Why do our limiting beliefs have such power over us? How much does our early life conditioning affect our lives today? Trance states provide some interesting clues.
Although I was first introduced to the concept of childhood trances during my psychotherapist training in Germany in 1993, it wasn’t until I did a workshop with Reichian therapist Stephen Wolinsky several years later that I was struck by how our childhood experiences and subsequent trance states drive the fears that hold us back as adults.
In his book, The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Wolinsky describes a trance state as the mechanism through which we disconnect from our current reality and allow the emotions from our old reality—from our childhood or earlier life—to take over. A trance state is a situation in which we experience that emotional disconnect. It’s as if our emotions are hijacked by our unconscious minds. According to Wolinsky, age regression is the most common trance state.
Trances explain why many of us react or behave in ways that seem out of our control, without understanding why. There is a part of us—which I refer to as the observer—that creates and uses trance states as a way to protect ourselves and to survive difficult childhood experiences and traumas. When something happens in our adult life that reminds us of a past event—a trigger—we unconsciously recreate memories and emotions that relate to the past event rather than the present reality. That can cause us to react in ways that are often inappropriate to the here and now.
Trance states can be invoked by all kinds of situations and events. Not long ago, I was working with a client, Marybeth, on issues related to her sense of loneliness. We talked about trance states, and a few weeks later, during one of our sessions, she recounted this story. That week, Marybeth had gone to an unfamiliar church where her son was singing with the choir as part of a school-related event. When she arrived alone at the Episcopal service, she found herself seeking out fellow parents with whom to sit. She said hello to an acquaintance and asked if she could share a seat, but the woman was saving the entire pew for aunts, uncles, and grandparents who were scheduled to arrive shortly. So Marybeth found a seat next to someone she didn’t know. Since the two of them were seated alone together, Marybeth reached out her hand and introduced herself; they exchanged a brief hello and the names of their children. The family in the pew in front of her was very well dressed and sitting stiffly, whispering barely audibly among themselves. Suddenly, Marybeth had an intense feeling that something was terribly wrong. Within moments, she was filled with anxiety. She was gripped with a fear that she’d been behaving inappropriately. Anxiety and embarrassment swept over her; she felt an overwhelming sense of confusion. She started to sweat; her mind racing. It took a few minutes for her to collect herself. “What was going on?” she wondered, recognizing that her reaction was out of proportion to what, if anything, might have occurred. Because of the work we’d been doing together on trances, she realized that she was in a trance state. It wasn’t her loneliness that was the issue. She was experiencing emotions that sprang from her early life. Raised in a very proper family, she’d grown up in the Episcopal Church, which she had long since abandoned. She’d been taught to be very quiet when entering the sanctuary. By talking so openly and moving from pew to pew when she’d first entered the church, she’d broken the rules; she’d behaved, she thought, inappropriately.
Marybeth was disconnecting from the present. Somehow, the combination of events had taken her back to her early years in church, which, from her perspective, had not been about worshipping, but all about appearances: how you dressed, how you looked, how you behaved. Her core limiting belief: If I don’t behave appropriately, I’ll be rejected and humiliated. Recounting the experience to me as something of an epiphany, Marybeth reported that, during church services growing up, her mother would repeatedly shush her, along with her brother and sister, reprimanding them with stony glares if they spoke at all. Being in an Episcopal sanctuary, sitting behind a whispering family that was dressed very formally—just like the people who had surrounded her in church so many years before—had triggered the sensation of shame and confusion she’d experienced as a child. In fact, she noted, issues around behaving appropriately at all kinds of events were emotional triggers for her because of her mother’s intense preoccupation with appearances.
Trances bring our pathologies from childhood into our everyday adult experiences, ultimately creating patterns of behavior driven by our core limiting beliefs. In The Dark Side of the Inner Child, Wolinsky defines a trance as “the means by which symptoms are created and maintained and become a source of pathology as they are integrated in our habitual mode of response to the world.” In other words, trance states are reactions based on the past. They trigger habitual behaviors that are grounded in our core beliefs and conditioning. In adulthood, those trance states surface again and again. The fight-or-flight response triggers the trance; the trance triggers the habitual behavior.
Here’s another example. I had a client, a man in his mid-30s, who played the piano as a child. Every time his parents had guests, they’d try to get him to perform. It made him feel uncomfortable, and he would make a lot of mistakes, which humiliated and embarrassed him. As an adult, any time he was in a situation where he was put on the spot or was the center of attention, he got very anxious. His limiting belief: If people notice me, I’ll be humiliated. Any situation he associated with performance—from speaking out at a meeting to delivering a toast—triggered fear. So his habitual response was to always avoid the limelight.
To better understand the degree to which trance states may be diminishing the outcomes you seek in life, start noticing when you shift into a reactive emotional state. Then identify the trigger that evoked it—the thought or event that happened just prior to the reaction. Next, see if you can connect it to a past situation or experience that was traumatic or unpleasant. The goal is to determine if your reaction is appropriate to the here and now, or if it is an overreaction—or not even relevant to—the present moment.
If you find that your reaction is related to the present, take action to address the situation as appropriate. If you discover that it is a trance state, and one that you tend to get stuck in frequently, that is an indication that you need to do some work to uncover its origin, change the limiting belief that you internalized at that time to one that reflects today’s reality, and learn how to move out of the trance state back into the here and now.