Are you feeling trapped in a job you hate, or a relationship that’s going nowhere, but are too are too tied-in to make a break? Feeling trapped could be a sign that you are waiting for more information before making a decision, but more commonly, it is sign that you feel powerless to change things; that you have a fear of failure, should you try to change things; or that you have a fear of success, should you change things and they actually work out.
Feeling powerless and fearing failure go hand-in-hand. If you felt powerful you would also feel capable of succeeding. The emphasis here is on proving your ability in the success/failure equation. Pretty straight forward. But fear of success is more illusive and yet, quite a common mindset. Feeling powerless can also be implicated with fearing success, and here’s how. If we feel that we don’t deserve the success we are aiming for, it indicates a sense of personal powerlessness. It’s not so much about proving our capability, but about feeling good enough on the inside.
In fact in this scenario, we fear power itself, because power and success are similar states. If we felt powerful, we wouldn’t fear success, we’d grasp it! The problem is that if we believe we are not good enough, we cannot match the image that we have of ourselves, with the successful image that we strive for. We feel disempowered, and so we seek an experience that resonates with that low vibration, because that is our comfort level.
Feeling trapped can actually be a good thing, because you need to feel the discomfort of it in order to want to shift it. It could be a sign that you are ready to change. Some people on the other hand might be in the same, unrewarding job year after year, and simply accept their fate. They won’t try to improve their position. They won’t dare to dream. They simply accept a numb existence. These people are not ready for change.
John: Feeling trapped in the wrong job
Oh John… he had years of expertise over his colleagues in IT. He could do their work in half the time that they took. He had a reputation as the fountain of knowledge in his workplace, and he was always reliable with delivering results. John’s skill set was not the issue, it was his desperate fear of success which had prevented him from applying for higher positions, and which kept him feeling trapped in the customer service roles he’d been doing.
John feared success because he had always felt devalued on a personal level. His feeling trapped originated from the metaphorical cage he found himself in, based upon his upbringing, where he was bullied relentlessly by his older brothers. In many ways this treatment had molded John as the ‘loser’, the ‘scapegoat’, the one who everyone else could mistreat. John was disempowered. He identified with the image of himself as a loser, and no matter how outstanding he was in his work, he saw himself through very dark glasses.
So John needed help taking off those glasses, so to speak. He needed help to resolve the past and to create a new image of himself, which more realistically matched his worth, and then some. We used a number of techniques over the three sessions to rearrange John’s mindset in a more useful way.
John felt a massive shift after the first session, as he began to see the past for what it was, and more importantly, that his unconscious mind could now see it clearly and in perspective. Then we fed his unconscious mind a more resourceful version of the past, through a regression, and we began to create a future vision that matched this more resourceful state.
Feeling trapped in the wrong job is one example of how I work with fear of success and fear of failure. It could come out in any number of ways. Trapped in a bad relationship or trapped in an unhealthy lifestyle. These are all traps that we can break out of, if we choose to. Horizons Clinical Hypnotherapy Noosa.