Why Do We Stay Trapped When Freedom Is Right There?

You're sitting in a prison cell, and you probably don't even realize it. A prison of your own making to some extent, but mostly an accumulation of everything you've experienced right up to this moment.

I realize this prison isn’t an actual physical place, but it feels completely real; the cell may be small in some cases, but in others the walls will be some way off in the distance.

What do these walls represent; limiting beliefs, old traumas, the voices that say you're not good enough, the fear of what others think.

The key question is: what keeps us in that cell? There's a strange comfort in the familiar, even when it serves us in no way at all. And here's the real benefit of staying trapped - it absolves you of responsibility. While we're in this cell, we can limit our choices and blame our circumstances. We trade freedom for the comfort of excuses.

There is an irony to this situation, one that should make you laugh out loud, in the middle of this cell is a table and on that table is a golden key and all we must do is take that key and open the door and we are free.

So, imagine walking over to that table and trying to lift that key; you find you cannot lift it. It's impossibly heavy, that weight is your fears, your doubts, your lack of belief in yourself, all the voices telling you that you can't.

But the cell isn’t always solitary confinement; we invite people in, and this way we imprison ourselves even further or trap other people inside our cell.

Someone with narcissistic traits will quite often draw people into their cell, making it very difficult for them to escape.

We trap others, or use others to justify staying trapped, so how do we escape our self-confinement? If it was easy, we could just pick up the keys and make those changes easily and make them now.

Sometimes the process is not that easy; our beliefs and habits are so entrenched in our subconscious. We are not even aware that we are trapped in a prison cell, and this is how things are and how they will always be.

Before I address possible solutions to this problem, let us consider what lies beyond the walls of your prison cell.

Imagine your life free from your limiting beliefs, whether those have been acquired from yourself or from other people up to this point in your life. These subconscious programs trap you inside your prison cell.

Choice, a quality that allows you to live life in a way you desire. Inside your prison cell, you have limited choices, if any at all.

No more blaming others for your circumstances; you will regain control and be able to be responsible for your own destiny.

We can self-reflect but acknowledging the cell is not the same as escaping it, the key is there, it is what this represents that is the problem.

The weight of the key (the fears, doubts, beliefs, habits) all live in the subconscious, so this explains why willpower and conscious effort fail.

There are many paths out - therapy, coaching, meditation, and support groups. What they have in common is helping you see the cell clearly and shift the patterns keeping you there.

Hypnotherapy is particularly effective because it approaches the problem by interacting with the subconscious mind; it is the key that will unlock the cell.

Most of our behaviors and beliefs are effectively programs that have been installed in us from the moment we were born up to the present moment. These can be from both the people and the environment that we have been exposed to during this time.

Hypnotherapy works by replacing these unhelpful patterns - which may have served you once - with beliefs that allow you to leave your self-imposed imprisonment behind

Once you experience the feeling of freedom and choice that you can experience outside the cell, you realize you never needed the key at all; the door was always open.

So how will life actually feel different? Take George for example he had the feeling that the world was always against him, but in reality, this is not a feeling it is a belief, something that was acquired not from himself but from a childhood which consisted of arguing parents, divorce, being constantly reminded that money was scarce.

With the help of hypnotherapy, we can address those traumas of the past and allow George to take on new beliefs that better serve his current situation, He starts to notice opportunities he never saw before, relationships improve, and the world stops feeling like the enemy and George will over time find that he has more control of his life than he once thought.

If you're ready to discover that your door has been open all along, I'd love to help.