CAN HYPNOTHERAPY ERADICATE RACISM?
No one is born racist, it is taught, plain and simple.
I’m sure many of us have seen the 1992 Todd Robertson photo of a small child in a KKK outfit during a rally, curiously touching the shield of the now retired Georgia State Trooper Allen Campbell, who is Black. This child, dressed and brought to a rally to show hatred for another group of people, had no inherent hatred or fear in him that day, but you can be almost positive that it lives in him now.
Anything that can be learned, can be unlearned. A key to unlearning harmful and unuseful patterns can be found in doing what is called timeline intervention. This is a tool both used in hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming (NLP). In a timeline intervention, you would visualize your life as a timeline, and jump in and out of events (starting with the most recent) where you have felt the specifically identified emotion, habit, thought, behavior, anxiety, etc., and you examine the situations where they have occurred in your life. You thoroughly go over what was happening, what was said, where you were, what was felt, what could have been done differently, and you continue this examination as you go further back into your life’s timeline. You go all the way back to the earliest memory that you can find, and you make peace with these scenes.
In most cases, you will find that the behavior you acquired was a thought passed down from someone else or a built defense mechanism. Paired with some Socratic questioning, this will help you connect the dots between experiences and negative thought patterns. Examples of Socratic questioning would be: Am I basing this on fact or my feelings? Am I making any assumptions? Am I looking at only evidence that supports my thought?
Of course this is best accomplished with a hypnotherapist leading you, but why don’t you see if you can give it a try on your own?
Go through a timeline of recent to past circumstances when you felt or thought a negative way about a person/people of color (POC); i.e., fear, distrust, hatred, violence, resentment, etc. Who was around you? Was this your own thought? Did you classify an entire group of people based on one experience? Have you had similar experiences with anyone that looks you? If so, did you classify them in a dangerous way because of it, as you did with POC?
Go back to the first instance, which is usually in early childhood. Was something said to you about them? Was it a teacher in class when discussing slavery? Maybe your parent told you that you couldn’t play with so and so, or you only saw POC on tv/media, and your parent said something to the effect of ‘that’s why you need to stay away from them’. Take the time to thoroughly examine where these thoughts come from, and how they can be or have been detrimental to yourself and others.
As a hypnotherapist, I’ve used timeline intervention with clients, and it is always a revealing and emotional experience. I cannot say that this would make a racist person or person with racist ideologies do a complete 180, but I can say it will give great clarity and insight. This is why I considered that it may be a helpful tool to use, if willing to do the work. Because being clear on the ‘why’ is a really good first step to change.