Your Mind As Cure: Autosuggestion for everyone

By Jean-Luc Mommaerts

The huge role of non-conscious processing in daily life, health, work, and play has been proven increasingly over the last few decades. In Your Mind as Cure,  Dr. Jean-Luc Mommaerts shows how, apart from the medicines we take, we can also make an important contribution to our healing process. Using scientifically based insights, we can do much more than our materialistically trained physicians or we usually suspect. A cure based on autosuggestion also goes deeper in many cases. Moreover, this way, we avoid the side effects and high costs of an excess of medicines and surgical procedures. Making effective use of one’s deeper mind is something everyone can learn.

Dr. Mommaerts describes in an accessible way the role of psychological factors in being sick and how we can best listen to the symptoms in our own body. This book shows that autosuggestion can also be an effective means for those who are not sick: for example, to increase stress resistance in ourselves or to stop smoking. Our mind is a very powerful tool. Let’s put it to work for our well-being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AURELIS
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020

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Bibliography

Introduction

The current medical philosophy embraces attack and defense as a principle. Western medicine can be considered as the arms of war, disease as the enemy.

As an example, in his State of the Union address in January 1971, President Nixon declared:

I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.

Later that year, President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, which came to be known as the ‘War on Cancer.’ As part of the national effort, the Army’s Fort Detrick in Maryland, a biological warfare facility, was converted to a cancer research center.

There are many other examples of this ‘War’ on Illness: the Total War on AIDS (TOWA) project, the war on cholesterol, the war on diabetes:

Ask Eugenia Millender why we’re losing the war against diabetes and she’ll tell you simply: We’re on the wrong battlefield. Prevention has not been our focus, laments the clinical director at FAU’s Diabetes and Education Research Center, and now we’re paying for it. […] The nation’s health authorities are wondering how to keep from adding to the list of casualties . (From PalmBeachPost.com, Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012.)

War, total war, conquering, battlefield, casualties…

First, the enemy is mapped out. In the field of research, this is done by ‘discovering’ new syndromes based on many patients with similar symptoms. In the area of medical practice, the mapping of the enemy is done by diagnosing a specific patient. At least, this is the scenario that suits the philosophy best.

In the next stage, the offensive weapons – drugs, surgery, psychotherapy – are placed in a position to wipe out the enemy as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is called curative medicine.

Preventive medicine belongs to the same philosophy. Its goal is to prevent diseases by reinforcing the line of defense, with, for example, vaccinations.

This philosophy, which today still shapes medical thinking and acting, is not recent. Its origins can be traced back to 17th- and 18th-century Europe, the era of philosophical enlightenment and enormous technological progress. Napoleon’s army physicians (perhaps most notably Dominique Jean-Larrey) were co-instrumental to the birth of the ‘new medicine’ that we today see as classical Western medicine. Characteristic of that time and ours was the great optimism about the practice of science and technology within medicine. With our present knowledge, it has become apparent that in those times, all drugs and medical actions were – apart from a few exceptions – ineffective (unless by suggestive influence). This philosophy is not developed based on scientific data!

This does not imply that this philosophy and modern medicine that originates from it would not be precious. Before someone misunderstands, let me make it clear that cancer, coronary disease, AIDS, diabetes are terrible illnesses. I am convinced we should make every reasonable effort to find ways to help those who suffer from these scourges. Current western medicine has enabled us to help many people and even save many lives.

But the least that can be said about it is that it is biased, which is attributed to the philosophy behind it. An important manifestation of this one-sidedness is that extremely little attention is being paid to psychological factors and the likewise self-healing powers of the patient. Such ideas do not, as a matter of fact, fit in the war philosophy. They are difficult to define and as such insufficiently ‘amenable‘ for use in battle. Also, they blur the distinction between friend and enemy.

The same mental capabilities, such as the capability to interpret a situation as threatening or reassuring, can be seen as a cause as well as a solution of much ill-health.

In the 20th century, Western medicine handled many problems well. Think, for instance, of the combat of infectious diseases or the development of urgency-medicine. We have gotten so used to this that we often forget the dangers our grandparents faced in the case of puerperal fever, pneumonia or a fractured leg.

The efficient medical treatment of this sort of problem also throws more light on the shortcomings of our current medicine, especially in the broad field of psychosomatics. This is not limited to just a few diseases. In scientific medicine too, the thesis prevails that the area of psychosomatics (also called functional syndromes) plays a part in almost every ailment.

However, that same medicine finds it hard to come to terms with this domain. Since it cannot find any proper offensive weapons, it feels obliged to pull out the old arsenal. Too often, these weapons bring little sustainable benefit. Moreover, they can turn out to be harmful to the patient, not only because of their side-effects but mainly because they create a sense of acquired helplessness.

All this makes me interpret the success of alternative medicine as a comprehensible reaction. However, the consequences of this reaction are not necessarily healthy. Alternative medicine can act as a ‘poetic suggestion’ that can enhance the patient’s self-help. Unfortunately, in spite of their pretensions, many alternative healers do not show much difference in this respect; they trip over one-sidedness. Worse, they replace scientific weapons by a shroud of mystery while at the same time mostly ignoring the patient’s self-help.

As a medical practitioner, I have been inundated by the ‘war philosophy’ for years. In my defense, I have to admit that I always had difficulties in doing so. I saw that I was unable to help many patients the way I wanted to. Regrettably, I lacked the insights and possibilities to deal with the matter differently.

After eight years of medical practice, I felt it was time to switch to what interested me most: namely, medical ‘computerized decision support.’ A few years later, I earned another university degree, this one in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This quite uniquely enabled me to examine a large number of diseases and their possible treatments from a completely different angle and with a new background. In doing so, I reached several conclusions that were quite surprising. I will briefly sum them up; they will be further developed in the book:

The major part of medicine as I practiced it is symptomatic¹; i.e., not the causes of ill-health are tackled, only its manifestations, the symptoms.

Most drugs and other medical treatments work mainly through the placebo² effect, meaning the power of (auto-)suggestion. Compared to 300 years ago – in spite of the undeniable progress, of course – not that much has changed as what seems at first sight.

If patients are cured, it is usually and mostly through their own power. The principal thing a doctor can do in many cases is to stimulate this power.

For me, many experiences from my practice years make so much more sense now. The treatment of illness should not be the only matter of concern. At least as important is ‘healing’ the patient as a person. In doing so, the patient should be recognized as a unique person rather than as an element in statistics. The disease is no longer the enemy, but a call to action, a message sent by – in many cases, mainly the deeper side of – a total person. This message can be a warning of an ‘enemy’ (e.g., a bacterial infection or a fractured leg). But it could just as well be – possibly at the same time – a request for deeper healing. This healing can only occur from within the total person, from one’s mental (‘inner‘) power.

Mental power can partly be tapped by a placebo drug. However, a placebo is a misplaced lie whereas other means can draw on inner strength directly and openly. These other means are what I bring together as autosuggestion.

In 2014, I graduated for a third time, as a doctor in medical science on the subject of subconceptual processing in health and healing. Indeed, the fact that autosuggestion can be used to increase health has a sound neuroscientific basis.

This book, together with AURELIS (see further), are two attempts to fulfill this for a broad public. I hope they will find their way in this complex world, in which the use of inner power becomes less evident for many people, although the open use is more and more necessary.

This book opens with a few chapters that explain the phenomenon of autosuggestion in a general sense, comparing it to willpower, prayer, and the placebo effect. You also get general advice to use autosuggestion effectively.

Chapters Two and Three are standing apart a bit. They contain more in-depth insights. I think they are important enough to really understand what the rest of the book is based upon. Yet, they may be a bit ‘drier’ literature and not necessary before reading the rest.

In Part 4, you find chapters on domains that are suitable for working on self-change with the use of autosuggestion. These are examples. Autosuggestion can be applied in all aspects of your life. The chapters on the fields of application all have the same structure. In them you find suggestions which you may now (consciously or not) be using on yourself and which increase your problem. To every suggestion some explanation is added about how you can take the edge off it partly or entirely. Each chapter also supplies you with advice on how you can apply autosuggestion in a general sense for a specific problem. I have also included a few examples of visualizations. These are all developed in AURELIS, which is explained in the last chapter of the book.

About the (s)he thing… In my writing, unless specifically stated, the masculine is a generic gender with no denigration to anyone.

Jean-Luc Mommaerts

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1 Symptomatic: with influence on the symptom, but not on the underlying cause.

2 A placebo is a medicine that is not effective on the basis of some component. It works because of the suggestion that it works. The placebo effect is the effect that a medicine has as a placebo.

CHAPTER 1

About Non-

Conscious Processing

Autosuggestion is like talking to a leaf that falls from a tree. Before it reaches the ground, you both have told your life to each other.

Once upon a time, there was a monkey who insisted on learning to speak. He did foresee a few problems, such as his larynx that needed to be slightly stretched. He might have despaired if he had lingered over the fact that his task could not be completed in one lifetime. But as he then already believed in reincarnation, this was not a problem. He was a very optimistic monkey.

And so about 500 (or was it 5000?) lives onwards, his larynx had developed so much that his vocal cords were able to vibrate like the strings of a violin. He could now form all the letters of the alphabet. In the meantime, he had also learned that letters are not yet words. So he coined words for all the things he met, thus finding unexpectedly that everything he named also had a meaning. This gave him so much pleasure that he wanted to capture the whole world in such words.

The rest of the story is familiar. The monkey lost most of his hair. He proudly straightened up on his hind legs and kept on walking like this.

What is the moral of this story? The monkey conquered the world, but in doing so, he lost his hair and contact with himself.

The ‘non-conscious’ as a social phenomenon is not a recent discovery. Freud has been helpful in bringing it to an important place in psychology books. The principle, however, is as old as the hills of Old Greece and Egypt, where the world of the gods was nothing but an outwardly projected non-conscious. But Freud did something improper with the non-conscious. With a scientific glance in his eyes, he claimed that it existed whatsoever, just like a tree in his garden or the stars in the sky. Mind you, he did not prove any of this, but he could talk so fluently and he wrote such smooth books that this idea formed the basis of one of the major psychotherapies for about a century. And Freud saw that all was well.

But things were not well at all. To start with, his pupils Jung and Adler (who were once considered as his spiritual sons) concluded that Freud’s non-conscious did not completely comply with their own non-conscious. Or better, it did not comply in the least. As a matter of fact, everyone had and still has his own ideas about the phenomenon ‘non-consious.’ Concerning this, we can say that the non-conscious is impervious to reason. We have conquered the world and may soon conquer the universe while we still cannot make any sense out of that what is nearest: namely, our self. We remain our biggest mystery.

The non-conscious does not exist, long live the non-conscious!

We all seem to know what it means to be conscious. I am conscious when I am awake. I am not conscious when I am in a dreamless sleep. People who are in a coma, we presume, are not conscious either. As we will see later on in this book, the notion of consciousness is not as straightforward as it may appear. Still, let us assume for the moment that we know what it means to be conscious. What then is meant by ‘non-conscious’? Throughout history, people have held different ideas about it:

The non-conscious is the inner place where spirits or demons live that make us do what we not really want to do.

The non-conscious is the whole of ‘conscious contents repressed’.

The non-conscious has no reality. It is a fiction.

The non-conscious is the state in which consciousness is absent. It is the negative of consciousness. A person is non-conscious when in a coma, a dreamless sleep, dead.

In any case, Freud carried the matter too far when he described the non-conscious as a rutting horse you can tame in therapy with a Grandmaster. Because, rutting or not, the non-conscious is not a ‘thing,’ neither a horse, a plant or a mineral, not even a sea. Nevertheless, there are as many entities in a non-conscious as there are fish in the big ocean.

The non-conscious has been compared with the part of the iceberg underneath the surface of the sea. It had better be compared with the sea itself. In any case, the non-conscious is tremendous. But that still does not make it a ‘thing.’ It is not something you can meet. It is forever volatile and fickle and so immensely vast that it becomes the thing it sees, whether this is a house or the universe. One can only talk about the ‘non-conscious’ in terms of a metaphor³. And if you keep in mind that this metaphor stands for something that cannot be grasped, then you are on the right track. Only then can you safely continue to speak of the non-conscious. This is the way it should be understood throughout the book. Whenever I mention contact with the non-conscious, or when I talk about the non-conscious that takes care of you all the time, it should be clear that I am not talking about a rectangle in a smart scheme of the human mind.

In the non-conscious, there are no distinct thoughts present such as we know them consciously. That is only logical; otherwise, they would by definition not be non-conscious any longer. There is no such thing as a ‘fence,’ behind which distinctly ‘conceptual’ thoughts outside consciousness are kept and from where we could peep through a hole at these thoughts. The ‘non-conscious’ aspect of non-conscious thoughts is precisely a characteristic of these ‘thoughts.’ In other words, these are not thoughts at all. Watched from a distance, it could briefly look as if they were. It is far better to compare non-conscious entities with clouds that are intensely enlaced and can usually not be spotted individually unless local flashes of lightning illuminate one of them. From close by you will still not be able to see the cloud. From far-off, you may see something that could cause a conscious thought to emerge.

The attentive reader will note that in this book, I never talk about the ‘subconscious mind.’ I prefer the term non-conscious for two reasons. Subconscious means that there is such a thing as a consciousness that is outside of ‘normal’ consciousness. Also, it indicates that this ‘consciousness’ must be somewhere ‘below’ ordinary consciousness. In both cases, I assume the opposite:

1) The non-conscious has virtually nothing to do with consciousness in terms of structure and function.

2) The non-conscious is not under, beside, or in any other way outside of consciousness. The non-conscious is, as it were, always ‘around the corner’ present at whatever thought we think, or act we perform. So the non-conscious is not a big block that jumps up as soon as we take a seat on the divan of a psychoanalyst. It is always much closer to our regular daily routine than we think.

What the non-conscious is capable of

Imagine all the things we do in one day – without mentioning feeding the cat, taking the children to school, or putting out the dustbin. No, so much more is going on. It was once calculated – do not ask me how – that each day about 50,000 conscious thoughts fly through one’s head. Can you remember what you were thinking of yesterday between 10 and 10.05? It must have been about 173 thoughts. How is it possible that we think of so many things without going insane?

The solution for this strange phenomenon – as with many weird issues – can only be found in the non-conscious. You know: this non-thing, this ultimately elusive chameleon. We have already seen that there are in the non-conscious only thoughts that look like thoughts. The thoughts that arise from there and that some brave researcher has been counting all day, are seldom completed. It is the cream floating on top of a non-conscious activity that is infinitely much more complex in itself.

We all have 100 billion brain cells which can be working continuously, each on its own. Together they are like 100 billion tiny computers which all do their thing, day in and day out. Together they create an event so complex that it may never be completely understood. What’s more, these tiny computers also closely cooperate with all the other computers in the body. Scientists discover in this cooperation an increasing number of astounding facts; it is as if we are at the beginning of the knowledge about it.

The non-conscious takes care of you

Fortunately, your non-conscious has undertaken the task of looking after you. This is quite evident since that non-conscious is eventually you. And if we go back in evolution, we see that the monkey – our predecessor – whose non-conscious only wanted to do something else than to look after the monkey itself, would not have lasted long.

So while my daughter is tying her shoelaces before leaving for school, her non-conscious is busy doing 1000 different things. A precise adjustment of her respiration means that she receives enough oxygen and can shed sufficient volatile waste to do what she wants and do it in good health. Perhaps she has to walk to school today, and she will need much more oxygen than when she is taken there by car. Fortunately, the non-conscious takes care of this. Consciousness would not be able to.

On her way to school, she seldom falls over. If you think this is simple, you had better change your mind! When walking, she makes use of her balance organs and her eyes, together with the receptors and nerve tracts that incessantly determine the position of her limbs. Add to this the fact that her brain continually compares all neural impulses and all information with yesterday’s and last year’s experiences, all of which are essential for the balance. This is not exactly a piece of cake. Luckily, the non-conscious takes care of all this, as consciousness would not be able to cope by itself.

And so my daughter lives from one activity to the other throughout the day. In the meantime, her non-conscious makes her withdraw her hand from a hotplate before she realizes she could obtain a nasty blister. In giving her an appetite, her non-conscious makes her eat, and later on, makes her feel the food is digested, and it is time to go to the toilet.

Trying to interfere with non-conscious processes consciously might have a detrimental effect. If you are a golf player, you probably know what I mean. If a sportsman is successful, he can feel to be ‘in a flow.’ That flow may last until he makes a few mistakes. If the golfer then makes the more fundamental mistake of consciously ‘concentrating on his game’ to correct his minor errors, the flow may suddenly be interrupted. Only then will things start to go really badly. Making strenuous conscious efforts to fix your technique is often not such a good idea. Your play will probably worsen from it instead of improving. You might need to do something else. Somehow you will have to consciously invite your non-conscious to improve your game instead of all-too consciously tinkering with your posture, grip, or swing.

David Eagleman, a popular neuroscientist, has remarked that our consciousness mainly gets involved when something unexpected happens or when different systems in our brain, which usually act non-consciously, suddenly start to pull in different directions.

Imagine you are driving home. As you are familiar with the layout of the land, you do not think for one moment about the road ahead. Then, suddenly, you face a roadblock and ‘your consciousness kicks in.’ It seems you now have to plan an alternative route consciously.

You are feeling hungry. One part of your brain tells you that you need sugar intake. However, you are not yet conscious of your hunger. Another part of your mind tells you that it would be good to lose some weight. For the moment, you are not conscious of the resolution. Then someone presents you with a cookie. Suddenly, you become consciously aware of both urges: the urge to eat the cookie, the urge to lose weight. Your consciousness takes up the matter: you consciously decide to do what fits best with your long-term goals. At least it looks that way. But how independent is your conscious thinking of your non-conscious processing even in such situations? Is ‘take up the matter’ in the previous sentence more than a way of speaking about something that goes on in a very different way?

Even so, these are exceptional situations. Most things in our lives go on non-consciously, and usually with an excellent effect! Overall, we can say that it is not for the sake of consciousness that consciousness is there. It is there because, as a byproduct of the non-conscious, the internal mechanism that we eventually perceive as consciousness gave us significant evolutionary advantages in particular situations. However, without the non-conscious, we would not be able to live our lives.

Some more examples of the non-conscious at work

As to the definition of the non-conscious as all mental processes of which we are not conscious yet that influence our thoughts, emotions, perception, and behavior in meaningful ways, some examples are:

You are at a cocktail party, drinking a glass of champagne and talking to a friend. An orchestra is playing. There is music, a lot of chatter and other background noise. Suddenly, you are sure someone in the crowd mentioned your name, although you didn’t really hear it. Somehow, your non-conscious was scanning all the conversations and background noises on the lookout for pieces of information that might be of personal interest to you. All this was going on without you being consciously aware of it.

If you drive a car, you are probably familiar with the following situation. You drive back home after visiting some friends or family. Parts of the evening or fragments of the conversation are still playing through your head. And then suddenly, and somewhat to your surprise, you turn into your driveway. You have no idea how you got there. You have no memory of the road you traveled that night. Your non-conscious has driven the car home without a hitch while you were consciously thinking of other things.

Robert Bornstein of Gettysburg College devised a series of interesting experiments in which the research subjects, graduate students, were exposed to several photographs of individual people. Exposure was short: only 1/5 of a second or less. As a result, the exposure remained ‘subliminal,’ meaning that none of Bornstein’s students could report having (consciously) seen the pictures. Still, when the students afterward met some of the people represented in the photos, they reacted more positively to them and, in general, ‘felt better’ about them than about people who had not figured in the pictures. In other words, mere exposure to a human face, even when this exposure remains non-conscious, results in a more favorable valuation of the person in question when you meet him or her afterward [Bornstein et al., 1992].

We are all familiar with the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Your mind is actively searching for the name of someone you know, but whatever you do, you cannot come up with the name right away. The name is, you might say, ‘on the tip of my tongue.’ Well, not precisely… You are unable to become conscious of that name, but still convinced that you know it, so where is it? Where then is it stored? The name must be ‘present’ somewhere in your non-conscious.

There is a phenomenon called ideomotor behavior. Suppose you are an enthusiastic Dodgers fan and watching one of their games on television. The game is in overtime, and the Dodgers need a field goal to win the match. You see the kicker makes his approach to the ball and… At that moment, if you are 100% focused on the game, your foot may shoot out and hit the coffee table. This is called ‘ideomotor behavior’: seeing the representation of behavior (in our example seeing or anticipating it on television) is sufficient for initiating that behavior in you. You have not made a conscious decision to kick the table. There is, after all, little that you can do to influence the game. Your reaction was initiated non-consciously.

If you are an artist or a scientist, you have probably already experienced that the best inspirations often arrive without really knowing how they came about. Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was a famous French mathematician who, amongst other things, laid the foundations of Chaos Theory. Poincaré was also fascinated with the discovery of mathematical solutions through a process of intuition. He described spontaneous and unexpected inspiration as a consequence of prolonged and unmistakably non-conscious effort. But you don’t need to be an artist or scientist to know that it is sound advice to ‘sleep on a problem.’ What happens is that, before going to sleep, you invite your non-conscious to prepare the solution for you. During the night, unbeknownst to you, the non-conscious is busily at work. When you awake in the morning, surprisingly, the answer may be there waiting for you.

fMRI, which stands for ‘functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining,’ is a technique developed to visualize what parts of the brain are active while performing different mental activities. Recently, fMRI has made it possible to have a new look at the mental processing that goes on before