Sometimes people hurt us.  They abandon us or abuse us.  It hurts us deeply and causes us shame.  We do all sorts of things to sooth our woundedness and shame and sometimes our body hurts because of shame or woundedness that is unacknowledged. 

The root of shame is where you put your focus.  Oftentimes, when we are feeling a sense of shame it is because we have been putting all of our focus and attention on what hurt us or where we have fallen short.  We get into a stuck state of “why am I like this?”  When we ask the question why, it sends us into an endless loop of answering the question without giving us an exit for the answer.  

Why am I like this?  Because I was abandoned.
Why am I like this? Because I was abused
Why am I like this? Because I made that mistake.

Hypnotic tools give us a different series of questions to ask such as:
How do I want to feel? Good
What do I need to do to make myself feel good? Focus on the value I bring into the world.
How do I focus on the value I bring into the world? List my good traits (Yes you have some!)

Look at the why questions, then look at the “what” and “how” questions and notice how they make you feel differently.  “Why” questions get you stuck and “what” and “how” questions move you toward something.

Certainly, it is good to know sometimes “why” we are the way we are. It can be a good starting point. If you stay in the “why” questions, though, you will get yourself stuck.  Something happened to you or because of you. Once you acknowledge that, it is important to figure out how you want to feel next and what you need to do to get there.
This is what hypnosis does- takes you from where you are (feeling bad about yourself) to where you want to be: Taking action to make yourself feel better.

When you start to see the value that you bring into the world despite what has happened to you you are acting in gratitude.  Gratitude is the deliberate focusing on the value of yourself or even other people in your life.  How you value yourself or another person (or even objects) will directly determine how you treat it.  If I paid $10,000 for a coat, you better believe I am going to treat that coat well, because I value it.  The same can happen to you. Instead of focusing on what makes you feel unworthy and asking why you feel that way, you can actively and deliberately ask yourself: “What makes me valuable?”  Or you can ask that of another person, “What value do I see in that person?”  What hypnosis can do is to turn your attention from the “why of shame” to the “what” of gratitude.  When you do this it changes your feelings from negative shame induced feelings to really good feelings of gratitude and love!