You and I have been there, we have had periods of time where we would not change. It is not that we could not, we would not. We had a skill and were competent at applying that skill to holding in place a particular view of the past, present, and future. For some people it is first experienced in early childhood, we might refuse to stop sucking our thumb. For others it starts in the teens and for a very long time they might smoke. Rigidity in thinking begins early in life.
We create a mental universe and we live in it. We defend it from change and opinions. And even when we know something is not quite right with our universe and seek help we are often too buttressed in our fortress universe. Thankfully, we have our vast subconscious storehouse of learning to draw upon.
My mentor in Hypnotherapy is Milton Erickson. (Milton has been dead for decades but his work lives on.) I have a great collection of worn and underlined books dissecting the minutia of his work. I particularly like his view of the subconscious: he says, “Now, the unconscious mind is a vast storehouse of memories, your learnings. It has to be a storehouse because you cannot keep consciously in mind all the things you know. Your unconscious mind acts as a storehouse. Considering all the learning you have acquired in a lifetime, you use the vast majority of them automatically in order to function.”
Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found resonance at the unconscious level. The patient could be aware of this or could be completely oblivious that something was happening. Erickson would see if the patient would respond to one or another kind of indirect suggestion and allow the unconscious mind to participate actively in the therapeutic process. In this way, what seemed like a normal conversation might induce a hypnotic trance, or a therapeutic change in the subject. According to Weitzenhoffer, “[Erickson’s] conception of the unconscious is definitely not the one held by Freud.”