the “blue tree syndrome”. If I ask you not to think about a blue tree, you are forced to think about a blue tree in order to process the request to not see it. By which time it’s too late.
For this reason, I’m not going to offer you a way to try and use this TP, but instead, leave you with a question designed to help you expand your self-awareness:
What could you be not seeing, not hearing or not feeling that might in fact be there?
To help you answer this question, try asking a (good) friend. Ask them what they think you might be denying about yourself (for better or worse). If you don’t much like the idea of doing that, you could try imagining stepping into his/her shoes and watching yourself going about your day. What do you notice? What seems different from their perspective, and what would you need to be missing to make that difference?
How To Know If You’re Negatively Hallucinating
When an adult is automatically negatively hallucinating, the symptom is often a sense of confusion. As if something is wrong but they can’t tell what exactly. Do you ever get a foggy, fuzzy feeling that you’re missing something? If so, what could it be that you’re unconscious is holding back from your conscious awareness? And, what do you think it might be trying to achieve by doing so?
Good luck!
By Hazel Gale
For more information about Cognitive Hypnotherapy or sports hypnosis, visit hazelgale.co.uk.
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