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Mandala Institute for Holistic Mental Health
What You Need to Know Before Your Consultation Call
What is Anxiety?
Bottom Line: Anxiety isn't an emotion and it's not a disorder. It's a warning flare sent up by your Autonomic Nervous System to get you ready for danger or risk. (Ever heard of your Fight or Flight Response? This is it).
But what dangers or risks might your system be trying to warn you against? Really, in life in the 21st Century, risks can be physical, financial, social, environmental, dietary, or even technological.
To go beyond simply "managing" anxiety and instead actually healing it, you need to understand exactly why your system is on high alert. All of these alert signals are rooted in earlier experiences from your past along with both your conscious AND subconscious beliefs today. So, what you believe about yourself, about the world, and what goes on it right now are BIG players here.
Putting that all together, we can effectively move you back into a place of calm, and guide you in developing a skillful relationship to your body, your mind, and your life.
How is Anxiety Normally Treated?
Mainstream psychology typically tries to "manage" anxiety, mostly through pharmaceuticals, conversation, and sometimes cognitive behavioural therapy to try to control symptomology. This approach is heavy on theory and light on actual, on the ground results.
By limiting itself to a disorder/treatment model, mainstream methods don't take the whole person into account and attempts only to control or manage symptoms.
How Is Our Approach to Anxiety Different?
To Heal Anxiety Successfully We'll Do Three Things Together:-
Heal your past
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Assess your beliefs and change any that may not be serving your highest good
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Learn how to use your mind and body in ways that allow you to determine how you navigate and experience your life
We have a combined thirty years experience working with clients just like you to make permanent changes in how you think, how you feel, and how you act.
We understand the science and have spent decades honing our expertise, allowing us to bring together the most effective of both Eastern and Western applied technologies and frameworks for healing and transformation. We bring together breath, body, and mind practices, cutting-edge hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) techniques as well as our knowledge of nutrition and physiology to customize an approach that's right for you.
And Most Importantly:
We bring the wisdom of also having used these approaches in our own lives -- what we teach and practice is a LIVED and EMBODIED experience.
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What is Trauma?
Trauma is any overwhelming negative experience that is too much to mentally and emotionally process at the time it occurs.
Dissociation can occur in the midst of a trauma, often followed by shock and denial immediately after the experience.
Traumatic memories are stored in the subconscious mind, which expresses the residual experience through the mind and body in various ways.
Symptoms of trauma can look like:-
Confusion, difficulty concentrating.
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Anger, irritability, mood swings.
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Anxiety, fear, and panic attacks.
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Depression, withdrawal, feelings of hopelessness.
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Guilt, shame, self-blame.
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Feeling disconnected or numb.
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Nightmares
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Chronic headaches, digestive issues, and other medical manifestations.
What is PTSD?
When the number of trauma symptoms being experienced exceed a certain threshold, a psychologist may conduct an formalized assessment resulting in an diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Part of the PTSD experience can look like reliving a trauma through nightmares and flashbacks. Some people may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt. They may also have problems sleeping, such as insomnia, and find concentrating difficult, among other symptoms.
PTSD symptoms are often severe and persistent enough to have a significant impact on the person's day-to-day life.
How is Trauma Normally Treated?
Mainstream psychology typically relies on medication, talk therapy, sometimes cognitive processing therapy (CPT), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, and exposure therapy to try to reduce symptoms the symptoms of trauma.
Many mainstream approaches require you to recall your traumas, to talk about them in great detail, and to relive them. These approaches can be retraumatizing and leave clients feeling worse after a session than when they arrived.
How is Our Approach Different from Other Trauma Therapies?
We use trauma healing techniques that are more gentle, work faster and are more effective than those typically used by mainstream psychologists and psychotherapists.
Trauma healing within the frameworks of, and using the tools of hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) starts by creating positive mental states, followed by using the imagination in positive ways to rewrite how a traumatic memory has been stored in the mind. This approach to trauma healing keeps you in an empowered and positive mental and emotional state throughout the entire process, and always leaves you feeling better than when we started.
What's more, our trauma healing approaches often activate and engage the use of self-love, whereby you become both the provider and the recipient of the safety, acceptance, understanding and support that was missing at the time of the trauma, and that becomes the medicine that your psyche needs to heal.
In this way, our approach to healing trauma is to guide you to heal yourself, and in the process, you develop a deeper, more moving relationship with yourself.-
How is Counseling Normally Done?
Counseling is normally a talking relationship between a client and a counselor that may range from just a few sessions, to multiple sessions over a period of weeks, months or years.
There is no one type of counseling, as each counselor folds in their unique background, education, personality and style to develop their unique approach.
What's typically missing in more mainstream approaches to counselling is your counsellor may have completed a course of study to administer the counselling without ever having experienced real healing and breakthroughs in their own life, which makes it very difficult for them to be a reliable resource for making lasting changes and developing wisdom for you the client.
How is Holistic Counseling Different from Regular Counseling?
Like any good counseling, holistic counseling incorporates the best available techniques for mental and emotional exploration and transformation. And while we don't use hypnosis in our counseling sessions, our first-hand understanding of the subconscious mind allows us to bring deeper, richer, and more holistic perspectives and insights to your experience because of. Because we take the whole mind into consideration, including the subconscious mind, our approach is truly holistic.
Holistic counseling using a hypnotherapeutic lens allows us to work with you to identify the roots of your mental and emotional experiences in a shorter amount of time than most other counseling approaches. Additionally, many of the powerful techniques that we use in hypnotherapy can actually be used in the waking state as well. We can teach you to use techniques on yourself so you are empowered to continue your healing work outside of session time and beyond your course of counseling.
Specific activities used in our holistic counseling sessions include:-
Guided self-inquiry to uncover your core values, drives, and limiting or negative assumptions and beliefs
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Guided self-inquiry into your thoughts and feelings
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Examination of and feedback on your lifestyle components – familial, social, nutritional, environmental, occupational, spiritual, etc.
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Active, guided reframing of situations, events, themes and dynamics in your life
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Providing you with perspective and context to remove judgment, shame and guilt
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Reworking limiting perspectives and assumptions
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Teaching you self-management techniques informed by the latest science on resilience
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Emotional education so you better understand your feelings and what to do with them
These sessions often include homework and practices to continue outside the sessions. As with everything we do, our goal is your transformation; greater connection to self, others and the world; and moving out of limited, unexamined automatic responses and into an open, spacious relationship to your thoughts and feelings.
Who is Holistic Counseling For?
Life rarely stands still, and when it does, chances are your mind does not. Whether you’re looking for a total overhaul of your thoughts and emotional patterns, for support through a life transition, or simply to fine-tune and improve your level of resilience and skillfulness in dealing with life, holistic counseling can help.
Do I Need to Be Doing Hypnotherapy Sessions Too?
Absolutely not. These sessions stand on their own.
What if I Am Already Coming for Hypnotherapy?
Our holistic counseling sessions are great adjunct sessions to work on goal setting, accountability, and deep, guided inquiry into your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. These are powerful sessions designed for immediate turnarounds on conflicting or difficult thoughts and perspectives that are no longer serving you.-
What is Depression?
Depression is your mind and body telling you that what you're doing isn't working. It's a signal sent to tell you to "give up."
Most people experience uncomfortable feelings that they don't know what to do with. And because they don't have the resources they need to resolve that feeling they instead develop short-term strategies to cope, soothe, or distract from it.
These "feeling-distraction" cycles work for a little while, but eventually lead to your mind rejecting everything and going into what is generally called "depression."
How is Depression Normally Treated?
Mainstream psychology typically attempts to treat the symptoms of depression with pharmaceuticals and talk therapy.
In many countries, such as Canada, the US, and the UK, people can be prescribed antidepressants simply by going to their local GP and may bypass even basic psychotherapy completely.
These approaches leave people with no lasting or effective way to heal.
How is Our Approach to Depression Different?
Our holistic approach works to heal depression at it's root
We guide you to rewind the process by which you ended up in depression.
We start by exploring the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings that led to your depression, and then teach you the skills and techniques to resolve what you didn't have the skills or resources to resolve at the time.
By clearing the backlog of stuck emotional content, your depression can gently and naturally lift, and you can experience the relief and empowerment that you deserve.
We have a combined thirty years experience working with clients just like you to make permanent changes in how you think, how you feel, and how you act.
We understand the science and have spent decades honing our expertise and bringing together the most effective APPLIED technologies and frameworks from East and West.
We bring together nutrition, breath and body practices, and cutting-edge Hypnotherapy and NLP techniques.
And the Most Important Thing:
We bring the wisdom of also having used these approaches in our own lives so that what we teach and practice is a LIVED and EMBODIED experience.
What is Couples Counseling?
Couples Counseling is a form of counseling that can help you and your partner greatly improve your relationship. If you are having relationship difficulties, you can seek couples therapy to help heal and rebuild your relationship.
Couples Counseling can address a wide range of relationship issues, including ongoing conflicts, communication challenges, feelings of disconnection, larger family dynamics, or difficulties due to external stressors.
Basically, a relationship is the sum of its two parts. A fusion of two minds. Of two sets of beliefs and worldviews, two sets of fears and desires, two sets of preferences and aversions, two sets of traumas and pains, two sets of behaviours and patterns, defense mechanisms, strategies to feel safe, communication styles, and more.Learning to navigate this fusion successfully often requires both partners to heal their individual pasts and also learn the skills, frameworks, and tools that allow both to show up with clarity, compassion, open hearts, and open minds.
How are Couples Counseling Sessions Normally Conducted?
Couples counseling typically involves exploring specific topics of concern to a couple, building communication skills, and rebuilding the bonds of attachment that had originally been lost.
This typically involves the counsellor providing a stable and safe space for the couple to have difficult conversations without things going off the rails, and with active guidance to break stuck communication patterns and pitfalls.
Couples counseling often involves training in new communication approaches and styles, and homework that assigned to the couple to respark bonds that have been damaged.
How is Our Approach to Couples Counseling Different?
Our approach goes deeper than simply working through individual issues and skill-building.
Our expertise in hypnotherapy allows us to go deep to the root cause of each partner's patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour, and to open up avenues for resolving issues at their root.
Our approach to couples therapy is a dance between sessions with both parties together, and healing work with each individual. The more we can move each individual to being healthy, healed and whole, the more naturally relationship issues dissolve away. Healing the individuals and the relationship at the same time is a win-win for everyone.
Why We Do Individual Sessions Before Our Couples’ Sessions
We have structured our Relationship Success package to begin with an individual session with each partner before moving on to the couples’ sessions.
You don't come to a relationship as a blank slate.
Rather, you bring our entire past with you -- your history, family dynamics, ideas, beliefs, values, preferences, traumas and defense mechanisms.
The individual sessions allow us to gain a clear understanding of your experience of the relationship, and of what is going on within you that is contributing to the strong feelings, or lack of connection and fulfillment, that you may be experiencing.
Having this insight prior to a couples' session allows us to hit the ground running with a fuller picture of all factors at play in the dynamics of the relationship, better allowing us to bridge gaps in understanding, communication, and to elicit the empathy and compassion for one another that naturally results.
The individual sessions also allow us to create a kind of inventory of outstanding mental and emotional content that can be worked on at an individual therapy level, should the partner choose to pursue that.
How the Couples’ Sessions are Structured?
Each couples’ session is customized in-the-moment to address what is emerging most strongly in your relationship.
At times we will help a partner articulate their feelings that perhaps they had not previously had the vocabulary or emotional courage to express.
We also help elicit understanding and compassion between partners by tying in a partner’s way of being to their personal history. A partner’s behaviours taken at face value can seem illogical, confusing, even annoying, frustrating and infuriating. But when you are able to place those behaviours in the context of one’s past history, you are often able to see that the behaviour is not a conscious choice, but rather a response to one’s upbringing — be it from passive mimicry of parents, survival strategies developed in childhood due to unsafe conditions in the home, school or wider world, or an adaptation to a trauma or stressful condition experienced in the past.
When you can understand that your partner’s behaviour is a result of pain from their past, you can begin to dissolve your judgments about them and return to the big love that you once had. With the kindness that comes from understanding and compassion, safety and trust can be re-established in the relationship, opening the door to deeper and more honest and productive conversations. You and your partner can begin to work as a team, once again.
Sessions May Involve Homework
We usually wrap up each couples’ session with some takeaway homework to practice in the days leading up to the next session.
The homework is designed to implement the learning in day-to-day life so that this aspect of growth begins to be integrated into the relationship in a permanent way.
Homework can involve new ways of communicating with each other, activities to engage in together, new sharing of tasks in the home, new boundaries to put into practice, new self-care routines, and much much more.
We’ve all been to school, and not many of us enjoyed being “assigned” homework. And so the homework we engage in is never “assigned”, but rather agreed upon through discussion and consensus.
Only when both of you agree that a piece of homework is likely to be helpful and productive do we all agree to move forward with it. This approach is important to ensure buy-in from both partners, and is a recipe for successful results.
Couples Counseling May also Involve Individual Counselling or Hypnotherapy
Sometimes understanding, compassion and skillfulness are not enough.
Content often emerges in couples’ sessions that highlights the opportunity, or need, to do individual healing work to dissolve the emotional pain that lies at the root of the behaviours that may be causing problems in the relationship.
When you love your partner, you should want to be the best version of yourself for them. And when you love yourself, you should want the same for yourself.
The Best Way for You to Approach Couples Counseling
The best attitude to approaching couples therapy is one of courage, curiosity, and a desire to feel in love once again. Couples therapy can be an important ingredient for the growth and evolution of a relationship. As an individual, you don’t stop growing and evolving once you get into a relationship — that process continues.
The key is to ensure that you aren't growing apart, but rather that you're growing together. Couples Counselling is the best way to reconnect across a space that has opened up between two people. Reconnecting to understanding each other once again with safety, kindness and gentleness can restore that bond and renew the relationship.
We always recommend that, instead of coming to the work like a client or patient, plan to come in like a student. Come to this experience ready to learn about yourself, each other, others outside your relationship, and also the world and your place in it. Come in ready to learn how to let go, heal, transform, and grow.
Couples’ Counseling Helps You Deepen and Mature Your Relationship
The concept of maturing is also important here. You don’t stop maturing when you become an adult. It's an ongoing process throughout your lifetime. Ideally, you continuously learn, grow and evolve. And as you mature as a person, your relationships also naturally mature. Without understanding the maturation process, changes over time can be scary or cause you to want to avoid change.
But with a little help, you can experience growth and evolution as a natural, organic, and easy process that can be leaned into, and that with the right perspectives and tools. And you can steer the healthy unfolding of that evolution together with your partner into an ever-deepening and ever-more-satisfying relationship.
A Holistic Approach to Mental Health
For those struggling with mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, OCD, or addiction, it’s natural to seek an approach that truly addresses the root of the struggle rather than managing symptoms alone. Psychedelic therapy, especially through the use of psilocybin, offers a safe, gentle, yet profoundly effective alternative to mainstream methods, providing a path to healing that is more aligned with natural, holistic principles.
Psilocybin: A Natural, Compassionate Choice
Psilocybin, the active compound found in certain mushrooms, is a natural substance with a long history of use in healing practices around the world. Unlike synthetic medications, which often come with dependency issues and challenging side effects, psilocybin works harmoniously with the body’s own systems. This natural approach resonates with those who are seeking mental health solutions that feel authentic, gentle, and that provide benefits that are sustained over time.
Tackling the Root Causes, Not Just Masking Symptoms
Mainstream medications for mental health often act as temporary fixes, focusing on symptom management rather than true healing. Psilocybin journeys allow individuals to access and understand the core of their suffering, often uncovering insights, emotions, or past experiences that are holding them back. Rather than relying on daily medication, a single psilocybin experience has the potential to create lasting, meaningful change by addressing these deep-seated issues head-on.
Fostering Openness and Flexibility in Thought
One of the unique benefits of psilocybin is its ability to increase psychological openness and cognitive flexibility. Many people find that after a psilocybin experience, they are more open to new perspectives and possibilities. This openness can help dissolve rigid thought patterns that often contribute to conditions like OCD, anxiety, and depression, allowing for a fresh approach to life with a greater sense of freedom.
"The idea is that you're taking this system that's fundamental to the brain's ability to think about the self in relation to the world, and you're totally desynchronizing it temporarily. In the short term, this creates a psychedelic experience. The longer-term consequence is that it makes the brain more flexible and potentially more able to come into a healthier state."
- Dr. Joshua Siegel, Washington University School of Medicine
Supporting the Brain’s Natural Healing Pathways
Research shows that psilocybin encourages unique patterns of brain connectivity, allowing different regions to communicate in new ways. This dynamic “reset” in brain activity supports healthier thought patterns and can help release habitual thinking that fuels mental health struggles. By promoting this kind of brain flexibility, psilocybin assists clients in stepping out of cycles of negative thinking and embracing a more balanced mental state.
A Holistic Experience that Nurtures the Mind, Body, and Spirit
Unlike conventional mental health treatments, psilocybin journeys are inherently holistic, addressing every aspect of who you are. For many, the experience brings a deep sense of connection—to themselves, to others, and to the larger world. This sense of interconnectedness nurtures the spirit, empowering individuals to embrace life more fully, with renewed purpose and clarity.
Holistic Mental Health is the art and science of healing that addresses you as a whole person – body, mind, and spirit.
This is an emerging approach to mental healthcare that considers the underlying biological, psychological, environmental, and social factors contributing to your mental health.
Along with our Hypnotherapy site here, we recommend that prospective clients also visit and explore our Education & Training site to get a little deeper view into how we work and all of the projects we are working on across Canada & the world.
Learn more about our approaches and work at www.themandalainstitute.com.
Hypnosis is a natural state of relaxation we enter into every day — while we’re reading, watching TV, falling asleep, waking up, and daydreaming. It is a state of highly focused attention and creativity. Being in hypnosis is incredibly relaxing and usually brings a sense of peace and well-being.
The state of hypnosis is similar to, but not the same as, the state of mind individuals strive for during meditation.
What is the difference?
In meditation, you generally seek to clear the mind of all thoughts while in the clear and focused state; whereas in hypnosis, you are generally there to use the power of that state for a specific therapeutic and transformational purpose.
Hypnosis is a spectrum with different depths. We work in lighter and medium states, which is like having your eyes closed, being very deeply relaxed, and being in a state of rich visualization.
But you are always aware of where you are in the situation and you are always in control.
Like most things, Hypnotherapy and the states of mind that people achieve tend to get deeper and easier to get into with practice.
Hypnosis reduces or eliminates the activity of the conscious mind, calms the nervous system, and allows the benefits of a relaxed, focused state to come to the surface. In hypnosis there is an enhanced ability to:
-Access deep self-knowledge and wisdom
-Experience natural ease, well-being, and grace
-Step out of a negative thought pattern or perspective
-See a more positive perspective, to embody hope, to release attachment to outcome, and to forgive
-Revisit and reinterpret memories from the past in a broader, more supportive context
-Reveal emotions that may be associated with and causing psychosomatic illness
-Influence physiological processes through visualization (such as in Medical Hypnotherapy)
Hypnosis opens up the subconscious mind to the way it was when we were children – malleable and open to changes in belief. This is extremely powerful since it allows a skilled hypnotherapist to literally assist you to undo damage that was done through a misinterpretation of earlier life experiences.
While regular psychotherapy (talk therapy) allows you to understand on an intellectual level how an earlier life experience affects your current psychology (and in the process provides some empowerment), hypnotherapy targets the actual experience, reframes how it is perceived, and completely changes the associated emotional context and resultant belief. Working with the subconscious mind directly also allows incredible changes to occur physiologically.
There exists a very strong connection between the subconscious mind and our physical body. Science is only beginning to understand the mechanisms of these connections, yet in the meantime we have found that simple hypnotic and visualization methods can improve or eliminate a large range of medical conditions.
As you go into hypnosis, you will feel a deepening relaxation. A good state of hypnosis is similar to that wonderful feeling of just gaining awareness as you wake up in the morning. Your body is still very much asleep, and your conscious range of awareness is very narrow, but perhaps focused on a dream, an idea, a feeling or an image. Physiologically, going into hypnosis is similar to falling asleep, except with hypnosis, your mind stays aware while your body goes to sleep.
During hypnosis, you will likely lose total awareness of your body, as your mind is completely focused on whatever is being discussed at the time. When you do turn attention to your body, you will often feel like it is extremely heavy. Your heart rate has slowed down, your breathing has slowed, and your body temperature will have dropped slightly.
At the end of the session, when you emerge from the hypnotic state, you may not be able to move your body for the first few moments. Your mind typically wakes up first, then your body, and you have the desire to stretch out, just as if waking up from a nap. After the session is over, you will typically feel so relaxed that it can feel like you’ve just had a full body massage. Your stress levels will be very low, you will feel very calm, peaceful, and centered.
Usually not.
Most of the work can be done in a light state of hypnosis, where you're actively participating in the process and emerge fully aware of what transpired. For most of our work lighter, states are actually the preferred state.
However, deep trance can be beneficial under some circumstances.
Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic practice that uses Hypnosis as a foundation to help you address and resolve psychological, emotional, or behavioural challenges. It's a natural, creative flow state that allows you to change the way you think, feel, and behave. It also allows you to totally change the way you understand yourself, other people, and the world around you.
The greatest factor is you.
We find that the clients that are the most successful share some common traits that include, but aren't limited to;
-Being deeply committed to their transformation
-Being courageous about facing what's not working for them in their lives
-Having a deep desire to change
-Feeling a desire to work on themselves and aren't looking for "quick fixes"
-Being honest with themselves
-Having an openness and curiosity about themselves and their lives
-Being coachable/teachable and want to learn ways to live better
-Wanting and committing to developing emotional flexibility
If you don't feel like you have those traits, don't worry, we can teach you those too.
Permanent results can be seen in just one session for a few people, and over several sessions for others.
It varies by person. The extent of those results can vary widely as well, from marginal improvement, to a complete resolution of your issue. Sometimes a healing goal is at close reach. Many times, a more gradual and layered approach is appropriate. This is highly dependent on the nature and complexity of the issue you want to heal.
This is why we always recommend a consultation call before you book a first time appointment.
As with any good holistic practitioners, we work with you to heal the root cause of your issue(s). When people can heal the core issue, they almost always find rapid and lasting relief from symptoms. Hypnotherapy works to identify core limiting beliefs that often date back to childhood and directly change them out for more empowered perspectives. Guiding you to your own internal wisdom to generate these alternative perspectives is a key aspect of the work, and to generate the healing answers for yourself is also great at building self-esteem.
Core beliefs are simply deep-set thoughts that are often outside of your conscious awareness. When you can bring these core issues to light for yourself, you have the power to change them. And when you heal your thinking at a core level, mental and emotional peace naturally follow.
It is always up to the client to decide how many sessions they will complete, and we recommend that clients plan to do five sessions on any issue. This is to ensure that we are being as comprehensive as possible at addressing and resolving all the root layers of people's issues.
We recommend that clients plan to do five sessions on an issue they are working on. This allows the time and space to be as comprehensive as possible.
Everyone is different and coming to the table with their own unique circumstances, life experiences, learning style, personality, and history.
We work with our clients to get the best results possible as quickly as possible, and support our clients to do their best work and direct their own healing trajectory.
We highly recommend scheduling a consult call to discuss with us your particular situation and we can make suggestions about how to best move forward with session work.
YES, absolutely. Our years of experience have shown that a short call before booking your first session sets you up for real success on your healing journey. It allows a few moments for us to determine if working together is the best way forward. It also allows us the chance to talk out what working together should look like based on your personal situation. Knowing what to expect allows you the chance to make empowered decisions about how you can get the most out of our work together.
We don't.
Typically we accept about 70% of the people that reach out to us as new clients. We make that determination based on the presenting issue, the person's history, whether or not we think it's a good match for our specific practice, the person's communication style, and various other possible factors.
In some cases, we don't need to do a phone consult to know that it isn't going to be a good match. This isn't personal at all.
Often, individuals aren't scheduled for a consult call because they don't follow the standard instructions for scheduling a consult call that we provide to everyone that reaches out to us. When these instructions are not followed precisely, we don't obtain the necessary information to schedule the call, resulting in the consult call never being booked.
Our goal is to maximize your healing and if we think that we may not be able to help you do that (for whatever reason), or that there there isn't an alignment in terms of goals and values, then we don't move forward.
Our Values: Integrity, Respect, Love, Healing, Clarity and Wisdom. Always.
Years of experience have shown us that children learn their coping strategies from their parents, families, and the other people around them. Because Hypnotherapy is a deeply holistic approach we understand that stress, anxiety, depression, behaviours, and even some physical symptoms are expressions of a larger dynamic.
In many cases we find that the best way to start doing hypnotherapy for a child or teen is for the parents to work in Hypnotherapy on their issues first or at least simultaneous to the child/teen. In this way the healing and resolution is a "global" experience.
Hypnotherapy is very often not an effective approach for children under a certain age. Typically 12 to 14 is an acceptable range to start but that depends on various factors.
Please feel free to schedule a call with us to discuss the particulars of your situation.
No. As of April 2020 (the beginning of the pandemic) we are strictly an online service. We see clients by either Google Meet or WhatsApp video/voice calls. We have no intention at this time of going back to working with our clients in an office setting.
By working with us online you are able to experience maximum comfort from home and are able to rest after your session without having to get up and travel from our office to your next destination. We find this to be the ideal set up for you to do your healing work.
There is absolutely no difference in the effectiveness of the work we do whether it is in person or online.
We began our Hypnotherapy practice more than 20 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area and upon returning to Canada in 2014 transitioned our American clientele to strictly online sessions then. We were well positioned for the Covid lockdowns because we were operating in the online space already for years by that point.
I mean, if you really want to...but we generally prefer that you don't.
Many of us have seen a stage hypnosis show, or know someone who took part in such a show. Stage hypnosis is purely for entertainment and utilizes a very deep state of hypnosis that not everyone enters into naturally. Stage hypnosis is an excellent display of the sheer power and malleability of the subconscious mind when the function of the conscious mind is temporarily suspended.
These experiences are far removed from clinical hypnosis which is a well recognized and serious therapeutic modality. Everything done in a therapeutic session is done in complete cooperation and agreement with you, the client. Hypnotherapy clients usually feel a sense of awareness throughout their sessions and are able to recall what transpired. Occasionally some individuals in deep hypnosis will experience a natural amnesia and will not remember portions of the session.
While there doesn’t seem to be any research conducted on this topic, our experience has been that clients who are on psychopharmaceuticals may sometimes have reduced ability to visualize and make emotional connection to memories and imagery.
The success of hypnotherapy is closely tied to these two abilities, and so yes, these types of medications can sometimes interfere. But not usually.
We have worked successfully with many clients who were still able to achieve powerful insights and breakthroughs while on prescription anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications. There are some anti-psychotics or anti-convulsives that may make the work together not realistic. Each drug and each person are unique, so if you are concerned about this, just ask.