Konstantin Eriksen, Guest
Waking Times

Nominalizaton and self-hypnosis are linked. Nominalization is to take a process and to turn it into a static thing by giving it a name.

Self-hypnosis is to place yourself in a reality of your own making, using your own mind-software and the mind-software you got from others.

As I’m going to show, nominalization usually LEADS to self-hypnosis and since you’re going to hypnotize yourself anyways, you may as well do it in a positive way.

In ancient China, life was seen as a process. Each individual person was considered to be a process, not an itemized thing. It is nominalization that hypnotizes people into having a particular self-concept and the corresponding level of self-esteem.

I’m going to be brief and explain this in 3 steps to show you just how insidious nominalization can be. It can ruin entire lives.

First Step – Emotions.

Let say you’re relatively young and you hate public speaking, talking to the opposite sex or job interviews. Before you have to perform, you don’t feel very good. Your stomach is queasy, your heart is racing, you’re starting to sweat. These emotions are a process. However, if you label them and call them “anxiety,” “stress” or something similar, you have nominalized them and you’be just increased your chances of experiencing them again.

Let’s say (again) in spite of all that stuff, you feel happy for a few years. But then you go into a mild depression because of something that happens, then you find a new girlfriend/boyfriend and you feel better again. When this person leaves you, you get depressed again. If you go to a psychiatrist, he will probably nominalize you within 15 minutes.

It’s not you feeling depressed. You are depressed. You are “bi-polar.” You have a chemical imbalance.

Your feelings have been officially nominalized. Now it becomes part of your identity. What began as a nervous feeling when having to perform in public has become a thing-in-itself. Over time, it becomes a part of your self-concept. You’ve been hypnotized!

If you feel the emotions without labeling them and actually do something to make changes, you can surfthe emotions as they flow through you. But you know they are not who you are. So nominalization can lead to a process of self-hypnosis that can last until we die. This is not a theory, I have seen it.

Second step – Nominalizing Yourself

In stage one, you or other people nominalized your emotions. In stage two, you have become the nominalizations. This means that you formed a sef-concept based on a bunch of bullshit nominalizations.

I am shy.
I am not good with women.
I am a failure.
I am depressed.
I am not good for anything.
I will never make lots of money.
(I’m sure you can substite something more personal to extend the list)

At this point, you are not yourself, you are the self-hypnotized product of your own nominalizations and those of other people.

Now, your future will be determined by how you have nominalized your past. When you glue words onto your emotions or habits, you solidify them and it becomes very difficult to get rid of them. They live you.

Stage Three – Time-Binding And Complete Self-Hypnosis

When you reach this stage, it means that you don’t even notice you’re doing all the stuff I just wrote about. You just carry on with your daily life assuming that there is nothing else out there, nothing different. Nothing!

You have frozen a past process (for example, a past relationship) and you see it as an entity. You hate it now, if it ended in divorce, for example. And so on…

The solution? Start asking yourself some questions.

Look into the past. Is there anything there that you are nominalizing? How is that affecting you now?

How would your life be different if you stopped feeding off of that conceptualization of the past and old, crusty concept of yourself and began to see life as a dynamic process?

What if you begin to think of yourself as a a dynamic work in progress than as “I am (put labels here)?”

See yourself as a constant, unfolding process. Otherwise, you become like Al Bundy. He scored 4 touchdowns in one game, thirty years ago, and he’s still bragging about it.

I’m putting as many resources on how you can improve your life in every way on this site. So have a look around and see if anything makes you actually DO something about it all.

Konstantin

About the Author

Konstantin Eriksen is a philosopher and a 32-year-old former stock-trader, long-time natural health researcher, neigong enthusiast and fledgling internet entrepreneur. In my spare time, he enjoy hiking, music, mountaineering, meeting interesting women, studying whatever interests him and Piazzolla. Please visit his excellent blog, Life-Sucks.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with the buttons below…