Today, thousands of people know about positive thinking, self-hypnosis and affirmations, hundreds use it, dozens get results. Why is this happening if information about it is available both in books and on the Internet? Most likely, this is due to the inability to use it or lack of patience.
Psychologists define the problem of modern man as dependence on the presence of a teacher who must guide and oversee him until he achieves success in his goal. Taking responsibility for their life in general or for career growth, he alth and personal relationships, many people shift to doctors, psychoanalysts or bosses, although modern psychological techniques allow you to achieve everything on your own, free of charge and without much effort. The only requirement to be met is the regularity of action when working to change the mindset.
Great Pharmacist
Emile Coue was not the first to use autosuggestion to achieve his goals, but he did not immediately come to the conclusion that by influencing the consciousness and the unconscious, one canradically change subjective reality.
Emil really wanted to become a doctor, but, being the son of poor parents, he could enter the university only as a pharmacist. Having received a diploma in 1876, he opened his pharmacy in Paris and gradually began to acquire a clientele.
To attract visitors and fight competitors, Emile Coue began to assure them at every sale of medicines that it was his pills and tinctures that would help them. Soon, the young pharmacist began to notice the relationship between his wish and the he alth of his clients. Having discovered that his confidence in the effectiveness of the drugs he made was transmitted to people, and their recovery was much faster, he began to consciously influence their minds.
There is a well-known case that Emile Coué later cited as an example in his book. He gave the client a vial of distilled water, assuring her that this remedy was the most effective remedy of all for her illness. What was his surprise when she came a few days later and thanked for such an effective remedy, which brought her recovery so quickly!
After this incident, the pharmacist decided to study psychology, especially everything related to the issues of the imagination, the unconscious and the subconscious. He soon closes his pharmacy practice and moves to live in Nancy, where he establishes a psychotherapy clinic. Thanks to this move, Coué's method of conscious self-hypnosis, which later became famous throughout the world, was born. Today, few people know this French psychologist, although his developments formedthe basis of many methods of treating diseases through positive thinking.
Former Pharmacist's Clinic
At the beginning of the 20th century, many rich and not so rich people began to turn to the clinic founded by Emile Coué. Conscious auto-suggestion is a technique developed and taught by a former pharmacist to his patients. And despite the fact that most doctors of that time sharply criticized his method and called it quackery, even they could not help but admit that the self-taught doctor's clients recovered one after another.
Coue called his clinic a school of self-control based on positive psychotherapy. While still a pharmacist, he noticed that clients who were skeptical and did not believe that medicines could help them really continued to get sick.
The same patients who believed in his words that tomorrow they would certainly feel better, really felt better. So the French psychologist came to the conclusion that the basis of a person's recovery is his imagination, backed by faith in the result.
What did Kue offer his patients?
- Firstly, he explored with them their thoughts in the area of life that they wanted to change. As a rule, he was able to point out to the client the relationship of his negative thinking with the reality in which he lived.
- Secondly, Coué helped patients create new attitudes that rebuilt their minds. The individual psychotherapy that he conducted with them formed the basis of future behavioral therapy, withwhich in the mind of man lined up new lines of behavior. For example, aggression gradually turned into good nature, excitement was replaced by calmness, and greed was replaced by generosity.
- Thirdly, Emile Coué was the first to propose a method of controlling thoughts, thanks to which many people were able to qualitatively change their lives.
Thus, this great man, at the dawn of the development of psychotherapy, developed techniques based on work with the subconscious and the unconscious.
Faith as a healing power
Cue paid much attention to such a little-studied, but the most powerful phenomenon of the human psyche, as faith. You can read about the miracles of healing with its help in biblical parables, and you could also see them in real life.
There are many examples in the history of mankind when people gained he alth by touching a religious relic or visiting holy places. According to scientists, faith is an indisputable truth, or dogma, perceived by a person as a fact that does not require proof. It is also a very strong psychological and emotional state in which a picture of the world is formed in the mind of a person, based on his thoughts and ideas about the surrounding reality.
One of the clearest examples of faith that has been documented by witnesses is the case of the shipwrecked. Several people ended up in a boat in the middle of the ocean without food or water. If they could do without the latter for a while, then death from dehydration would overtake them in a couple of days.
Because, except for God, theythere was no one to rely on, they surrendered to the will of the waves, and they themselves knelt along the sides of the boat and began to pray to the Creator that the water around it would turn from sea water into fresh water. The desire to live and faith were so great that indeed after a while not only the structure of the water changed, but even its color.
When they were finally found a week later, the rescuers were surprised to find everyone alive and well. The liquid surrounding the boat was taken for examination, and it turned out to be the purest spring water.
Que's psychological methods were based on the same principle. With the help of self-hypnosis, people wrote down new information into the subconscious, which later became for them an indisputable truth and a picture of their world. At the same time, it does not matter at all whether it was true at the beginning of the work or not.
Emile Coue method
For the patients of his clinic, the former pharmacist offered to carry out the following procedures 3 times a day:
- relax your body and mind completely, taking a comfortable position sitting or lying down for this;
- 20 times in a calm and monotonous voice say the key phrase.
These simple actions contain the famous psychological techniques of Kue, which returned to many people not only he alth, but also the meaning of life.
In fact, inside them lies a deep understanding by the author of how our subconscious works. It perceives all the information it receives as an indisputable truth. This consciousness grumbles that everything a person says is notcorresponds to reality, and for the subconscious, a thought expressed even in jest is true. That is why many people cannot achieve results - they are "led" to the skepticism of consciousness and simply stop acting, because they do not understand the processes that occur in their brain.
When a person calmly and clearly pronounces the necessary installation aloud, he thereby does not give the consciousness the right to vote, directing what was said directly to the destination. If conditions do not allow you to speak aloud, then you can do it silently, but moving your lips. This helps the person to be in a state of awareness.
The best time for this procedure is immediately after waking up or before going to bed, when all information goes directly to the subconscious.
Nuances of the Kue method
Some people wonder why it is necessary to pronounce new attitudes calmly and, as it were, even detachedly, and not connect positive emotions to this process. In fact, the latter play a large role in the visualization technique that works on a conscious level. It is not advisable to create unnecessary tension and waste energy when working with the subconscious, as it will not “perceive” this.
Coue's psychological methods were revolutionary at the beginning of the 20th century, but after his death in 1926 and due to numerous tragic events in the following years, his work was either forgotten, or criticized, or recognized as unscientific. They were remembered much later, when self-hypnosis techniques began to be developed in psychiatry. It was then that Emile Coue was "discovered" again. Author's books started againpublished and translated into many languages and made available to the general public.
"I" conscious and unconscious
The individual psychotherapy that Coue conducted with his patients consisted of several stages:
- Firstly, he taught people to focus completely on the action they were performing, whether it was relaxing the muscles or tensing some of them. He considered it important that his clients could control their bodies.
- Secondly, Coué explained to them the difference between the "I" that they used to perceive as their personality, and the one that actually controls their lives.
- Thirdly, the doctor made easy-to-understand phrases with patients regarding the area of life in which they wanted to make changes, and worked with them, teaching the technique of conscious autosuggestion.
One of the most significant tasks that Coue set for himself was a psychological consultation dedicated to the separation of the conscious and unconscious "I". For many people, the very existence of the second was shocking.
The author of the technique himself explained that the unconscious is an imagination that collects all information from the outside world, even the most insignificant, and then, on its basis, forms its own opinion about it. This also includes the data of the thought processes of the person himself. For example, if someone has a prick in the side, and he decides that it is a diseased liver, the unconscious will process this information, and the more often a person thinks about an imaginary disease, the faster it develops.
Fortunately, this process is reversible. Just as you can suggest any disease to yourself, you can just as easily get rid of it by giving the unconscious new data about the state of he alth.
Autosuggestion
So that patients can feel the impact of the secret "I" on their actions and life in general, and also learn not to blindly obey it, but to manage it, Emile Coué devoted most of the time in the learning process to this. Self-hypnosis is a procedure that requires full concentration on the action, but applied once in any area of life, it can be used in any situation.
The fastest and most spectacular demonstration of the impact on the unconscious occurs at the level of the body. Patients who have seen how it reacts to commands directed to certain parts of the body begin to feel it inside themselves and work with it directly.
For example, Coue asked a person to set the body, as if his legs were "screwed" to the floor, and wherever he leaned, they would remain motionless. When he began to say this setting in a calm and monotonous voice, and then leaned forward or backward, his feet really remained in place.
The next step was to inspire the unconscious with the necessary information 2-3 times a day and just observe the changes taking place in the body or life.
Positive thinking
The translation of thoughts from minus to plus Kue perceived as an additional source for achieving the goal. Positive psychotherapy was carried out by him with each patient, sohe considered the quality of thinking to be an important part of the process. At the dawn of the 20th century, most doctors took this as another sign of quackery, as they believed that a good mood could not cure a person.
Kue also understood this, but he was sure that positive thoughts contributed to the acceleration of all qualitative changes in the area in which the work was carried out.
Meditative Relaxation
Another important condition for getting the result is a relaxed state. The absence of tension in the body creates an optimal environment for the "delivery" of new information directly to the unconscious. There are many techniques in the world dedicated to this process, but one of the best is meditation. In this case, there is a consistent relaxation of each part of the body with the help of mental attitudes and relaxing music, which, in turn, affects the brain waves, calming them.
Coue's work in modern psychotherapy
Today, Coue's psychological methods underlie most of the techniques devoted to working with the subconscious and positive thinking. For example, psychiatrist Vladimir Levy actively used them in his auto-trainings. In his works The Art of Being Oneself and The Taming of Fear, he applied Coue's behavioral therapy, expanding and adapting it to the thinking of a modern person.
Any psychological consultation with a specialist today is based on work with the unconscious "I" of a person responsible for all his actions and daily habits. Did the same inits time Kue.
