Almost every woman who comes to me eventually asks the same three questions in some form, so let me answer them here, once, on the record.
Let me clear this up first
No, I do not perform stage hypnosis. I do not put people in front of an audience and make them bark like dogs. That is entertainment. It is not therapy. It is not my work.
No, I cannot manipulate you. I cannot meet you at a coffee shop, whisper an anchor word, and make you do something against your will. That is not how hypnosis works. That is not how anchors work. That is not how the human mind works. The Hollywood version is a story.
No, you cannot get stuck. You will not go into a session and forget how to come back. There is no such thing as being trapped in hypnosis. You are conscious the entire time. You can open your eyes and leave the room at any moment. You are always the one in charge.
Hypnosis is not something I do to you. It is a state you allow yourself to enter, with my guidance, because you have decided you are ready to go somewhere the analytical mind cannot take you.
What hypnosis actually is
Hypnosis is a focused, receptive state of consciousness in which the analytical mind quiets and the subconscious becomes available.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
You have already been in hypnosis dozens of times this week. When you drove somewhere and could not remember the drive. When you were completely absorbed in a book or a film. When you sat on the beach and lost track of time. When you were praying, or dancing, or making love, and the thinking mind went quiet and something older took over. Those are all natural trance states. Hypnosis is the deliberate, guided version.
The reason we do this in a session is because the subconscious is where the roots of your patterns actually live. Not in the thinking mind. The thinking mind is the leaves. The subconscious is the soil.
You can trim the leaves for thirty years. You can affirm. You can journal. You can process. You can name every pattern out loud. And nothing structural changes — because you have not touched the soil.
Hypnosis takes you to the soil.
How I actually work
I do not put anyone into hypnosis on a first session. That is my signature. That is what makes my work different.
Before I ever use a hypnotic induction with a client, I want her body to know somatically what deep relaxation feels like. Because you cannot go into meaningful hypnosis from a body that is braced, guarded, or in survival mode. The body has to know the door before we walk through it.
So we begin with Yoga Nidra. A minimum of three sessions — sometimes more. Sometimes with somatic work threaded through, because tension in the body will pull you out of trance every single time. I am a movement therapist as well as a hypnotherapist, and I know how to use titration and differentiation to help a body release what it has been holding without overwhelming the nervous system.
Only after the body has been trained to recognize the state do I introduce hypnosis. And even then, I use one of three approaches depending on the person and the work:
Relaxation-based induction. The traditional method. A guided descent through the body and into deeper and deeper states. Works beautifully for someone whose body is already trained.
Confusion or contradiction. Ericksonian techniques that give the analytical mind more than it can process, so it steps aside and lets the subconscious come forward. Works beautifully for the client whose thinking mind is very strong and very defended.
Surprise or pattern interrupt. A sudden shift — sometimes a sound, a gong, a struck bowl — that interrupts an automatic mental pattern and opens a window of receptivity. Works beautifully for the client who has been sitting with the same story for too long and needs the pattern broken before anything new can enter.
What we actually go looking for
Every habit has a root. Every pattern has an origin. When a woman comes to me because she cannot stop smoking, or cannot lose weight, or cannot stop procrastinating, or cannot sleep — we are not there for the smoking or the weight or the procrastination.
We are there for the identity underneath.
Smoking is not really about nicotine. Under it, almost always, is a slow-burn rage. Under the rage — an old, quiet unsatisfaction. Under that — a low self-esteem that has been running the show since before you had language. Hypnosis lets us follow the root all the way down and release the identity that has been growing out of it.
Then — and this is the part most hypnotherapists miss — we do not leave an empty space where that identity used to be. We install a new one. An identity with better roots. Better foundations. Better values. An identity that does not need the cigarette, or the food, or the procrastination, or the sleepless night, because it is standing on something more solid.
Hypnosis is not about erasing who you were. It is about giving your subconscious permission to belong to a version of you with deeper roots.
What happens if something big surfaces
Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — a client goes into a deep session and something older comes up. A memory. A grief. Something from childhood that the body has been holding for decades.
This is safe. You are safe. I am trained for this. And if what surfaces is something that needs a specialist — a licensed trauma therapist, a psychiatrist, someone with credentials in a specific clinical modality — I will tell you honestly and I will refer you to the right person. I do not pretend to be everyone. I know what my work is and I know where its edges are.
Everything I do is non-clinical. I am not a therapist. I am not a doctor. I am a facilitator of a very old and very effective practice, and I hold the container with care and with honesty.
Hypnosis is not magic. It is not manipulation.
It is one of the most direct routes we have
to the part of you that has been running the show —
and it is time you got to meet her.
— The Hoopoe