The common--though incorrect--perception is that hypnotherapists only put people INTO trance. But a vastly significant percentage of the work a good hypnotherapist does is help people OUT of the unhealthy trances they're in. Including the cultural delusions that plague Americans.

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The common--though incorrect--perception is that hypnotherapists only put people INTO trance. But a vastly significant percentage of the work a good hypnotherapist does is help people OUT of the unhealthy trances they're in.

Take a look around and see if it isn't so! Who doesn't have an IPOD attached to their head or a phone on their ear? Who isn't spending hours staring at a TV or hooked into the internet. Our culture is now almost entirely media driven""we're surrounded (all the time!) by advertising, media, and even music that tells us what we need, who to love, and what drugs to take to make us happy.

We don't know who we are or what we're doing here, but we are convinced that Viagra or a breast implant will somehow make it all better.

There are more pervasive cultural delusions that I can go through in one article but this is a brief list.

1. ViralFear

2. Moritis

3. The Eruption of Ugly

4.The I'm-1-N-1 Virus

All of these are pandemic in proportion and are driving American culture headlong into the critical care unit. Is there a fix for them? I think so.

Viral Fear

Viral Fearis the oil for the American drive shaft.

It moves the market because it moves us to buy. We believe we need something because we get convinced that the absence of it puts us at grave risk""for attack, hemorrhoids, loneliness, heart failure or social scorn. We pour more pharmaceuticals into our bodies than ever, yet we have more heart disease, panic attacks, isolation, and asthma in this country than ever before. And with all the surveillance, bombs, and barricades we've erected around us we are still the most frightened we've ever been""which is exactly where Madison Avenue wants us.

Because when we're afraid, we're needy. And when we're needy like that, we'll buyanything.Including bad ideas, bad politicians and ultimately sign on for bad policies.

Moritis

The second American disease follows the first in both style and substance. It is consumption""not the tubercular one that plagued the weak, poor and malnutritioned in the late 1800's, but the modern, psychological version of it in which we never have enough.

What's in your garage? In your cabinets? When you walk through your neighborhood, what do you see in their yards, their storage areas? How much of it do you think you (or they) actually use in a year, in a decade? My assumption""if my experience is anything like yours""is that you use very little of what you have. And that you need even less than that.

This is the delusion of I NEED MORE. It is unrestrained avarice and growth. We guzzle without compunction. On the physical level, you have cancer, psoriasis and diabetes.Our garages are filled to overflowing, but on the emotional and spiritual level we are becoming bankrupt.

The origin of it is subtle. You""me""we identify with what we HAVE more than we identify with who we are and what we offer to our communities. If we don't have the clothing, the car, or the house that reflects our chosen image to the world, we have nothing. Worse, we ARE nothing.

It is fear based from start-to-finish.Imagine the way America does business, exchanging credit cards, credit card offers, percentages of interest, interest reports, people with their heads in their hands weeping over piles of bills, advertisers for more credit.

Because of our need for MORE, our whole culture is now based on one of the few economic devices the Bible completely disallows: usury. Yet, we can't stop putting things on credit. We can't sit still. We can't be with one another quietly. We have to keep buying, acquiring, collecting.

Our shelves and stomachs are filled but our hearts and souls are empty. We sit alone and sip on our Prozac cocktails.

The Eruption of Ugly

As you watch your favorite shows this evening, notice the endless advertising for beauty products aimed directly at your weakest spots""your insecurities. It starts with cellulite and goes on to target thin lips, sexual dysfunction, abdominal flab, and fatigue. The people we watch on television are almost always the antithesis of what we see in real life. They are perky, puffed up and perfectly happy juggling mahhhhvelous acting careers, baby bumps, and award ceremonies.

There has never been a nation of more deliberately sculpted beauty or a culture that has spent more money on beauty because it is convinced that it is ugly.

Women starve themsevles, men fill themselves with toxins in search of the on-command erection and everyone spends hours in front of mirrors terrified of being unattractive as if our sexual desirability determined our worth in the world and our chosen-status by God.

The truth is we haven't a clue about what is really attractive or beautiful. And we miss all the real opportunities for love which have far less to do with plumped lips than we'd like to think. After all, if it were just a matter of a little collagen, that would be a relatively easy fix. No one would actually have to work at intimacy, forgiveness, or sharing.

This disease has American by its chinny-chin-chin. And we're spending a fortune "fighting" it.

"I'm-1-N-1" Virus or the Centerless Self

This is the deepest expression of all the above pathologies. Because of all the others""the distortion of self and body-loathing, the sense of never being or having enough, the constant fear""we've also become exceedingly self-centered. Which is actually much more disastrous than it sounds because in our cultural psyche, there is no self and there is no solid center. We've become painfully insecure AND entitled. And when we don't get what we want""because we have no center, believe that we need that thing to fill up our emptiness, fear what may happen and loathe ourselves without it""we become violent.

The evidence for that is all over the news on a daily basis.

All these diseases, these cultural, collective delusions form a sort of intellectual and emotional breast milk for us and our children. They are the formula for how we think and how we live.

So what heals these delusions?

The first and most important antidote is Love.A spiritual Love. This is not the same as romantic love or Eros. It is the love St. Francis prays for when he says, "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love." This love is unconditional, selfless, humble, and constant. It has also gone out of style. As if battered by the distant drum of the sixties and self-psychology, love now has to start with "I" and end with "me."

If we are to heal and be de-tranced, we will have to know and learn to experience that we are not the center of the universe. Something else is and that IT centers us. We have no center without a relationship with the creator.

The second is Faith. When we can put our faith in something beyond ourselves, there is nothing to fear. When we can trust that a God who literally loves us is running the show, we can relax in the moment. We don't have to buy anything. We don't have to run away anymore. We don't have to puff ourselves up or repeat empty aphorisms to buoy our sagging sense of self.

The third and perhaps most difficult for Americans is a Correctness of Desire. The medicine for unrestrained want, irrepressible fear, and self-loathing is gratitude.

Authors Bio:
Judith Acosta is a licensed psychotherapist, author, and speaker. She is also a classical homeopath based in New Mexico.

She is the author of The Next Osama (2010), co-author of The Worst is Over (2002), the newly released Verbal First Aid (Penguin, 2010) and the author of numerous articles on mental health and cultural issues. She specializes in the treatment of trauma, anxiety, and grief, working with people all over the country.

She has her practice in New Mexico with her canine therapeutic assistants. She has worked with trauma, anxiety and fear in patients for twenty five years. She has watched it, felt it, wrote about it, and helped heal people from it. As a result, she has learned a few things about fear, particularly that growing epidemic she calls VIRAL FEAR.