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I’ve been drawn to healing and helping others from a very early age, continually finding myself in the role of empath and counselor. Like countless others, my dreamer/idealist persona was forged in the Sixties (thank you, Martin Luther King, Beatles, et. al.) Whether because I lacked the business instincts or because I held fast to my principles, I never “sold out” my vision of a world of peace, beauty, and harmony. In light of the discouraging evidence that abounds, I keep in mind Mahatma Gandhi’s assertion that “anything you do will be insignificant, and it is very important that you do it.” In my work in social services, I found that (contrary to the admonishments of my supervisors and colleagues), my clients were hungry for spirituality and welcomed the “dharma talks” that I incorporated into the curriculum of the job-seeking skills workshops. Learning to love and accept oneself was at least as important as knowing how to fill out a job application. And an atmosphere of camaraderie and good feeling was essential to getting that “love” message across. I had in the back of my mind the idea that healing shouldn’t have to be an arduous undertaking, and my own experiences as a psychotherapy client gave me the idea that if one doesn’t feel “gotten” or understood, it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable the practitioner is. (This is neatly summarized in the aphorism “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.”) I would often hear my social services clients say I was the first authority figure who actually listened to them and didn’t talk down in response. I saw how, in a nurturing atmosphere, people would heal and grow spontaneously. If, on the other hand, they were merely shepherded through a series of rote protocols--and objectified in the process--successful outcomes were very unlikely. So, when, through a series of synchronistic events, I stumbled upon hypnotherapy, I was ready for it. The whole point of the work is engendering spontaneous healing as a response to one’s feeling safe enough to let that healing process take place. I began sneaking sessions in with my social services clients (hypnotherapy not being on the county's approved list of counseling approaches). Almost always, they reported those “wow!” experiences I had felt myself when I was learning alchemical hypnotherapy (which still forms the core of my work). They would say how different they felt in their bodies. They would spontaneously experience relief from years of shame, forgiveness after years of resentment, freedom after years of feeling incapable of moving forward. When the “cunning and baffling” phenomenon of alcoholism struck my family, I began to wonder if hypnotherapy might provide alcoholics and addicts another effective response to the disease. Again, my teachers suggested that such a deep intervention was inappropriate for clients in early recovery (up to about 18 months after quitting drinking or using). The thinking is that all one’s resources are needed to resist the substance in question, and delving into emotional issues could easily trigger a relapse. Field-testing proved otherwise, however, as I had suspected. The work I’d learned not only goes straight to core issues; done properly it never fails to assist a client in returning with powerful resources to use “out there” in the world. This drugless therapy provides addicts (and anyone else) a potent weapon in getting past shame and self-loathing to the gold within the shadow.
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