In 1631, the royal printers in London, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, made a mistake that went down in history as “The Wicked Bible.”
Through a printing error, they omitted one tiny word from one rather important commandment:
NOT.
The result was shocking for the time.
Instead of:
“Thou shalt not commit adultery,”
they printed, in black and white:
“Thou shalt commit adultery.”
King Charles I was furious. Almost all of the approximately 1,000 copies were destroyed, and the printers were fined the colossal sum of £300 and lost their printing privileges.
All because of one missing word.
Why am I telling you this today?
Because the mind can sometimes behave a little like that distracted printer.
When we tell ourselves not to think about something, the mind still has to activate the idea in order to understand what we are trying to avoid. Research on thought suppression suggests that repeatedly trying not to think about something can sometimes make that very thought more accessible — or more likely to return.
When you repeatedly tell yourself:
“I DON’T want to be poor.”
“I DON’T want to be overweight.”
“I DON’T want to lose control.”
“I DON’T want to fail.”
what idea does your mind have to activate in order to understand the sentence?
Poverty.
Being overweight.
Losing control.
Failure.
Before the mind can move away from something, it first needs to know what that “something” is.
Without realising it, you may be printing your own little version of the Wicked Bible inside your mind every day.
Different words.
Same printing press.
Do you want to rewrite the script?
If you want to move from “error” towards “where you genuinely want to go,” it can help to work with someone trained to explore the patterns that may be operating automatically underneath conscious intention.
And this is where we enter the territory of hypnotherapy.
Not because you don’t know what you want.
Very often, you know exactly what you want.
The problem may be that the patterns underneath your conscious intention are pulling in a different direction.
When I use the word “programme” here, I mean the learned beliefs, associations, habits and automatic responses that can become familiar through repetition and experience.
You consciously say:
“I want this.”
But somewhere underneath, another programme may be quietly saying:
“No, this is safer.”
“No, this is what we know.”
“No, people like us don’t do that.”
“No, remember what happened last time.”
And suddenly something that looked like lack of motivation becomes much more interesting.
Because what if you are not fighting laziness?
What if you are fighting an old instruction?
This is why I think of hypnotherapy as a royal road to the subconscious mind.
It can give us another way to work with attention, imagery, suggestion, and the patterns that may operate more automatically beneath our everyday explanations.
Because the conscious mind is very good at explanations.
We all have them.
“I’m just like this.”
“I’ve always been anxious.”
“I’m terrible with money.”
“I always choose the wrong people.”
“I’m too old now.”
Perhaps.
But before turning those sentences into permanent truths, there is another question worth asking:
Who wrote them?
You?
A frightened version of you twenty years ago?
A parent?
A teacher?
A relationship?
A humiliation?
A failure?
Something you heard so many times that eventually you stopped hearing it as an opinion and started recognising it as yourself?
That is where things become interesting.
Because a belief can feel completely true and still be only a belief.
A learned pattern can feel like personality and still be a learned pattern.
And something that once protected you can quietly become the very thing keeping you in the same place.
Reading a clever article will not magically change that.
Neither will another inspirational quote telling you to “believe in yourself.”
If it were that simple, we would all have solved ourselves years ago.
Real change asks for something else.
Curiosity.
Commitment.
And, at some point, the willingness to look beneath the story you already know by heart.
That is the territory where hypnotherapy becomes fascinating.
Not because somebody else gets to programme you.
But because you finally get the opportunity to notice what patterns have already become familiar or automatic — and decide whether they still deserve to run your life.
Perhaps you already know perfectly well where you want to go.
The more interesting question might be:
What inside you keeps printing a different destination?
References / Further Reading
Wang, D. A., Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2020). Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression: A Meta-Analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3).
Zahedi, A., Lynn, S. J., & Sommer, W. (2024). How hypnotic suggestions work – A systematic review of prominent theories of hypnosis. Consciousness and Cognition, 123, 103730.
Museum of the Bible. The Wicked Bible — historical account of the 1631 printing error involving Robert Barker and Martin Lucas.