Not What You Might Expect
 

A Tool

for addressing your subconcsious mind and unconscious behavioral programs

A Method

to allow a more effective form of self-relfection

A Trance

A State of mind that lends itself to inner thought restructuring

Burning Up The Snake Oil

There is a lot of misinformation and stigma surrounding hypnosis in general, let alone hypnotherapy. Many people, without looking into it, or having heard the brief mention of it in their first-year psychology course will quickly dismiss it as fake or in the realm of pseudoscience.  These claims stem from the early forms of hypnosis from Franz Anton Mesmer, who developed a prototypical form of hypnosis that was also associated with something he called animal magnetism called 'mesmerism,' and the early type of psychotherapy developed by Sigmund Freud called 'psychoanalysis'.  While many of Frued's ideas have been refined, updated, altered, and in many cases debunked by contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists, what he was right about is that imprinted emotional experiences as children keep running behavioral programs long after childhood.  This is agreed upon by the current psychological community.  Hypnotherapy is all about identifying these emotional programs, their origins and deprogramming/desensitizing that emotional connection so it no longer influences current behavior.

This method of identifying emotions in the moment or retrospect is very similar to the methods employed by cognitive behavioral therapists.  In the psychological community, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is becoming a fast-growing, extremely effective form of therapy that has volumes of studies and data to prove it's effectiveness.  Hypnotherapy, in my personal belief, as per I was instructed in it, laid the framework for CBT, which lends itself to be more easily researched than hypnotherapy.  Stripped of both their nuances, in the same way that CBT addresses the conscious mind, whereas hypnosis is meant to address the subconscious mind.

Hypnotherapy has similarities and elements that are similar to mindfulness and meditation, due to the trance induction before a therapy session.  The major setback, however, is that not everyone is able to easily enter a trance-state, and without some continued efforts of both therapist and client, some barely experience anything that they would even call a trance.

The trance itself is just a tool of hypnosis, which in turn is just a tool for hypnotherapy, which in turn, is just a form of therapy.  Just as all therapy has to come from within, and becomes self-therapy, the same is true for hypnosis.  As your therapist I am merely the facilitator for a shift in cognitive behavior using the craft of hypnosis as our tool to get there.