Katrina and her family were in Adelaide on holiday when Cyclone Tracy almost wiped out Darwin. After the cyclone, her father went back to see if there was anything left and was able to rescue their terrified cat who was hiding in the rubble.
Katrina became a total hoarder, unable to part with any of her belongings and even rubbish. Losing her home and all their possessions was totally traumatic for her. She was the oldest of 3 children and felt very responsible. The younger children were not affected by the cyclone in the same way.
She has settled now and downsized without all the clutter.
Ingrid came to me feeling anxious, panicked and drinking heavily. She wanted to be able to “relax her brain”, to feel happier and more confident and have good relationships with her kids. She was divorced and distressed because her kids wanted to spend time with their father not her. This was a major motivation in seeking help.
Her mother married an immigrant from Northern Europe and although they were very much in love, her maternal grandparents never wanted the marriage to happen and eventually they broke up the marriage and took their daughter and her two children around 400 kms away from the husband to live on their farm.
Ingrid’s mother was deeply distressed and after a few years she suicided in a rather gruesome way. The grandparents then brought up Ingrid and her sister. Neither of the 2 children was allowed any contact with their father and they were told that he was a very bad man.
From age 11 Ingrid was repeatedly raped by her uncle who continued to live nearby and be a regular part of her life.
In her 20s Ingrid married and had two children. Then at age 60 her own marriage broke down and her kids were closer to their father. Around age 40 she managed to track down her father who was living in Melbourne. She found a very pleasant man and developed a good relationship with him before he died. He had never remarried, and his house was full of photos of Ingrid and her sister as small children. He enjoyed adding the adult photos and meeting his Grandchildren. She had problems re losing first her father, then her mother plus the rapes and the bad marriage and divorce.
She no longer has anxiety or panic attacks. She seldom drinks alcohol and has good relationships with her children and stays with them when she comes to Adelaide. If something unpleasant comes up in her life now she thinks about the sunshine that she carries in her heart.
I helped a lovely woman I will call Julie who came for help feeing lonely and isolated with panic attacks that come with no warning. She woke dreading each day and was becoming agoraphobic.
Julie grew up on an army base in Cyprus where her father was a non-commissioned officer. She had been raped at aged 8 by 2 teenage boys, the sons of Officers and when she reported this to her parents, little was done about it other than her father being very angry and unable to resolve it.
When the family returned to the UK those older boys had graduated as officers and her father was stationed under their command. This is when the family migrated to Australia. An older brother also raped her, which continued this for many years. She was frightened to tell her parents because saying she was afraid her father would kill her brother.
She divorced age 44 after finding her husband was bringing other women into her house while she was at work.
Recently she was also having ongoing and increasing bullying by a manager at work.
She was carrying a lot of guilt guilty about causing problems for her father and had ongoing problems about her brother.
She told him in her imagination that she had actually saved his life by not telling her father what he did.
When she came again she told me that she had written to her brother and had told her mother. She enjoyed planning a confident future. We used the pond again to was away any remaining guilt.
Stuff is no longer rolling through her mind, and she is no longer anxious. She has told her mother about the rapes and confronted her brother so that she feels comfortable meeting him now.
She is no longer being bullied. She now has 5 boxes in her mind, 1 is very pretty and on a pedestal to put good thoughts in and the other 4 are there so she can put all bad thoughts in them.
Gina is a very beautiful and competent half Asian girl from Darwin. Her mother came to Australia as an Asian bride, but the marriage did not last and her mother became a prostitute as the only way she had to support her child.
Gina grew up to be a very competent young woman with a responsible job, but she had a massive case of both anxiety and imposter syndrome. She was sure her boss would find out that she was not really competent.
She is now fully confident, aware that her background is not a problem and she values her mother as a strong woman who had managed to bring up and educate her child on her own in a new country. She is now proud of her mother and confident in her managerial role.
Belinda is now happy well balanced woman in astable relationship with a job she enjoysalthough she came to me in fear of her life. Her parents split up but at 15 her mother rejected her, so she moved in with Dad until at 16 she moved in with a boyfriend. She was beaten and rejected when she was pregnant because she no longer looked attractive as the baby grew. She was a single Mum, had several more babies and domestic violence. In her 20s she was stalked by a past partner.
When she came to see me, she had totally lacked feelings of self-worth and stability. She was working to support her 4 children while constantly fearing rejection and feeling deep anxiety. She suffered a home invasion and was raped by the invader.
When she first came to me, she was in fear of her life because of violent threats by the boyfriend of a daughter who lived with her. The daughter was too frightened of the boyfriend to report him to the police. What a mess.
Belinda is now a happy confident person. She was totally transformed by the hypnotic process and is now in a very stable relationship with a man she loves. Her daughter is now safe, living in sheltered housing and has recovered from the traumas.
Mike was born in Darwin and with his family he was evacuated as Cyclone Tracy was imminent. For the rest of his life Mike felt overwhelmed and fearful when there were strong winds. This was a huge problem for him in his work in the building industry.
The problem is that wild weather like cyclones, flood and fire can be traumatic and those memories are not stored in the normal way in the body so future weather triggers fear. When a person is overwhelmed, the memory is not stored, but instead held in the body as deep feelings. These feelings and fears are triggered by similar situations throughout life unless they are treated properly.
With hypnotherapy he is fully recovered.
A fireman, I’ll call Paul, came to see me to quit smoking then he asked if I could help him with a problem he had developed in the last few year. He became overcome with panic when he was in a crowd, and waiting in a queue at a supermarket checkout registered as a crowd. This became a big problem
I asked him to think back to what else might have happened around the time this panic started. OK, he was a firefighter and was caught in a cramped space in a burn-over during a bushfire. He has supposedly been treated by this at work but had to give up work because of the frequency of the panic. A cramped space surrounded by fire is a definite trauma and it had not been treated effectively by the workplace councillor. He recovered in a single session when I treated him using hypnosis and he has not needed any more help, and is now back at work.
Nancy grew up in a very religious family, part of a Pentecostal church. However Nancy was gay and always knew this. Her parents were horrified and sent her twice to gay conversion therapy which did not work but left her highly traumatised. She was also exorcised and added to the trauma.
Eventually she ran away and went to America with her girlfriend where they got married because that ended her family’s conversion efforts.
Over time she was divorced from her wife, not unexpectedly given the speed and motivation for the wedding. She is now in a very happy settled relationship with another lovely young woman.
I treated her for the trauma and worked with her so that she understands unconsciously that the trauma was not her fault but she needed to learn to love herself for who she is and, like every one of us, it was her responsibility to heal herself which she has done.
Jill is a lovely woman from a regional area who I worked with on zoom. She grew up on a farm and still lives on a small farm while also working for the council on a road gang. She is a strong and physically active woman but wanted first to quit smoking then to lose weight.
She quit smoking easily with hypnosis but her diet as part of an all male work group was a challenge to change. The big change that allowed her to lose her excess weight easily was the change in her mindset. She was eating less with healthier food and learning to love her stomach, then she called me one day to tell me that something weird had happened. Instead of coming home to a six pack of beer each night she only wanted to drink one stubby. Yes, she did lose the desired amount of weight and felt much better for it.
Carol came to me for help with her anxiety. She had two major traumas in her life. Both were the result of naivety.
The first was when she visited an Asian holiday resort on the first stage of a world trip when she was in her early 20s. She was befriended by some locals who showed her great warmth and kindness until she visited them when she was kidnapped and seriously scammed. She was forced to go to the bank with them and empty every thing in her bank account and her credit cards. Then they dumped her off. She was lucky, her family came to her financial rescue and she safety continued her trip... just a little wiser but deeply ashamed that she had fallen for this.
Her second trauma was in business. She bought a successful business that she already worked in. Shortly after, the major client, a government instrumentality changed its rules cutting her new business down to around a quarter. She still had all the employees and as a new busines owner needed to learn about the painful process of letting staff go.
The combination of these left her anxious and ashamed so those were the feelings that needed to be dealt with. The anxiety cause by the two traumas was first, then we were left with shame and she was able to simply let it go while in a deep trance.
It is always a wonderful sense of joy and relief for me as well as for the clients when I am able to help them make these changes without the need to go back over things with a cognitive approach.
Cognitive therapy uses the conscious mind and it does not allow those feelings that are stored in the body, not the brain, to be properly stored. Traumatic memories are never forgotten but my job is to remove the pain so that they just become historical fact.
Business trauma is just as significant as fire, accidents, illness etc. This is not always recognised but running a small to medium business, especially over the past 2 years is highly traumatic.
Jim was a very athletic man who played a lot of sport and ran every day for fitness. One day he vomited before a basketball match. After that he started vomiting before all exercise, every run and every basketball match. He’d had lots of medical tests and there was no reason for this. He was told it was psychosomatic.
When we discussed this, he remembered that he had been ill around the time of the basketball finals, and he thought that was when it started.
Hypnotherapy convinced his unconscious mind that he no longer needed to vomit before exercise and although he consciously worried about it, next time he ran, he did not vomit. Same thing for the next basketball match. The vomiting was just a habit.
The fact is that your unconscious mind is 90+% of your mind and it is the boss, so when you change your unconscious mind, your habits also change. What habits do you find unhelpful and you want to change? You can do this.
