Auto Suggestions or Affirmations- How You Can Use Them to Change Your Life

Includes 9 Self Hypnosis Affirmations for Increasing Positivity In Your Life

By Susanna Sweeney, MSc, MBACP, CHT

In this article, find out the history of auto suggestions, the science behind them and how you can use them to your advantage to change your life.

What are Auto Suggestions?

In hypnosis terms, suggestions are statements made with the intention of influencing someone's mindset. The hypnotist uses suggestions when they want to change the way the client thinks about something, wants to change their feelings towards something, or wants to inspire positive emotions.

An auto suggestion then, quite simply, is a suggestion is a  suggestion you make to yourself. Typically such suggestions are used to focus your mind, or to motivate and inspire you towards a particular goal, for example to stop smoking or to lose weight. These days, auto suggestions are more commonly referred to as affirmations.

You have probably heard about affirmations and may very well have used them. But did you know that the idea of using affirmations to change your life goes back to the work of one man AND is over 100 years old? 

I bet you had no idea. Not many people are aware of this piece of hypnosis history.

In this article, I want to introduce you to the life and work of Émile Coué (1857- 1926) and retrace his thinking process for you so that you can understand the concept of affirmations or auto suggestions from the ground up.

The Pioneer of Auto Suggestions-  Émile Coué (1857- 1926)

Frenchman Émile Coué was born in humble circumstances in Troyes, France. He studied pharmacy in Paris, then returned to his hometown to open a pharmacy and drug store.

Hypnosis lectures and hypnosis stage shows were very popular at the time, and one day Émile stumbled upon such a lecture by the famous hypnotist Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823- 1904) whom he subsequently befriended and started to work with in the hypnosis field, opening a hypnotherapy clinic in Troyes.

Émile was struck by parallels he observed in his hypnosis and pharmacy work. It was his observation that the patient's belief in the cure offered made a substantial difference to whether the cure would work for him or her, or not.

He started to believe that the suggestions he gave were more powerful than the medicines or the hypnosis themselves and that all healing was largely due to a placebo effect: if a patient believed the medicine would heal him, his chances of healing were much greater than if he did not.

As a result- along with the medicines he sold, he started feeding his patients suggestions to help their healing and continued to do so for many years. By the end of the century however, he moved away from being the giver of suggestions. 

he came to believe that it was a much more empowering experience for patients if they became their own masters- designing and administering their own suggestions because ultimately, suggestions would only work if the person proceeded to internalize the message given.

This idea formed the background to Émile's concept of  'conscious auto suggestions'. 

Whatever the healing method used- be it medicines or hypnosis- in Émile's view the healing was due to auto suggestion, and if the patient could be taught and encouraged to design and use auto suggestions, this would work so much better. rather than hypnotizing his patients, he now started to teach them how to design and use auto suggestions- all while they were in a fully conscious and wide awake state.

His recommendations on how to use auto suggestions were to use general suggestions daily, as well as specific ones that target specific goals or issues. You should recite these to yourself several times a day, in other words, Émile saw repetition as key in being successful with suggestions. Repetition would ensure acceptance by both conscious and subconscious minds, and a suggestion could only be realized once fully embraced.

Émile became a tireless proponent of the idea of auto suggestions, promoting the concept widely. He wrote books and went on lecture tours. Émile's ideas became famous all over the world. He had centres in Paris, London, and even New York. However, after his death in 1926 the craze for his ideas faded away within about ten years.

This, however, was not the end of the use of auto suggestions.

Auto Suggestions Today

The New Age movement popularized the idea of auto suggestions once more and certainly since the movie 'The Secret' was released public fascination with self hypnosis affirmations has become wide spread.

Commonly they are now referred to as affirmations- but beware-not all affirmations are created equal. If you get the design wrong, they won't work for you or- at worst, will work against the very thing you are trying to achieve!

Read my article on auto suggestion techniques to make sure yours are designed right and that you are getting the best out of them.

The Scientific Case for Auto Suggestions

Émile Coué claimed that even physical ailments could be treated- or at the very least helped- by auto suggestions. This idea has been confirmed by research in the fields of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology. The concept of psychological modulation of immune function has become widely accepted in these fields.

Here is a random selection of examples for scientific evidence for the mind body link as well as for the powerful role of suggestions. I have chosen these to illustrate the wide range of issues that suggestions and auto suggestions can help with.

For example:

• Stress and disease have been linked to developmental issues in very young children such as insecure attachment. (1)
• Hypnosis and suggestion have been used successfully to treat warts. (2)
• Suggestions have been used successfully to treat irritable bowel syndrome. (3)
• Aided by PET imaging, researchers demonstrated the successful use of hypnotic analgesic suggestion. (4)
• Self hypnosis involving auto suggestions has been shown to decrease anxiety levels. (5)
• Suggestions were used successfully as a part of the treatment for the symptoms of child sexual abuse. (6)
• Hypnotherapy treatment involving suggestions was used successfully to treat depression. (7)

I have also written articles on the scientific background to using stop smoking hypnosis and weight loss through hypnosis. (Hypnosis treatment for these issues will always be based on suggestion hypnosis over regression hypnosis.)

What can You Achieve Using Auto Suggestions ?

You can use self hypnosis affirmations to make changes in your life in a lot of different areas:

• You can boost self esteem and confidence with auto suggestions.
• You can get relief from the symptoms of anxiety and depression through suggestion (administered by someone else) or auto suggestion.
• You can get relief from obsessive ideas, and obsessive compulsive behavior.
• You can get rid of the self destructive smoking habit through suggestions by using self hypnosis for smoking.
• Auto suggestions in self hypnosis for weight loss are fantastic help that can make weight loss easy.
• Auto suggestions can help you achieve your goals of any nature, be they educational or sporting goal, career, financial or health goals.
• You can even change your emotional state with auto suggestions when you feed yourself the right messages about what you would prefer to feel. This can be a very useful mind power technique for mastering emotions.

9 Auto Suggestions or Self Hypnosis Affirmations for Bringing Positivity Into Your Life

Find out More About Self Help Hypnosis Methods

• Does self hypnosis work? My answer might surprise you.
• Find out the basics about self help hypnosis.
• The benefits of self hypnosis for your life and work.
• Self help hypnosis challenges you should be aware of.
• Learn auto suggestion techniques.
• Learn about self hypnosis techniques.
• Learn self hypnosis relaxation techniques.
• Find out how to recognize hypnosis and self hypnosis trance.

Personal Issues You Can Change Using Self Hypnosis

• If you want to stop smoking, check out self hypnosis for smoking
• If you want to lose weight, check out self hypnosis for weight loss
• To rid yourself of anxiety, check out self hypnosis for anxiety.
• To get rid of the symptoms of depression, check out self hypnosis for depression.
• Improve self esteem with self hypnosis for self esteem.

I hope you enjoyed this brief article on auto suggestions. Read on about auto suggestion techniques to find out how to design and administer suggestions that can help you to change your life.

Here is to your success and well being.

Regards,

References:

(1) Maunder, Hunter, 2001. Attachment and Psychosomatic Medicine: Developmental Contributions to Stress and Disease. Psychosomatic Medicine, July-August 2001, Vol. 63, Iss. 4, p. 556-567

(2) Spanos, Stenstrom & Johnston 1988. Hypnosis, Placebo, and Suggestion in the Treatment of Warts. Psychosomatic Medicine 50:245-260 (1988).

(3) Lupu & Lupu, 2017. Cognitive Behavioral Hypnotherapy in a Case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Journal of Evidence Based Psychotherapies, Vol. 18, No. 1; March 2018, p. 35-44

(4) Nussbaum, Redoute, Le Bars et. al., 2010. Chronic Low- Back Pain Modulation is enhanced by Hypnotic Analgesic Suggestion by Recruiting an Emotional Network: A PET Imaging Study, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, November 2010.

(5) VandeVusse L, Hanson L, Berner MA, White Winters JM (2010). Impact of self-hypnosis in

women on select physiologic and psychological parameters. Journal of Obstetric, Gynaecologic and Neonatal Nursing 39(2): 159-168.

(6) Fourie & Guse, 2011. An Integrated Hypnotherapeutic Model for the Treatment of Childhood Sexual Trauma: A Case Study. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 53/3.

(7) Alladin, 2010. Evidence Based Hypnotherapy for Depression, International Journal of Clinical and experimental Hypnosis, 58/2, p. 165-185.

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