Hypnosis Rising

06/12/2025

I am more than a hypnotherapist.

Recent comments from clients:

An aspiring stage actor suffering from anxiety: "I feel that you are healing my relationship with God."

An entrepreneur struggling with motivation: "Our work together laid the foundation for my business success."

An addict in recovery who graduated to found an animal rescue non-profit: "You should go into the greeting card business. What you say to give me hope actually means something."

One of her favorites: "When you feel that your heart is going to break, let it break. Let love flow through it into the world and put the pieces back together stronger than ever before."

04/14/2025

Imagine that "toothpaste" was a word you never learned - there was just that colored tube that you squeezed before bedtime. Might you make a mistake if someone left a tube of itch cream on the counter?

Now think about relationships. How can we navigate that rich sea of actions, people, and emotions? What features can we rely upon? What words do we use to describe them?

This is the power of moral intelligence, organized around virtues and vices. It gives you the confidence to face the world knowing that - even if you can't do what you did yesterday - you can still be who others expect you to be, claiming allegiance with them as you work towards fulfilment.

Mental balance is found in deciding how you want to be and allowing what you do to follow.

04/14/2025

Hypnotherapy heals inner conflict.

You bring the conflict. I'll bring the psychology and the methods - and teach you how to open your mind to new opportunities.

02/19/2025

Carl Jung, certainly the most productive of the early psychotherapists, recognized the conflict between the persona - the social identity - and the personality that seeks fulfilment.
Many entrepreneurs strike out on their own because they are fed up with the rat race. The personality can no longer suffer submission to the persona of the employee. While this is admirable, often they found their business awash in the anxiety of inner conflict and regret for time lost.
If you find yourself struggling to shed the persona of the employee, I have evolved a unique method, the MindFork, that allows your personality to shed old baggage. Contact me today.

02/17/2025

Hypnotherapy is grounded in the belief that the mind is the most adaptive system in existence. That adaptation is - in most cases - managed by the subconscious. What we do as problem-solving in the waking state is improvisation - it becomes a behavior only after the subconscious has considered it in dreams and figured out how to integrate it for the long term. If you have trouble adapting your behaviors to achieve your waking goals, hypnotherapy holds that your subconscious is limited by an expectation that the change will have negative side-effects.

Reaching those expectations is difficult to do alone. A therapist can be a valuable support, largely because in most cases we have compensatory behaviors to unwrap before we can get to the root expectation. A therapist has an understanding of the structure of personality that can be invaluable in reaching towards new possibilities.

12/25/2024

You may wonder whether hypnotherapy is "scientifically proven."

All therapy involves softening hardened expectations and cultivation of more rewarding behaviors. The challenge, after about ten years of age, is that the mind sets up a barrier to prevent deception and manipulation in society from corrupting the behaviors that secure our place in the family unit. This priority is obviously highly variable, depending upon the degree of stability and nurturance received from parents.

Hypnosis works to soften the barrier between the two parts of the mind - conscious and subconscious - so that the latter will soften its resistance to change. There are two broad strategies: authoritarian therapists will present as a substitute parent; collaborative therapists (myself included) will facilitate self-exploration.

Is hypnotherapy "scientifically credible?" Well, it turns out that no form of therapy is "scientifically credible." This includes psychotropic drugs, which the FDA does not allow manufacturers to market as "medications." Every case has unique wrinkles and episodes, so the scientific standard of "objective reproducibility" is never going to be found. Any therapist that tells you their practice is "evidence based," moreover, is going to have a tendency to want to put you in a box that is going to deny your uniqueness. You want to look for a therapist with whom you feel "rapport."

As for recorded tracks, they may help some, but most of the common issues require anchoring in your daily routine. All therapy is behavior change. Simply being told that you will be "confident" in the abstract usually doesn't stick unless coupled to some specific experience. Change happens when the subconscious, confronting that situation, asks the conscious mind "Should we try that new thing?" Given confirmation and success, the entire mind realizes that it CAN succeed, and hidden potential is unlocked.

What I can say is that when I compare notes with therapists who don't use trance-active methods, they admit to being intimidated by the rates of progress achieved by my clients.

10/19/2024

I can tell you how I know that a relationship with a client will be productive for them. It happens in the screening call. After they explain their goals, when I then turn to therapeutic strategy, they begin to associate emotionally with random events from decades prior.

In "Existential Psychotherapy," Irvin Yalom points out that almost all therapies lead to early gains - because the client comes in committed to improvement. Unfortunately, no model of therapy seems to have any greater benefit over any other at the 18-month benchmark. As a consequence, anyone telling you that they offer an "evidence-based therapy" is citing studies that didn't have an 18-month follow-up.

Yalom emphasizes that therapy is relationship practice. He prefers a group setting because too many clinicians adopt a privileged attitude to their clients, making authentic relationship impossible.

As a hypnotherapist, I can't afford such egotism. My job is to teach the client to talk constructively to themselves. As life has no end to the curveballs it will throw, if the benefits of therapy are going to last, they need to learn to be their own therapist. My job is to teach them.

Going back to that first conversation, I know that the caller "falls in love" with me - not in the romantic sense, but in the sense of which Yalom speaks: that we exist only through the witness of those that love us and that we have meaning because they show gratitude for the gifts that we offer. After a lifetime of clinical work, Yalom found that love is the foundation of mental well-being.

From influencer therapists on social media to psychotherapy platforms advertising on TV and radio, going to see a therapist is increasingly mainstream – yet many people know little about who they are seeing and what they are getting. Experts said more information and awareness among the public of ...

10/02/2024

Did you know that when confronting a new environment, your mind spawns a new personality to explore? Usually, a "mini-me" will be reintegrated, but there is an important exception: the conscious mind that is created when you go to school. It grows over the subconscious, which are the behaviors needed to get along with your family and control your body.

Almost all mental distress arises from unresolved conflict between your conscious and subconscious priorities. Hypnotherapy facilitates a conversation with the subconscious. I have added to that skill strategies that facilitate collaboration between the different parts of your mind, not just resolving conflict but revealing new capacities available only to the whole.

If you seek mental balance not achieved from medication or talk therapy, please contact me to arrange a consultation.

09/26/2024

Imagination is our greatest power and greatest curse. Schizophrenia and OCD, for example, can be understood as giving an imagined reality higher precedence than the reality reported by our senses. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), the "gold standard" method of psychotherapy, teaches that we must control negative thoughts. Unfortunately, that creates internal conflict with our imagination. We obsess over the rising of negative thoughts.

As a therapist, I start with an enumeration of your virtues. I walk them down into the subconscious and celebrate their authority in your life. I stimulate the dream process to focus on manifesting those virtues both within and without.

Clients who have been in therapy for decades throw off their chains in a few sessions. The mind seeks balance. Once it learns to ride the bicycle, there is no turning back.

I now accept that my mental illness is to be lived with, not got over.

09/24/2024

All trance-active therapies - EMDR, psychedelics, and hypnosis - release blocks between the parts of the mind that are isolated by trauma. To make use of that temporary integration, however, the therapist must provide the patient with a clear sense of direction. What does healing look like? What behaviors and feelings will become accessible? Without that clarity? Well, anything can happen when we are in trance.

There may be some danger to intentionally reliving your trauma

07/17/2024

My best parenting decision was to deny my sons a portable device until they were in high school. This is the recommendation of sociologists who study the impact of social media on youth. Parents need to identify like-minded families so that children can build reality-based relationships outside of school that will embrace them while on campus. That, in fact, is the heart of "resilience."

Middle school is complicated enough without all the extra pressures generated by having a social media influencer sitting next to you, writes Michelle Leder.

06/27/2024

"Consciousness," at the root level, is the awareness of difference. Self-consciousness is more subtle. It depends upon self-awareness ("What are my boundaries?"), memory ("How have I changed?") analysis ("How can I express those changes to others?"), and intelligence ("How should I change my behavior to optimize my state?"). The AI researcher's insistence that "If it sounds conscious, it must be self-conscious" bypasses all of these underlying factors. The underlying motivation is self-glorification and self-perpetuation: they are afraid of death and want desperately to believe that self-consciousness can be transferred to a more robust physical container. They would be better served to turn inwards, seeking spiritual enlightenment.

The debate that will steer the future of consciousness — and us.