The excerpt below is from my just-published downloadable e-book, Help with Negative Self-talk, volume 2, (a sequel to volume one which was published last year). You can purchase the book here:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/pages.php?page=selftalkebook

Misunderstanding is the food of conflict; without it, conflict weakens and withers. Joining with a troublesome internal voice can be a first step toward understanding it and how it functions, and this can then be used to regain some control over what it says and does. This approach is something that very few people would ever think of doing on their own, but it has some very interesting consequences. The example below is from Douglas Flemons, a brief therapist in Florida:

Clients come for therapy because some chunk of their experience is happening outside their conscious control, and it’s driving them—and/or someone else—crazy. The brief therapy work I offer employs the logic and methods of hypnosis to invite a reunion between their conscious intention and an automatic and alienated part of the self.

Brian, a high-powered trial lawyer at the top of his game, was desperate about his insomnia. He got five to six hours of sleep on a good night; two to three—or none at all—on a bad one. And for the last few years, most nights had been bad. He’d tried everything, from warm milk and various medications, to relaxation tapes and hypnosis, but nothing had worked. When he’d lie down to try to go to sleep, a five-to-ten second auditory “loop” would form in his head—the chorus from a pop song, a snippet of conversation from earlier in the day, a snatch from a trial—and torture him for hours on end. Despite making formidable efforts, he could never get the loop to stop. After a couple of hours of tossing and turning, he would roam the house, looking for some magic location that might afford him some relief. But the longer sleep eluded him, the more agitated and strung out he’d become.

Brian had a reputation for being relentless. If purposeful effort could achieve a goal, he’d apply himself with the focus of a laser beam. But this skill, which worked so well in the courtroom, backfired when he tried to implement it at bedtime. He couldn’t make himself fall asleep and he couldn’t successfully will the loop in his head to stop. It wasn’t because he wasn’t trying hard enough, but because, given the nature of consciousness, he was trying too hard.

I asked him if he could get a loop started as he sat there in my office. Having never tried to create one on purpose, he was a little surprised at my suggestion, but he was willing to give it a shot. Within a few minutes, he had one going full tilt in his head, so I moved into hypnosis and offered the following suggestions:

“While that loop continues, repeating over and over, you can listen to it with the back of your mind, and to me with the front of your mind. Or you can follow the loop with the front of your mind, while the back of your mind monitors where I’m headed. It doesn’t really matter. You might even find them switching back and forth.

“This morning at breakfast, I told my 6-year-old daughter, Jenna, to quit dawdling. ‘Finish up your cereal, Honey,’ I said. She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, matching my tone of voice, ‘Finish up your cereal, Honey.’ ‘Hey, what are you trying to pull?’ I joked, to which she replied, ‘Hey, what are you trying to pull?’”

“I complimented her on how well she was able to imitate not only my words, but also the tonal quality of my voice. She smiled at this, so I asked whether she could repeat what I was saying while I was saying it. As I said, ‘I hope you have a good day at school, Sweetheart,’ she looked intently at my mouth and managed to form each of the consonants and vowels of the words just a fraction of a second behind my articulating them. I found myself slowing way down as she spoke almost in unison with me, and at the end of the sentence we both burst out laughing.

“A funny thing happens when you have two or more people voicing the same thing at the same time. If you’re in a choir, holding a certain note, and everyone around you is singing the same note, then the boundary separating you and them dissolves, and your experience of yourself melts a little. You and the other singers blend together.

“I wonder what would happen if the front of your mind were to ‘pull a Jenna’ and start imitating, in unison, that back-of-your-mind loop? Instead of trying to stop it, it could create an exact replica, so you’d have two loops going, the automatic one that you can’t get to stop, and a deliberate one, giving you a stereo experience. Go ahead and try that, and let’s see what happens. Match the voice or voices in speed, articulation, accent, volume, and tone.

“When both are in unison, you may not be able to tell if the deliberate loop in the front of your mind is following the automatic one in the back of your mind, or if the automatic one has synced up with the deliberate one. Both can move together, in unison, around and around, giving you that stereo experience.”

I continued on in this vein for a while, and when I checked in with him, Brian told me that the loop had gradually faded out—something that had never happened before.

In asking Brian to initiate a loop, I helped him connect with something automatic that he’d always tried to eradicate. By helping him shift his intentionality, I helped relief and sleep to develop spontaneously. By inviting him to purposefully imitate it, I facilitated a dissolving of the boundary between his conscious intention and his symptom—a previously alienated part of his experience.

Later in the session, I taught him a self-hypnosis technique to use at night, and suggested that he practice “singing in unison” with whatever loops appeared at bedtime. He came back two weeks later, having slept well almost every night, and he no longer felt trapped by the automatic workings of his mind. He liked the irony, he said, of feeling empowered by not doing anything to the loops. We did some fine-tuning of his self-hypnosis, and he left, able to sleep and no longer at war with himself.

Douglas Flemons, http://www.contextconsultants.com/aboutus.htm

Read more excerpts from this book (and/or volume 1) and to order:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/pages.php?page=selftalkebook