People all want to experience safety, love, health, financial security, meaningful work, spiritual connection, joy and peace. Specific goals are chosen in the hopes of enhancing one or more of those basic needs. The trouble is that we often fail to recognize how our goals are connected to those basic needs.

For example, Getting in shape is probably the most common New Year’s resolution. A woman who came to lose weight discovered, under hypnosis, that she had not resolved the childhood sexual abuse she had experienced as completely as she thought. Hypnosis revealed that she blamed herself and blamed God. She felt essentially undeserving and unsafe. While she thought her goal was to experience health, that goal threatened her more basic need for safety. That need had to be addressed first.

Another woman wanted to stop procrastinating and move forward on her goal to start a new career. Under hypnosis she discovered that she was afraid of disrupting the lives of people she cared about by taking a new direction. It turned out that fear was connected to her experience when her parents got divorced.