In this interview, Thais Gibson explains why insight alone isn’t enough to change entrenched habits and shares her personal story of overcoming a six‑year opioid addiction. She contrasts the conscious mind (3‑5% of beliefs, thoughts, emotions, decisions) with the subconscious/unconscious mind (95‑97%) and argues that lasting change requires re‑programming the latter. After critiquing traditional hypnotherapy for its dependence‑creating dynamics, she introduces a self‑empowered tool—autosuggestion. The protocol involves (1) identifying a core limiting belief and its opposite, (2) gathering ten vivid personal memories that embody the opposite belief, (3) recording those memories with associated emotion and imagery, and (4) listening to the recording daily for about 21 days to forge new neural pathways. Gibson emphasizes that the subconscious communicates through emotion and imagery, not rational affirmations, and that this method can quickly dissolve deep‑seated “boulders” of self‑limiting baggage.
People see this across their daily lives, right? When they're like, it's New Year's, I'm going to set a resolution to go to the gym every day or to quit eating chocolate. And then like they go back to the same habits and patterns. So to me, insight's really important. It's a great, like awareness is that big first step. But if you don't have tools to recondition after that, it's like, it can kind of be a lost cause for people.
So, Thais, I'm so excited to chat with you today. You talked so much about subconscious reprogramming, and then you talked about autosuggestion. Why is it so important for us to like go deep into the subconscious reprogramming and use tools like NLP or autosuggestion or some other techniques you've used to kind of reprogram your nervous system? Tell us more about that. —what you found works really well.
It's such a powerful topic. I love the HeartMath Institute, by the way. Just really interesting. So, and I do want to just say too, like, you know, it's so true that if you are in a space where you're so disconnected from your emotions, but you actually start practicing, like, getting in touch with your feelings and working through your needs, like, what happens is we start to feel like, you know, emotions are scary at first, but then we start to feel like life, it's like going from black and white to, like, operating in color, right? You, like, feel more. I've used that metaphor too, yeah. So, so, um, anyway, so the subconscious mind, um, you know, to me, I spent a lot of time struggling as a kid, and I actually struggled with, um, I played soccer in university, and before, just in my scouting year, I got, uh, I had to have knee surgery and actually became like immediately addicted to opiates. And that's its own long story, but I went through about a 6-year journey of like trying to get sober and Yeah, and going through the ups and downs of that. And to me, like, the biggest thing that happened, and this painted the picture of it so clearly for me, is that I would do all these things where I would be like, I'm gonna delete this girl's number from my phone, or I'm gonna, you know, the people I would get them from, or I would journal, like, here's what I'm gonna do to stop, or I'm gonna get sober by doing this or that. And then you go back and just repeat the same thing the very next day. And you're like, what the heck? Like, I can have all the insight, I can have all the willpower, and then it doesn't do anything at the end of the day. And to me, that really illustrates in a more extreme way the difference between your conscious versus subconscious and unconscious mind. And so, you know, your conscious mind is responsible for roughly 3 to 5% of your beliefs, thoughts, emotions, decisions. Subconscious and unconscious collectively is 95 to 97%. And so there's a huge, like, powerhouse of stuff there that we're often not tapped into. And people see this across their daily lives, right? When they're like, it's New Year's, I'm gonna set a resolution to go to the gym every day or to quit eating chocolate, and then like They go back to the same habits and patterns. So to me, insight's really important. It's a great— like, awareness is that big first step. But if you don't have tools to recondition after that, it's like it can kind of be a lost cause for people. And so when we look at how the subconscious works, like, one really great tool— and there's tons of tools, there's tons of ways to reprogram. I spent a year— my first big certification was in hypnotherapy, and, and I didn't like the kind of like the power dynamics of hypnotherapy. Not so much because it was like, oh, you know, just it was like teach a man to fish versus or give the man a fish rather than teach a man to fish. Like, oh, people are dependent on you and they have to be in this state that they don't know how to get into on their own. They don't know how to change. And it was like, why not just educate people about how to create change themselves and how that part of their mind works? So there's a tool called autosuggestion. I'll go through it really quickly. Basically, you can take a core wound, so your piece of baggage. If it's like, "I'm not good enough," or "I'm going to be abandoned," or "I'm going to be betrayed," first step is you find the opposite. So, "I'm not good enough," "I am good enough." Then we have to speak to the subconscious mind, okay? Because the conscious mind is not waking up one morning and saying, "I have a job interview today, but I'm going to tell myself I'm not good enough in all these ways before I go in just to sabotage." The content's not a conscious mind problem. It's a programming problem. So we need to speak to the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind. And that's why things like affirmations can be kind of futile, because you're like, I'm good enough, I'm good enough, I'm good enough. Doesn't really do that much. So, so we have to speak to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind's language is emotion and imagery. So what we need to reprogram is we need to fire and wire, because it creates new neural networks, emotion and imagery. In a way that opposes that original core wound or piece of relationship baggage we're carrying. So step 1: I'm not good enough. I am good enough. The opposite. Step 2: where we actually find emotion and imagery is in every memory we've ever had. So if I say, tell me your favorite childhood memory, you'd be like, oh, I played on the playground, and you'd smile as you're telling it. You'd see the images of the actual playground. So every memory, especially the more vivid ones, we have the emotion and we have the imagery. Images. So step 2, I need 10 pieces of memory of times where I really did feel good enough. And then step 3, we record it into like our phone or our computer and we listen back to it for 21 days to really build a new neural network. And we can actually leave like decades of carrying these terrible wounds around with us that feel like we're carrying like boulders on our shoulders. We can actually recondition them in a short period of time.
I love that. So good. And, and I love that you break that down in your book as well. And because I think a lot of times when we're learning some of these psychological elements, if we don't really get the subconscious and back to the memories— memories are encoded according to feelings, right? And then also the amygdala can overrule. Amygdala is where those feelings are stored emotionally, and then it will overrule, right, all the other mental lobes if It's fight or flight or triggered in some unconscious way, and it could be something totally ridiculous. And then if you're hypervigilant like my wife was in our depression battle, or a lot of my clients are so hypervigilant in their nervous system. If you're struggling with PTSD or deep depression, you probably have some hypervigilance happening, which is just your amygdala is overactive and it's going back to these hard wounds.
