Hypnotherapy can be a useful way to explore goals, habits, emotions, and patterns of attention, while developing greater awareness and choice. Many find it helpful for reducing stress, changing habits, working with anxiety or other emotional difficulties, and developing new ways of responding to familiar patterns. Many find they are better equipped to manage the more stressful symptoms of ADHD, Autism, OCD and other conditions.

I often incorporate somatic work, parts therapy, inner child work and guided imagery in these types of sessions.

Hypnosis is one of the primary modalities I use when clients want to experience an alternative to traditional talk therapy.

Parts, also known as Ego States, and widely popularized through Richard Schwartz’s IFS Therapy, can be more easily accessed through hypnosis than just by using your imagination. This allows clients to have real time conversations or interactions with their inner parts to explore internal conflicts, develop greater self-understanding, work with difficult experiences, and build hope for the future. Often clients who have experienced trauma find this format of therapy allows them to process and release it from a distance, rather than having to sink back into the memories.

This process is very gentle and meditative, and clients often report enjoying journalling or working with their parts at home in between sessions and long after therapy is complete.

Phobias are tenacious neurological habits that many posit are usually wired in childhood. While they may not be ‘turned on’ until later in life, they can often be rooted so far back in the brain that it takes accessing historical body, mind, and emotion states to find relief. Fears on the other hand are habitual thinking patterns rooted in anxiety about future events, sometimes fuelled by real experiences. Some fears and phobias are intermingled, and hypnotherapy may help clients release both.

Some common phobias and fears clients have come to me for are-

• Flying

• Allergies

• Vomiting

• Gagging

• Driving after an accident

• Dental procedures

• Needles

Hypnotherapy can be a useful tool for weight management and for developing healthier, more sustainable habits.

It can help clients explore the thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and patterns that may be influencing their behaviours. It may also support changes in habits, such as reducing unwanted behaviours, strengthening healthy routines, improving motivation, and developing greater awareness and self-control.

Treatment planning is highly individualized. Together, we explore the client’s primary struggle points, which may include overeating, disordered eating patterns, self-esteem and body image, exercise, limiting beliefs, emotional patterns, or past trauma. Hypnotherapy can also be used to help reduce the intensity and frequency of unwanted food cravings and shift habitual associations with tempting foods. The goal is not simply to rely on willpower, but to cultivate more natural, sustainable choices and a healthier relationship with food, movement, and self-care.

Hypnotherapy can be a powerful supportive approach for reducing or eliminating persistent habits and behaviours that feel difficult to change through willpower alone. It can be used to address habits such as smoking cigarettes, vaping, cannabis use, alcohol overuse, substance use, nail biting, tics, compulsive behaviours, and patterns of negative or self-defeating thinking, among others.

Treatment is individualized to help uncover the triggers, emotional patterns, beliefs, and unconscious associations that may be reinforcing the habit. Hypnotherapy can help clients interrupt these automatic patterns, reduce cravings and urges, and develop healthier responses and replacement behaviours. The goal is to create meaningful change at both the behavioural and unconscious levels, helping clients feel more in control and better able to choose responses that support their health, wellbeing, and goals.

Some common things I can help you with -

• Weed

• Vaping

• Cigarette use

• Drug use

• Alcohol use

Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy (GDH) is one of the most well-researched applications of clinical hypnosis. Having learned from Dr. David Bowler, a physician with a speciality in pain management, I offer a Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy program. This is primarily intended for individuals with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), but it can also be adapted for other functional gastrointestinal disorders using a validated, peer-reviewed protocol.

Clients need to be appropriately medically evaluated, with relevant investigations and GI consultations completed where appropriate. If your physician confirms that nothing is medically preventing you from safely being free from your symptoms, clinical hypnotherapy can be a highly effective solution. Feel free to use the Physician's clearance and approval template found here.

Research on gut-directed hypnotherapy has reported meaningful reductions in IBS symptoms for many participants, including substantial symptom reduction, or remission in some studies. For more research on this topic, click here.

Chronic pain is generally defined as pain that persists or recurs for more than three months and affects an estimated 1 in 5 people worldwide. Importantly, chronic pain does not necessarily mean that the body is still being damaged. Pain can remain long after an injury or illness has healed, as the nervous system can become sensitized and continue producing protective pain signals. This is sometimes described as neuroplastic or nociplastic pain.

Pain is an essential survival mechanism designed to protect us from perceived danger. Sometimes the brain and nervous system can learn to interpret signals associated with stress, fear, anxiety, trauma, illness, or previous injury as potential threats, even when there is no longer a physical danger requiring protection. This does not mean that the pain is imaginary or "all in your head." The pain is real; rather, the nervous system may have become overly protective. Chronic pain and fatigue should never be mistaken for laziness or a lack of effort—many people living with these conditions have spent years pushing themselves through physical and mental limits while trying to keep functioning.

The goal of pain-focused hypnotherapy and related approaches is to help the brain and nervous system recognize when protection is no longer necessary. Techniques may involve hypnosis or non-trance approaches to work with attention, expectation, fear, emotion, and learned protective responses, which can help the brain update patterns that may have become unnecessarily persistent.

Approaches such as OldPain2Go®, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and hypnotherapy can be used to explore the relationship between the brain, nervous system, and pain experience.

When There Is a Structural Source of Pain

Even when there is a genuine structural or physical reason for pain, the pain signal may eventually become more than is physically useful. There can be an important difference between understanding why pain began and whether the nervous system still needs to produce the same level of pain. When appropriate medical assessment has determined that there is nothing further that needs to be physically repaired or treated, these approaches may help clients change their experience of pain and, in some cases, reduce its intensity or impact on daily life.

Click here to learn more and here to access the required physician’s letter template you will need to complete before starting our work together.

My approach to working with persistent pain can be summarized simply:

Pain signals from the brain can be Revealed, Resolved, Reset, and Released.