Breaking Negative Sex Trances
Stephen Wolinsky’s Trances People Live builds on the idea that much of our daily life is spent in unconscious, conditioned trances — many of which were installed in childhood.
He explores how Milton Erickson and Ernest Rossi differed in their approaches to hypnosis, particularly in how they viewed post-hypnotic suggestions and the unconscious mind’s role in shaping behavior.
Where Erickson worked within a person’s existing unconscious framework, Rossi leaned toward using natural cycles to guide change. But both acknowledged that post-hypnotic suggestions received in childhood shape our adult behaviors, especially in sexuality, attachment, and self-worth.
Childhood Installs and Sexual Conditioning
Wolinsky talks about how parents, culture, and early experiences install what he calls trances — deeply embedded patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that function like post-hypnotic suggestions.
These shape:
- How we experience desire: Messages about sexuality often install shame, guilt, or limitations on what is “acceptable.”
- Our relational dynamics: Early scripts dictate whether we seek validation, avoid intimacy, or repeat dysfunctional attraction patterns.
- Our self-image in sexuality: If we received messages of unworthiness, our unconscious will sabotage or distort our sexual expression.
For example, a child who hears “sex is dirty” or experiences shaming around their body might later develop compulsive avoidance or hyper-fixation in sexual situations — both forms of trance responses.
Trance Breaking: Rewriting Childhood Scripts
To break these old trances, the key is de-hypnotizing yourself — shattering the unconscious post-hypnotic suggestions implanted in childhood and replacing them with conscious, chosen beliefs.
Here’s how to start:
- Identify the Install: What messages did you absorb about sex, love, and relationships in childhood? Write them down in their rawest form.
- Find the Emotional Charge: Notice what sensations arise when you think of these beliefs. Shame? Fear? Guilt? This is where the trance still holds power.
- Break the Pattern with Disruption:
- Use provocative questioning: “What if this belief was a complete lie? What would my life look like if I never believed it?”
- Introduce paradox: If your childhood belief said, “You should wait until marriage for sex,” then ask, “How did people decide that was true? Who benefits from that belief?”
- Play with exaggeration: “What if I took this belief to an absurd extreme — would it still hold up?”
Now Reinstall New Trances Consciously: Erickson would say to embed these in metaphor and ritual.
Some ways to do this:
- Future Pace: Imagine yourself living with a different belief. Experience how it feels.
- Use Hypnotic Language on Yourself: “From now on, whenever I think about my desires, I automatically feel a sense of power and permission.”
- Physically Anchor the New Trance: Reinforce the new belief through physical gestures, movement, or breathwork to embody it.
By doing this, you re-trance yourself intentionally, instead of living under the unconscious post-hypnotic suggestions set by childhood. This is what Wolinsky called deconstructing the hypnotic reality — breaking down the trances we were handed and choosing our own.
Where do you feel you’re still living in an old trance? Which beliefs about sexuality or relationships feel like they weren’t really yours to begin with?
Join us for Trance Breaking, a transformative online course held Thursday nights at 8 PM PST. Learn how to break free from negative trances and uncover how sexual conditioning begins in our earliest years. Walk away with deep insights and the power to rewrite your own narrative.
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