The Voice in Your Head Is Lying to You!

Stephanie Riseley Hypnotherapy & Past Life Regression Therapy

The Voice in Your Head Is Lying to You.

Hypnotherapy, CBT, and Past-Life Regression Can Get Your Inner Critic on Your Side!

Do you have an Inner Critic? An angry inner voice? Like a bad roommate, always complaining to you?

Tuned into station KRAZY, that streams unwanted messages into your head? Do you have negative, sabotaging, ruminating thoughts?

Do they convince you that you’re not good enough, smart enough, brave enough, or thin enough to do the thing you actually want to do?

That’s your inner critic. And it has been playing its sabotaging tapes for years.

Believe me, I don’t speak to you from some altitude of effortless confidence. I spent decades hosting that same hostile inner voice.

I was raised by two very young parents who had absolutely no idea how to say, “Well done. Good job!” They didn’t have the skill set or experience either. It didn’t start with them, and your issues didn’t start with you, either. (It’s why I don’t do “blame therapy.) It’s generational. Tickle down trauma!

For me? I was the youngest of four granddaughters, and when I was just five years old, staying with my grandmother in Kansas, she looked at me one day with the full authority of a woman who had raised three boys, run the town post office, and suffered absolutely no nonsense. She said:

“Stephanie! You must have stood behind the door when they handed out the brains.”

I spent years thinking about that door. Who was handing out the brains? Was there a line? The image was so vivid that I never stopped to question the premise, which was that I didn’t have a brain – talk about the imposter syndrome!

That is where your negative self or inner critic gets its power. It doesn’t argue with you. It shows you a picture so convincing that you never think to stop and ask: “Is it true?”

YOUR INNER CRITIC IS NOT TELLING YOU THE TRUTH

The inner critic sounds like you. It uses your voice, your memories, your specific fears. It knows exactly which buttons to push because it built the buttons.

But it is not you. It is a recording. A very old one, made by people who were doing the best they could with what they had, and who still got it wrong in ways that cost you.

When I was 28, I started writing seriously. I sent short stories to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. And I got rejections back, as you do. But here’s the thing about those rejections: they were lovely.

Thoughtful. Specific. Many came from Roger Angell, the fiction editor at the New Yorker, and I didn’t understand at the time that Roger Angell did not write back to everyone. He wrote back to the writers, worth encouraging.

My inner critic did not know that then. My inner critic told me that I’d been rejected. Full stop. End of story. The truth was more interesting. The truth usually is.

WHY COMPLAINING THERAPY ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR

I did twelve years of classic talking therapy. I got to the point where I was complaining about my parents, my life, and my luck. We all love to complain because we all need someone to hear us. But here is what all my complaining got me: a very detailed understanding of my many problems, and absolutely zero forward motion. I was held captive in the victim wash cycle.

Insight is useful, but not the same as change. You can understand exactly why you are the way you are and still be exactly that way.

This is where the real work begins.

WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS

Over more than twenty-five years as a hypnotherapist and Cognitive Behavioral practitioner, here is what I use to help people change:

Hypnotherapy – Because it bypasses the part of your brain that is very attached to the story of who you are and what you’re capable of. It goes directly to the subconscious, where your actual blueprint lives, and it starts updating the file. The inner critic lives in conscious thought. Hypnotherapy works below that level. It is like a software update for a very outdated operating system.

Cognitive Behavioral work gives you the tools to catch the thought in real time. You can learn how to identify the trigger, interrupt the pattern, and replace the automatic response with something true. Not fake-positive. Not like, “I am a magnificent goddess of infinite potential.”

That’s a thought, but not a fact. And you can’t lie to yourself and get away with it.

And then I use past-life regression, which is where things get genuinely interesting.

When my clients begin the regression work in the third session and see themselves navigating impossible circumstances in other lifetimes, something shifts that is very hard to describe but easy to feel.

The knowing that you have done hard things before stops being an idea and becomes a memory. The soul’s resilience stops being a concept and becomes evidence.

That is a different kind of resource. And it creates a shift in perception, and that changes everything.

USE NEUROSCIENCE TO SILENCE INNER CRITIC

Your brain is not fixed. This is the news your inner critic does not want you to know.

Neuroplasticity means you can rewire your brain through your experiences. Every time you interrupt a self-defeating thought, catch it, and replace it with something accurate, you lay down a new neural pathway.

Every time you take an action, even a small one, even a scared one, your brain begins to update its story about what you can do.

You make the chemistry in your body with the thoughts you think! You can manufacture your own natural antidepressants. Your own courage drugs, produced in-house, at no cost, every time you refuse to let the inner critic have the last word.

Encouragement does this too, which is why I give it freely and without apology. Your brain responds to being told good things just as powerfully as it responds to being told bad ones. The inner critic has had decades of airtime. Let’s even the score, okay?

WHAT I TELL MY CLIENTS

I don’t just tell people they can change. I tell them that I changed, and they can too!

Your inner critic is not your conscience. It is not wisdom. It is not protection. It is an old recording, playing on a loop, from a time when you had no choice but to listen.

You have a choice now.

You do not have to feel confident to act confidently. You do not have to feel brave to do the brave thing. You do not have to silence the voice before you take the step. You just have to take the step while it’s still talking.

It will get quieter. I promise you. Not all at once. But quieter.

READY TO CHANGE CHANNEL KRAZY?

If your inner critic has been running the show, I’d love to help you take your power back.

Through hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and past-life regression, we work together to identify the voice, interrupt the pattern, and replace the recording with something that actually serves you.

Please give me a call at 323) 933-4377 or find me at StephanieRiseley.com

Sending you hope and love,

Stephanie