How We Started With Hypnosis

In 2019, Sammie was suffering from very severe anxiety and depression.  It was so severe, we considered hypnotherapy as a way to try to treat her.

Prior to, we had tried counselling with a psychologist and anti-depressants but they were ineffective.

The problem was that the psychologists never got to the root cause of Sammie's anxiety and depression, whereas the anti-depressants left her feeling like her brain wasn't working anymore.

I had a lifelong fascination with hypnosis, but never understood how powerful it was until Sammie went through her first session with a trained hypnotherapist.

In that session, the therapist performed an age regression technique, with Sammie reviewing the timeline of her life, starting as a small child through to the present moment.

With that technique, Sammie was able to revisit several past life events that, at the time, where deeply traumatic for her and created memories which, under the right circumstances in her day today routine, she would have flashbacks to.

When she would flashback to those traumatic memories, she would be prone to feeling anxiety or worry, which would cause her to "thought loop."

A "thought loop" is simply when someone starts to obsess over something they experience in their present circumstances that trigger within them a negative emotional response they have difficulty controlling.

Those negative emotional responses require conscious will power to regulate, but will power is finite, as it is a function of the conscious mind.

When a person's will power is depleted, their subconscious mind can run loose.  

In Sammie's case, when her will power is depleted and she can't control her thought loops, she starts feeling very high levels of anxiety.

If she stays in a state of high anxiety for a prolonged period of time, she starts to feel depressed.

Learning hypnosis has been able to allow us to recognize this cycle and to take practical steps to intervene to prevent her from falling into a negative downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

This was the most important reason for us in regularly practicing hypnosis.

After Sammie's first hypnotherapy session, I completed this online hypnotherapy course (and highly recommend it).

I started our YouTube channel coinciding with me taking this course, so I could study how Sammie responded to my hypnotic inductions.  

In fact, most of the videos in the "Practice Session" of our private website are of hypnosis sessions when I was first learning hypnosis techniques.

While I was practicing inductions or different types of hypnotic commands with her in the videos, I was also applying techniques such as dream journaling, meditation, and talk therapy.  

We also made major changes in our daily routines that avoided negative emotional triggers for her.

This all helped both of us get to the root cause of her thought loops and anxieties and create a sustainable lifestyle to prevent them from getting out of control.

For Sammie, hypnosis has helped tremendously, because it gives her a brief reprieve from her negative emotional responses.  A hypnosis session is an opportunity for her to "reboot" her mind.

This was the most important step in her starting a regular hypnosis practice:

Understanding that sometimes she has to let her mind go blank and stop thinking, so she is can look at her present moment circumstances with a perspective unbiased by her past negative emotional trauma's.