The Boy Who Was Called Soft: an age regression case

Andrés described growing up with a very dominant father. Until his mid-twenties, he said, he lived "in the most total and absolute unconsciousness", following a path already marked out for him in every area of life. A first crisis showed him he was living the life his father wanted. He answered it with years of "doing, doing, achieving, achieving" on his own. A second crisis, more existential, began the three years in which he feels he has started to know himself.

Through that inner work one theme kept returning: sexuality. Several people he consulted pointed to it independently. He had never linked it to anything, because for years there had been no difficulty. Then he remembered that his first sexual encounters, as a teenager, had not gone as he hoped, and that for a long time afterwards he avoided intimacy. What stayed, he said, was "a lot of shame, a lot of powerlessness and a lack of self-esteem". He still feels all three today, in situations that have nothing to do with sex.

He also described the personality he built to compensate. It works very well socially. He called himself "a bit of a chameleon", skilled at reading what others want from him. The cost: "I am not able to show a part of me."

His body was already speaking. In a short exercise before the session his hands began to sweat, and he felt a block running from the navel down to the groin.

Before any hypnosis, I asked him to follow the feeling down, one question at a time. This is the chain he gave me:

He had done years of cognitive work on his father. "That part I have worked on quite a lot," he said. What we were looking for was underneath the story, where the feeling lives.

I then asked how he wanted to feel when we finished. Liberated and empowered instead of soft. Joy instead of sadness. Authority instead of shame. Security instead of powerlessness. And when I asked for one word for his essence, he said: "emotional."

Following the feeling

We did not go looking for a memory. We followed an emotion. After the induction and a deepening, I asked Andrés to find the feeling in his body, in the groin and the navel, and to let it grow as I counted. Then I counted back from five and asked him to go to the event behind it. This technique is called the affect bridge.

Five years old

"I am crying," he said, "and my father is laughing at me."

He was five. It was daytime, at home. His father was mocking him for crying: calling him soft, calling him by a girl's name. "A lot of shame," Andrés said. His mother was nearby, "but she doesn't want to know anything." He felt attacked, and frightened.

The word from the pre-talk was already there. Blando. It had not started as his belief about himself. It was something said to him.

What he could not say then

I asked him to tell his father how he felt. The first time it came out quietly: "I am ashamed." Then louder. Then he was shouting.

"Stop! Can't you see? Don't you realise? I am here and you don't see me. You are hurting me."

He pushed his father out of the room. He kept going until something shifted. "He has stopped," he said. And then, crying: "It isn't fair."

What the child needed

When I asked what he needed from his father, the answer came without hesitation. "I need you to see me as I am. To love me for how I am."

And how is he? "I am a sensitive person. Affectionate. Emotional. I like to feel. I like to hug. I like to touch."

In his father's place

I then asked Andrés to change places and become his father, who had just heard all this. Why can he not give his son that affection?

"I don't know what that is," the father said through him. "I have never felt that affection. I have never been able to feel." His own mother demanded that he be perfect and look perfect to the outside world. His own father said nothing. "I don't know how to play."

So I asked the father to speak to his own parents. "Dad, I need you to tell me that you love me. I don't know if you love me." And then, again and again: "My parents never loved me."

Three generations

Andrés changed places once more and became his grandfather. What could he say to his son? The words took a while to come. "I love you. They didn't love me either, but I do love you." Then the grandmother: "I love you very much."

Back in the father's place, he received it. "Thank you," he said, many times.

Only then did the father turn to the five-year-old. "I love you very much. I am going to treat you with affection. I accept you as you are. I am going to be with you."

And the child answered: "Thank you."

The mother

The child had something to say to his mother too. "I needed courage from you. I needed bravery. I needed your strength." And: "You didn't want to see. Out of fear."

Speaking as his mother, he said: "I was afraid. I am sorry. I am sorry." Then a promise: "I am going to support you in everything you do." And something she had always known: "I know you are special. I have always felt it."

Both parents had asked for forgiveness. I invited the child to receive an embrace from the two of them, and to let it spread through the body, from the feet to the groin, the navel, the chest.

What the child had concluded

With the scene resolved, I asked the child what he had decided about himself that day. Three things: that he was bad, that he was soft, that he was inadequate.

Then I asked the adult Andrés, who had been watching, to answer him. "He is brave. He has a lot of strength. And he is very beautiful."

I asked the adult whether he could see how that event and those beliefs had fed the shame, the powerlessness and the low self-esteem of his whole life. He could.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness came in a fixed order. First the child separated his parents from their behaviour: two human beings doing the best they could with the resources they had. Then he forgave himself, on the same grounds. Then his father. Then his mother.

Understanding, forgiveness, connection, acceptance and love: together they make compassion. From that place he told his parents that he understood what they had lived through, and he thanked them.

Better, and better still

The last part of the work is a simple question, repeated: what would you need to feel even better? Each answer becomes a state to enter fully before I ask again. Andrés went up step by step:

There was nothing above expansion. That is what I call the core state: what remains when nothing more is needed.

Growing up again

I asked the five-year-old whether he would like to grow up feeling like this. The adult took him by the hand and brought him through the years, six, seven, eight, up to the present, carrying expansion with him. Then the two merged into one person: an emotionally mature adult who is also the sensitive, affectionate child.

We closed with suggestions built from his own words (joy, authority, security, liberated, empowered) and with an anchor: a gesture, a breath and one word he chose. The word was "love".

Before he opened his eyes I asked him to check the groin and the navel, where the session had started.

The words in the right-hand column are his. Some he chose before trance, as the place he wanted to reach. The rest he found in it.

This is what happened inside one session. Whether it holds in daily life is what the coming weeks will show.

In our integrative review of 241 studies of hypnotic age regression, published this year in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, we mapped four mechanisms that the research proposes. All four were visible in this session.

One caution belongs here, and the review insists on it. Age regression is not a reliable way to retrieve historical facts. I had mentioned the age of five as an example before the induction, and the scene arrived at five. That does not make it false, and it does not make it a record. What heals is the emotional truth of the experience: the child's shame was real, and so was the relief when someone finally answered it.

The same applies to his father and grandparents. Andrés did not learn facts about their childhoods. He found, from inside, a way to understand a man who could not give what he had never received.

Andrés came through the door marked sexuality. The room behind it was powerlessness. As I told him afterwards, the wound did not need to be sexual: it was a five-year-old who could do nothing. A body that later "did not know how to respond" was repeating, in another setting, the experience of a child whose feelings were laughed at.

Three threads stay with me.

First, the word. Before trance, blando was his own verdict on himself. In the scene it was his father's voice. A belief we take for our character is often a sentence someone else said, kept for thirty years.

Second, the direction of love. His father could not say "I love you" to the child until he had heard it from his own parents. The love had to come down the line, generation by generation, before it reached the five-year-old. Andrés did that work for all of them.

Third, the mother. He did not ask her for tenderness. He asked for courage. A child who is being shamed needs one adult brave enough to see it.

In the language of my own model, this was the full arc: the shadow (soft, ashamed, powerless), the gift hidden inside it (sensitivity, affection, the capacity to feel) and the essence underneath (expansion). As I often say,

Afterwards he was struck that he had seen all of it while fully conscious. That is how hypnosis works: he was in control the whole time, and he remembers everything. I told him that memories may keep surfacing for a few days, and that writing or drawing helps. The old state has been worked through. What matters now is to reinforce the state he chose.

One session is one session. I will add his own account of the following weeks if he wishes to share it.