Double-click to edit...
Part Three of When Capable Women Cannot Switch Off
“I have always been the responsible one.”
“I am the person who keeps everyone calm.”
“If I stop pushing, everything will fall apart.”
“I should be able to handle this.”
These statements are more than isolated beliefs. Together, they form a story about who the person is, what makes her valuable, and what she must do to remain safe and connected. For many high-performing women, anxiety is woven into this internal story. Their vigilance, productivity, and care for others are not merely behaviours. They have become part of an identity.
This is one reason lasting change can be difficult. Reducing anxiety may unconsciously feel like becoming less responsible, less useful, or less worthy.
The brain as a storyteller
Research on the brain’s default mode network suggests that human beings continuously integrate memory, language, social experience, and imagined possibilities into an ongoing internal narrative. The default mode network has been associated with autobiographical memory, self-reflection, understanding other people, mind wandering, language, and envisioning the future. Menon (2023) proposes that it helps integrate and communicate memory, language, and semantic information to create a coherent internal narrative shaped by individual experience.
This narrative contributes to our sense of continuity: the experience that the person who remembers yesterday, acts today, and imagines tomorrow is the same self. Stories are therefore not merely decorative additions to experience. They help organize it. A client’s ongoing story influences what she notices, remembers, expects, and imagines. It shapes how she interprets mistakes, praise, rest, conflict, responsibility, and uncertainty.
The limiting story may once have been adaptive
A client’s internal narrative usually developed for understandable reasons. Perhaps being helpful brought connection. Achievement produced recognition. Anticipating other people’s moods reduced conflict. Remaining composed protected more vulnerable feelings. Becoming indispensable made rejection or abandonment seem less likely. The story “I must hold everything together” may have supported resilience in an earlier environment.
The difficulty is that an old story can continue organizing perception after circumstances have changed. The client notices evidence that people need her but overlooks evidence that they can cope. She remembers mistakes more vividly than successes. She interprets fatigue as weakness and asking for help as failure. The narrative becomes self-reinforcing.
When a person repeatedly acts as though everything depends upon her, other people may also begin depending upon her more. Their dependence then appears to confirm her original belief.
Hypnosis as an experiential narrative process
Suggestion is a defining element of hypnosis (Elkins et al., 2015). Those suggestions may be direct or indirect, literal or metaphorical. They may invite changes in perception, emotion, bodily experience, memory, expectation, or behaviour. Clinical hypnosis therefore naturally incorporates narrative. Metaphor, imagery, memory, future rehearsal, role exploration, and therapeutic suggestion all involve the creation or revision of possible experience.
Alter (2025) describes hypnosis as an interactive process through which narrative may engage the client’s neuroplastic potential and support changes in self-reinforcing personal stories. From this perspective, the self is maintained partly through an internal narrative that remains capable of revision, although that revision may require a supportive interpersonal context.
This does not mean replacing the client’s story with one chosen by the hypnotherapist. Effective hypnotic work is collaborative. The practitioner listens for the client’s language, values, images, exceptions, strengths, and unrealized possibilities. Metaphors and suggestions are most useful when they emerge from the client’s world rather than being imposed upon it. The aim is not to install a more positive story. It is to help the client experience a broader and more flexible one.
From affirmation to lived possibility
A statement such as “I am enough” may be meaningful, but it can also feel hollow when it conflicts sharply with a client’s lived experience. Hypnosis can give the idea context, sensation, and emotional meaning.
Rather than repeatedly telling herself that she is enough, the client might imagine completing a piece of work and recognizing the moment when it is sufficient. She may rehearse receiving appreciation without immediately minimizing it. She may experience saying no while remaining connected to the other person. She may picture allowing someone she trusts to carry part of a shared responsibility. In hypnosis, these possibilities can be explored as experiences rather than simply presented as instructions.
The client may feel the weight of a burden being shared. She may notice how her body responds when she imagines completing something imperfectly and discovering that the outcome remains acceptable. She may encounter a future version of herself who is competent but no longer driven by constant urgency.
The internal story may gradually shift from:
“I am valuable because I never let anyone down”
to:
“My value is not measured by how much I carry.”
From:
“I must remain in control”
to:
“I can respond effectively without controlling everything in advance.”
From:
“I cannot rest until everything is finished”
to:
“Rest is part of how I sustain what matters.”
Future rehearsal and the possible self
The brain’s capacity to remember the past and imagine the future appears closely connected. The default mode network participates in both autobiographical memory and future-oriented thought (Menon, 2023). This makes future rehearsal particularly relevant to hypnosis.
The client can imagine herself entering a previously stressful situation with a different internal stance. She may see herself pausing before agreeing to another obligation, noticing what she needs, tolerating another person’s disappointment, or leaving work at a reasonable time. The future she imagines is not a prediction or guarantee. It is a possible experience.
By rehearsing that possibility, she begins to make it more familiar. She develops language, imagery, emotional responses, and behavioural options that may become available when the real situation occurs.
A larger identity
Hypnotherapy does not need to erase the identity of the capable woman. It can help enlarge it. She can still be responsible without being responsible for everyone. She can care deeply without abandoning herself. She can pursue excellence without living in fear of imperfection. She can be dependable and also have limits.
Most importantly, she can begin to experience herself as worthy before the task is finished, before everyone is pleased, and before she has proved once again that she can cope. For the client who has organized her life around doing more, the deepest change may not be learning how to accomplish less. It may be discovering that she is already more than what she accomplishes.
References
Alter, D. S. (2025). Once upon a time: Narrative storytelling, hypnosis, and the brain. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 67(3), 200–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/00029157.2025.2450329
Elkins, G. R., Barabasz, A. F., Council, J. R., & Spiegel, D. (2015). Advancing research and practice: The revised APA Division 30 definition of hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 63(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2014.961870
Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), 2469–2487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.023