Your brain operates like a highly sophisticated computer, storing every experience you have ever had in your subconscious. Brain research reveals that subjects can describe minute details of events that happened to them as children; clinical hypnosis allows people to remember things that the conscious mind may have filed away long ago. The body acts and reacts on the basis of its previous programming, even without the mind’s conscious acknowledgement. So many of your illness reactions and fears of today are the results of messages you received as a child. You keep these old programs in place with unconscious self talk and reinforce them with new input from contemporary sources.

• Childhood role-models. You may have watched Mom or Dad start every day with a dose of aspirin for pain, or end every day with a few drinks to handle stress. You wondered why certain topics, like sex and death, made adults very uncomfortable and why certain words, like cancer, were never used.
• Direct commands from parents and others. “You’ll fall.” “Oh, you’ll get sick.” “You’ll cut yourself.” And sure enough, you probably did!
• Rewards for illness or for being in pain. You may have received special attention like physical nurturing, been allowed to stay home from school, or been given candy and ice cream or gifts.
• TV, magazines and newspapers, and billboards. The media constantly supplies direct illness messages such as: “The winter cold season is here!” “Don’t worry about overeating, as long as you have those little white mints to fight indigestion.” Even more insidious are the implied messages, like “Cancer is inevitable and will always mean death.”
• Daily conversations. Some people constantly complain about their own symptoms and the ill health of those around them.
• Self designed, self destructive mental pictures of your pain or disease. Humans are image making creatures. Constantly and, for the most part, unconsciously, your imagination creates internal images of things that it cannot see, hear, feel, taste, or touch. Hearing the word ulcer, you will form a mental picture (or some other internal sensory image—not everyone creates a visual image) of an ulcer, even if you have never seen one. It may not be an accurate representation, but if the idea of an ulcer is a troubling thought for you, your stomach may tighten up nonetheless.

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