Father Christmas had you hypnotised, here’s how.
Spoiler alert: If you believe in Father Christmas, please stop reading now. And have a very Happy Christmas.
For everyone else, let’s start with a look at this tallest of tales… According to folklore, Father C is a plump old man who can…
Ride around the sky in a sledge pulled by reindeers
Deliver presents to every child in the world in one night
Employ an army of elves to make the presents
Slide down chimneys (even where there are none)
Monitor the behaviour of every child in the world
Appear in every garden centre simultaneously, looking different each time.
Quite a guy. And yet, incredibly, clever kids the world over believe in Santa with all their hearts, why?
Kids are naturally suggestible – before the age of 7-8yrs old, the neocortex of a child’s brain hasn’t fully developed. Meaning they don’t have the ability to reason and think critically about what they’re being told. Add emotions into that and there’s not much a child won’t absorb as truth.
Kids depend on their big people – because young kids don’t have the ability to think rationally in the same way adults can, they depend on the important people in their life to do this for them until them can do it for themselves.
Kids want to believe – kids are motivated to belief in Santa, the gains are clear, gifts and good times. Simply put, we believe what we want to believe.
Add all these factors together and you can understand how such a bizarre story becomes a kid’s reality, at least until an older sibling/schoolmate bursts the bubble.
Although this as a bit of festive fun, the important point is this, it’s not just Father Christmas that we learn to belief at an early age, its all the other stuff we inherit in those formative years, some of which can be severely life-limiting. Unlike Father Christmas, many of those beliefs don’t come up for scrutiny.
I know this because I hear it from my clients regularly, statements like ‘I’ve never been very good at XYZ’ or ‘my Mum was depressed, I get it from her’ or ‘I’ve always been shy’. When people tell me these things, they fully believe them.
The thing with long-standing self-beliefs is that they influence us subconsciously, in how we approach tasks/people/life generally - they are by definition, hypnotic. And the more times we repeat them to ourselves or announce ourselves to people we meet as ‘always being a bit anxious’, the more hardwired they become.
Therapy helps people to examine the substance of problematic beliefs. Often there is none, they are simply stories that have long outlived their relevance (if ever they had any). Discovering this can be a wonderfully freeing experience and often starts a process of personality growth, they become more of who they were really meant to be.
If your belief system is due an update, please get in touch.
