Some Good Things to Know about Ideomotor Questioning

• Hardly anyone—with the possible exception of trained psychotherapists and philosophers—starts out being good at ideomotor questioning. It takes practice. Trial lawyers are sometimes good too.
• You cannot hurt yourself as long as YOU formulate the questions and YOU answer them alone.
• Your answer directions can change from one session to the next. Always establish them first.
• Write down your questions and answers as you go.
• Don't do it in public. People will think you are nuts.
• Ask only questions to which your subconscious mind could know the answers. Don't use ideomotor questioning to pick things like sporting event winners or lottery numbers. And don't use ideomotor questioning to see if your wife is cheating on you or if you are going to get lucky tonight.
• Your subconscious mind uses a different kind of logic from that of your conscious mind, so don't reject subconscious answers just because they "don't make sense." They usually won't make conscious sense. Be prepared to learn things about yourself that surprise you.
• Always check a formulated suggestion by asking if it will be ACCEPTABLE, if it will be EFFECTIVE, and if it will be effective in the INTENDED WAY. If you get a negative answer to any of these, reformulate the suggestion and start over.
• Don't limit yourself to simplistic levels of questioning. You can go as far and get as sophisticated as you want with ideomotor questioning.

Dysfunctions

"Dysfunction" is a handy term for referring to anything that isn't working right, that isn't functioning the way it should. And the "should" in this case is determined by you. Consciously.

Sometimes dysfunctions are not viewed as such by the subconscious mind. If you are bed wetting, smoking, overeating, beating your spouse or kids, or any of a million other things you might be doing but don't want to be doing, you probably don't have any problem with acknowledging that those are dysfunctions. (You might have a problem accepting the fact that you subconsciously believe those things are okay, that they are not dysfunctions. But that is often the way it is. You have to accept that fact before you can actually do anything about changing.)

Actually, anything for which you are likely to want to use self-hypnosis can be viewed as a problem, a dysfunction. You say you want to play better tennis? If you want to use self-hypnosis for that you are in one of two categories. You are either too impatient and want to improve more quickly than your body will allow (or beyond your genetically imposed limitations), or you are not improving at a rate that common sense says you should be. In the latter case something is holding you back and is by definition a dysfunction.

Want to jog farther and faster? Same answer. Want to start exercising? Same answer. And so on. If you believe you can benefit from the application of self-hypnosis to a situation or condition, then you need to identify the dysfunction. That is, find out why you have not already achieved what you want.

Identify the problem or issue

The first thing you have to know, of course, is what it is you want to know more about. This means starting with the problem as it manifests itself, but boiled down to those processes and behaviors that are within you. The first question to ask yourself before you do any ideomotor questioning is, "What is the real source of the problem?"

There are a couple of key concepts here that require clarification.

For one thing, "source" does not mean the ultimate psychological etiology of a particular dysfunction. That would be asking too much as a starting point. We are not interested in engaging in some process of infinite regress in which you find that your potty training was the source of the problem. All we want here is the separation of the symptoms and the problem. In the case of smoking, for instance, your real problem is the desireto smoke. Never mind that the ultimate etiology goes back to when your mother thought it was cute to blow smoke in your face when you were in your crib.

Do not confuse acts with causes. Buying and carrying cigarettes, putting one in your mouth, lighting it, inhaling the smoke— these are all just epiphenomena, or symptoms, of the desire to smoke. If you just deal with one or even all of the symptoms, no matter how successful your suggestions might be, you are no better off than you would be if you were simply out of cigarettes and couldn't find a store open. Or if all cigarettes tasted like oysters to you. (See the Eddie Sue story.) You would still have the craving to smoke. So the real source of the problem that you can identify is the craving to smoke.

The same can be said for weight control. It is the desire to eat, or overeat, or eat the wrong things, that is at the source of the weight problem. Change the desire and everything else is pretty easy. Leave the desire untouched and nothing else works for long.

It is almost always true that desire (motivation, craving, need, whatever you want to call it) is at the root of active dysfunctions. An "active" dysfunction is one that involves something you do. Overeating, smoking, nail chewing, glue sniffing, these are examples of things you do. They require overt behavior on your part.

Passive dysfunctions are ones that involve the absence of something. These are often the so-called mental blocks so often referred to in street level psychobabble. "I don't know why I'm no good at math. I guess I got me one of them mental blocks against it."

Bad grammar and psychobabble aside, passive dysfunctions very often are mental blocks. They are subconscious constructs that get in the way of learning or performance. Often the purpose of psychotherapy is to uncover the existence of these dysfunctions. But unlike psychotherapy, we don't need to know how they were formed. Once we know they are there we can formulate and get acceptance for suggestions that will eliminate them.