Session #288: Michele Rosenthal on Trauma Release

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 288, Michelle Rosenthal on trauma release. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. So let’s kick things.

Appropriately with a bit of a story, uh, story that involves someone who I’ve known for a little while now. Michelle Rosenthal, who’s the guest on the podcast this week. She’s down in Florida, and you’re about to meet her in this incredible conversation that we had this morning. And part of this, I put out the podcast episode a little while ago called, If I had to Start All Over, where I talked about the mindset of training.

I talked about the mindset of becoming a voice. In the media presence, and I talked about leading with value and a lot of people reached out to me, which by the way, next week’s podcast session. Is going to be a part two of that. I got so much feedback. I got so many specific questions that rather than respond to everything individually, I’ve compiled the best of the best questions and I’m gonna do a bit of a q and a response to that specific episode.

We might even live stream it in the work smart hypnosis community and deal with a few things along the way as well. But here’s the Facebook message I got from Michel. That. She goes, I wanna run an idea and an offer across you about the importance of how to build a community around a cause related to your business.

You’ve done this so well, and that’s how I first launched my business back in 2009. That’s Michelle’s story and the community. I built a fun accidental story, which you’re about to hear, led to a blog which then went viral. One awards, book, deals, advertisers, a national sponsor on her podcast and speaking gigs, which then of course, Resulted in full practice of private clients and group session clients as well, which we then chatted back and forth and within five minutes it became an invite to be on the program, which you’re about to listen to.

But I, I love this concept cuz I meet so many people in our industry. So many people that dude, just get started. Just put something out there because, well, here’s the first part of it. People love being able to track how you’ve grown and how you’ve changed over the years. There are people who respond to a lot of what I’m doing now because they saw what it used to be 5, 6, 7 years ago, you know?

Yes. When I was maybe 40 pounds heavier, as well as saying different things, but they’re seeing the lineage, they’re seeing the results. And they’re seeing the long term efficacy that, Hey, this stuff works. That’s why I keep sharing it with others, but I, I go back to it. I tell the story here on this week’s episode of Pat Flynn who does the Smart Passive Income Podcast, which, yes, I borrowed one word from Pat Works Smart Hypnosis was modeled after smart passive income.

Pat’s an amazing guy. He did a podcast for a number of years before there was ever a product, which what I’d encouraged all of you, you know, start to share that story, start to share that messaging along the way. Have a mechanism for people to get more from you, which might be a simple Optin offer or hey, okay, I’ll let you have this one.

Subscribe to my newsletter. I’d rather you promote something specific that’s gonna give someone a measurable result. Get my Craving Crusher technique. Watch this webinar for strategies to grow your business. You know, let it be something more specific. But this way, now what are you doing? You’re building an audience and that’s exactly what you’re gonna hear.

Inside of Michelle Rosenthal’s story here where she had an audience, she had a group of people who were demanding that she have a service to help them out, and that’s why here she is at the top of her career, likely reinventing the game once again. Because at any stage of the process, we can change up what we do and become inspired to go in brand.

Directions. So you’re gonna hear this massively inspirational story, a great passion towards truly client centered work that as much as I pressed what techniques she didn’t give any why? Because that’s not how we do the process. Listen to the client. Your client is going to speak in hypnotic methods.

They are going to inform you as to what you want to be doing. She’s someone to be listening to. She’s someone to be reading and all the links and details over in the show [email protected]. It’s that mindset that the number one thing you can sell, and by doing so, you are providing an incredible service, is to help people to do things faster and easier.

Which, well, if you want to grow your hypnosis business faster and easier, check out hypnotic business systems.com. That’s the program that Michelle’s also inside of, and share some insights as to her experience and that community as well. You can check that out online. It’s the full tutorials behind how I’ve built this multiple stream hypnosis business that’s available [email protected].

But let’s give you the uh, free preview. Head over to Hypno formula. Dot com. That’s where we’ve got the hypnotic pricing formula. We’re in a short span of only about 20 minutes. In this on-demand presentation, you can see exactly how I build high value programs for my clients, and as a bonus exactly how I utilize evidence based strategies for success in designing those programs as well.

It’s free and it’s yours right away by going to hypno formula.com or if you know you just want everything, hypnotic business systems.com. And with that, let’s jump directly into this massively content packed session. This is my tape favorite type of podcast by the way, cuz Michelle and I basically had like a two hour conversation and like maybe 44 minutes.

So buckle up. There’s a lot of stuff here. Here we go. Episode number 288. Michelle Rosenthal on trauma release. So my first introduction to hypnosis was a moment of absolute desperation. So I am a childhood trauma survivor. I survived something really horrific when I was 13 and did not receive the help at that time.

It was 1981. So you can all just do the math real quickly. I’m 52, and at that time, nobody was looking at civilian kids with trauma and saying, Oh, ptsd. So I launched into almost 30 years of post traumatic stress disorder. That was un. And my life was a red hot mess. And just to jump to the end, I had multiple mysterious medical issues.

My body was imploding, my mind was imploding, and it was very clear to me that I needed more help than I was receiving. I was almost at the end of my thirties and. I set this goal for myself, which was pretty audacious. By the time I was 40. I wanted to be a normal person because I had sort of for almost 30 years just accepted.

I was crazy because I behaved in crazy ways and was very, just really anxious and very withdrawn and very isolated and not clear in my thinking and going through the motions of every day, but really just on the inside, struggling to survive every. And so I was, I had tried a bunch of things by the time I got to hypnosis, which is of course everybody’s story, but I had already done five years of talk therapy at that point, which left me markedly worse.

No offense to the therapist out there, but it just. Wasn’t the thing for me. I had done the alphabet, emdr, T F T E F T T A T, everything. And I was really despairing because I thought I’m gonna be crazy my whole life. And by that time I had a PTSD diagnosis, so I knew that this wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t know how to be free.

And I was driving along one day and I heard an ad on the radio that was for hypnosis, A group hyp. That cured a nicotine addiction and I’d been studying trauma and identity for a really long time to understand what was wrong with me. And I had come to the realization that at the basis of trauma, to me, is a trauma addiction that needs to be resolved and an identity crisis that needs to be heal.

And so when I heard this ad for hypnosis and nicotine addiction, I thought, Well, if it can cure a nicotine addiction, why not a trauma addiction? Yeah. And so then I started calling hypnotherapist. You know, I just Googled hypnosis near me and. And I called seven Hypnotherapist , and I interviewed them over the phone because I was looking for like one that I felt I could work with, and I narrowed it down to two names that you would recognize and one said to me, Well, we’re just gonna start at 9:00 AM and we’re gonna go all day.

As long as it takes until you’re done. And I thought, Oh my God, I’m, I’m living on the edge of my own implosion as it is, and if we do 12, 18 hours of hypnosis, I don’t think I’ll be able to manage. And the other one said to me, We’re just gonna take it one hour at a time every week. And I thought, Brilliant.

Let’s do that. So that was my introduction to hypnosis. I went in, I did not believe in it. I had been part of a hypnosis study in college and was very proud that I got kicked out of it because I was un hypnotizable . So I went in thinking it’s not going to work, but really desperately wanting it to. And I remember that first session I was thinking, you.

Talk about your critical factor, the whole hypnosis session. I was thinking to myself, This is so stupid. I can’t believe I’m spending money on this. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. This is never going to work. And imagine my surprise when that night, for the first night in almost 30 years, I slept eight straight hours.

Nice. Which I’d been sleeping just one to two, and I had no nightmares. So I woke up the next day. I was a believer. Nice. I wanna go, I wanna go back to a, go back to an element inside of that story, which I think is. You know there, there’s always the argument where some would go, something is overdiagnosed.

I would always argue back that the fact that something is underdiagnosed is just as big of a problem, if not as worse. So there, there’s something interesting in your story, which was that suddenly. When there was a label on it, when there was something that it could be, let’s use the D word diagnosed as now there was actually something that could be labeled and then addressed.

Correct. Oh, Jason, That was one of the best days of my life when I got that label. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead with what you’re thinking. I, No, cause that’s, that’s one of those big factors that, you know, I’ve had the client before and sometimes. Not to say this is something minimal that is not as serious. But I had a client one time with all these sorts of unexplained medical situations, which I, I did find a polite way to say you might want to look around at other doctors.

Cuz when it became after all of these risks that this guy was facing, when finally a year and a half in, they go, Well, how often do you need to, you know, supplement with insulin? And he goes, What do you mean? They go, You’re diabetic? He goes, No, I’m not. He go, they go, Yes, you are. So it had never been diagnosed and that turned out to be something that’s relatively easily managed.

And then there was a treatment plan for it. So there, there’s an odd moment. Where suddenly when something does get diagnosed, you’re right. There is a relief to that and that is a factor to be aware of when working with clients at times. Definitely. I think that’s a great point because if we don’t have the diagnosis, and I see this in my practice, I work exclusively with trauma, so I see this a lot and I remember it from my own journey.

If we don’t have the diagnosis, we blame ourselves. Yeah. We think there’s something wrong with me. And when you have the diagnosis, and I know in the PTSD world, there’s a, a big divide and I’m on the losing side of it, but I like the d mm-hmm. , I, I don’t wanna call it post traumatic stress. I don’t feel that that gives it, it’s due because post traumatic stress is one thing to me, but the disorder lets me know, yes, there’s something significantly wrong, but it’s a disorder.

It can be healed. It’s not run of the mill stress , and it’s not a disease. It’s solidly in the middle. And I can approach it that way. Yeah. And then you stop blaming yourself and that just right there is a huge step in healing. You’re right, it’s, it’s that place where now there’s something to actually address.

And yeah, I, I, I have the same opinion where people say, Don’t say you fix clients. Now, it’s not necessarily language that I use. It’s a different mindset though, that the fact that someone is hiring us is identifying that something in their life is not working well for them and something that’s not well is technically broken.

But then again, the action of asking for assistance is a position of strength. And yes, this may be all. Rationalizations around questionable language, but to say we are helping. So then again, I flash to a moment with a counselor where she goes, It’s only diagnosable if it’s not helping you. And there’s a dangerous statement that I’m gonna live by from now on.

So you had this massive change in your life as a result of that. So fast forward the story. What, Well, first of all, what was the. Career path leading up to that point. Well, that was part of the red hot mess. . Mm-hmm. , There was no career path. I just was surviving every day. I lived in what I call default mode.

Yeah. So I literally, I graduated college. I didn’t know what to do because I had no clue. I, I couldn’t think about what to do. I just was trying to manage every day. So I. Took the jobs that were offered to me. So I literally bounced. I started in advertising. I went to publishing. I went to pr. I went to finance.

I went back to publishing. I went to academia. So I have literally been in all of these different areas and these great industries, and I’m good when you put me in a situation, even when I was a mess, if I focus. I can achieve. So I was promoted and, you know, hired away and all this stuff, but that was on the outside, On the inside, I wasn’t making any decisions.

So after, you know, almost 20 years of a quote unquote career, I had no career. Yeah. So to answer your question, I did not have. Profession at that time, actually, things were so bad that I was working for my brother because I needed a job that I didn’t have to go into an office that I could work anytime I felt I could focus, and so I, I didn’t have a quote unquote profession that was something I was building on.

I had a lot of experience and a lot of different areas, but no one career. . So then what was that thought process to then transition then and start to look at hypnosis as something to actually offer out? Yeah, and so this is the fun part. I, I had six hypnosis sessions and I was done and it led me into, So I was 40 by that time, and I thought, now I don’t know what to do with myself because now suddenly the world is in technical.

I’m living in the present moment. I’m waking up every day feeling this blissful joy. I, I just assumed everybody woke up as terrified as I did every day. Mm-hmm. , I had no idea you could wake up another way. And I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I continued working for my brother and I was not even thinking about doing hypnosis.

Here’s what happened, and this is, this is interesting because in the hypnotic. Business group. Mm-hmm. , you know, that you run, that I’m a part of. I think it was in there the other day. Somebody asked, How did you decide your niche? Yeah. And, and, and this story I think is so interesting for how all of us as practitioners can really hone in on what our niche is.

So I didn’t know what to do. I’ve always been a writer since before my trauma. And so my brother said to me when he saw me, Flailing around after my recovery. And he said, Well, why don’t you just write about what happened to you? You, that’s, that’s what you do. Just write about it. And by then, I was already a published playwright, a published poet.

I, I had an MFA in writing, so I had all these credentials to write, but here’s what happened. He said to me, But don’t write it on paper or on your computer. There’s this new thing called blogg. I think you do a blog , so that’ll let you know how long ago this was. But, so I started blogging about my recovery and my struggle with PTSD at a time where people were not writing about that.

It was healable and not really thinking that anyone was going to understand me because my, my trauma was so rare and bizarre. And the next thing I knew, Jason, the blog went viral. It took maybe three or four weeks and. Veterans started writing to me saying, How do you know exactly how I feel? And rape survivors started writing, saying, You just put into words what I’ve been trying to say for 15 years.

How did you do that? And I really came at it from a place of passion and education and just wanting people to know what’s possible, because slowly but surely, and this is how I got to hypnosis, my mission became I want other people to heal faster than I did. And when they, when the blog went viral and people started asking me for help and more information, that’s when I stepped up and said, Okay, I gotta get trained

I can’t do this off the top of my head. So I, I got trained with, I trained with at Omni Hypnosis, which I kind cuz I’m in Florida and he’s close by, which was. And, and I trained with Richard Bandler because he also comes to Florida, so it was super easy . So that’s where I did all of my NLP training and I got my certified professional coach training with ipec.

And so I put all three of those things together and said, Okay, now I’m ready. And while I was doing my training, I was building this enormous online community. Yeah. Just from what you, you know, I was listening to your podcast 2 84 the other day, and it, you know what you would do then if you know what, if you knew what you know now.

And talking about how to lead with value and not knowing marketing or digital marketing. Back then, I just always led from a place of help. How can I help? How can I educate and give people what they need to take their next step? And that is really what dovetailed with my training, so that by the time my training was done, I already had it as this enormous community.

Right? Yeah. For offering my services. . Mm-hmm. that that’s something that’s massively important. And I can talk a few examples around that too, which is that we may not be yet in the position to offer out, let’s say, a product or even a specific service, but it’s never a reason why we can’t be that person offering value and creating the community around it.

And I think I’ve mentioned the story here before, but there’s a podcast out there called Smart Passive. By Pat Flynn, and when I met him a few times over the years, I said to him like, Hey Pat, just as a heads up, I I, I borrowed one word from you , and there’s Work Smart Hypnosis. And he’s an amazing example of he launched his Smart Passive Income podcast and for a couple of years, There was nothing you could hire him to do.

There was no product that he could sell you. It was just him talking about getting out of his career as an architect and then launching Business Dreams online, and basically what he was doing and interviewing people with interesting stories, which then fast forward. Now clearly, he’s a guy who’s got two outstanding podcast courses, a training on affiliate marketing, which only appeared in the later years.

It’s no wonder to then load those programs and open them up and see there’s tens of thousands of users inside of them. Mm. So we, we always can find that place to get started and just to be that person starting a conversation, opening up a dialogue. Writing a blog, doing a podcast, putting videos up online.

Tell that story because then there’s gonna be an audience of people that are gonna join together as a community that need that message. And my whole phrase is always, How dare you not share it. I totally agree, and I think, you know, you, you see so many thought leaders now and some of them are really genuine because they’re coming from the heart.

They’re sharing truly who they are. You’re very much like that. Thank you. So they’re sharing their story, their insights, their challenges, their successes, and they, they come across as regular people who just want to help and be a part of a community. And then you see other thought leaders who are clearly.

That interested in connection, They just are interested in, you know, the cash register. Mm-hmm. and I, I think it’s really those people who come from the heart and are willing to share the authentic truth of who they are, that build the best communities, that not only foster help for other people, but also build their own businesses at the same.

And it’s not a conflict because it’s all coming from this great. Yeah. To find that place where now it becomes the phrase becoming, what can I give rather than what can I sell? And letting that become that intention. That’s what creates that business that’s gonna be there for so many years to come. And you know that that mindset of giving I’d give.

I’ll leave out the names in the story , but I can name people who you know, have gone through every one of the life trainings that I’ve ever offered, Every online program that I’ve ever put out there. If I pop up with something unique and specific, they sign up for that and they’ve even spun around and found out that I do private consulting and they’ve hired me for that.

Meanwhile, here’s someone who’s on the western side of Canada, and I’ll phrase it this way, social perk up and go, Oh, that’s me, who has never bought a single product of. And yet whenever we’re around each other, it’s that, Hey Jason, I use your pre-talk. That completely changed my practice. Wow. And for the, for the content creator, for the business owner that I am to be just as happy with option one as I am option two.

Mm-hmm. needs to be that dynamic. So what was that transition for these people to then find out that, okay, now here’s the hypnosis, here’s the nlp, here’s the coaching. What was that transition for you to then? Offer that out as a professional service? Well, it actually, for me, and it may not be this way for everybody, but for me, because I had built the strong community that I had, I actually was responding to the request that had already been coming in for months, for people asking me, Could you help me?

Could you help me achieve what you’ve achieved in your recovery? And for a long time, I had been saying, Not yet. Not yet. So by the time I was. Ready. I had a list of people that I would just reach out to and say, Okay, now I’m ready and I can really do it right. So there was that. But then there was also that I started incorporating that into, I had a podcast, so I started talking about it.

I also had an award-winning blog, so I had a lot of traffic and I started writing about, So, and then I built out that part of my website that explained, you know, how hypnosis works and NLP and, and all those other facets that would educate people. So it was sort of a natural and organic next step if you were part of my community to start learning about this new thing that I was able to do.

Yeah. Nice, nice. So then, was it brick, because it is 2020, we have to ask this , uh, was it a brick and mortar location or were you now serving an audience around the world? Well, I’ll tell you a funny thing. So my hypnotherapist became my mentor and she was, she’s local and she had a brick and mortar. And so when I graduated and was ready to open, she was more than happy for me to rent a room in the space that she had.

And so I did that at not a small expense for a startup. And I think I used the, in, in like maybe the three or four months that I rented the room. I think I used it twice. because , because it was 2009 and my entire audience was global already. And so I was, I remember the day she and I went to lunch and she said, Well, how’s it going?

I don’t see you in the office. And I said, Well, it’s cuz I’m book solid and I’m at home and I don’t need to come in. And she said, What do you mean? And I said, Well, doing everything on phone and Skype. And she just looked at me and she said, You can’t do that. And all of a sudden you have that like heart sinking feeling like you’re so newbie that you didn’t know something.

And I, and I said, What do you mean why? And she said, Well, you just can’t, It doesn’t work. And I said, Oh no, it works. Yeah, that definitely works. . . So I, so I let go of the space because I didn’t need it. Now, fast forward a decade, I love my local office. Yeah. Because what I really discovered is, while I love working with people around the world, I love the energy exchange.

Of being in person. So now my practice is 50 50. Nice. Yeah. So it works out well. Yeah. Which, I mean that really helps to illustrate that. Well I, somebody who knows Keith Livingston message him and tell him I keep telling his story. So he needs to be on the podcast. there is to call out. No, cuz I heard Keith years ago say.

I found great. Something along the lines of, I found greater happiness by realizing I shouldn’t spend my time around people who tell me the stuff that I do that clearly works, won’t work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to trust yourself. Well, it’s, it’s, it goes back to this whole conversation about finding a community and then speaking to what their needs are, and those are the people.

I mean, at client session, I’ve. Later today, he heard me on a podcast. He resonated with the story and the whole positioning as to what’s missing was one combination of the hypnotic work that I have done for years as well as the business applications of hypnotic principles, and suddenly just the, the switch was flipped to him to go.

That’s what I. . So the fact that he’s the other side of the world working at a very odd time in the middle of the morning when I’m like, I can come in one day at 8:00 AM so it’s in the afternoon for you, . But where, where we find that’s that audience. So it’s where we can have a little bit of both, which even in the midst of the fun of distancing and face masks, I started the day in person in the office and I’m still here, but the rest of it’s sitting in front of a microphone talking to someone on the other side of the.

Exactly. So we, we can build whatever business environment it is that we want to create, but if we start with that community aspect, then they have a way to find us. That’s the thing. And I think, you know, in terms of building a community, I think it’s like two steps. You tell me what you think. It starts with that passion in you to share what.

What you’ve learned that really has rocked your world and will help somebody else. And then after you do that, it’s responding to what people tell you they want. Yes. You know, I started with just blogging with Holy cow, who knew you could heal PTSD . Nobody’s talking about that. Why not listen to this and look at this and look at this?

And then everyone started telling me, Here’s what I need to know. Here’s what I need to know. And it. Them asking me questions, I didn’t have the expertise to answer that caused me to launch my podcast, which then went on to, you know, great success and I had a national sponsor and advertisers and all this stuff that never occurred to me to do that.

I just was following the good energy. Of what my own community was creating and asking me for, which let’s add a third step, which is either directly or metaphorically, to then ask the question, How can I make that easier for you? Yes. Yeah. Which is where, now here’s the service, here’s the product, here’s the plan to help them to overcome that.

Right, which is a perfect transition cuz at this point we’re about 22 minutes in and I’m sure there’s people out there now going, Yeah, but what does she do with them? ? So what are hypnosis? All right. Thanks for listening everybody. See you next week. Which by the way, next week’s episode is the part two of the, If I had to start all over again because we were getting all sorts of questions in the Facebook community about what?

About this, what about that? I’m like, Exactly what you just said. Listen to the feedback. I’m like, Oh, there’s, There’s part two. Yeah. Which we’re making them wait a week to release your episode cuz it’s awesome, . So let’s talk through some of the specifics. What are some of the, Well, what’s, let’s start this way.

What’s the user experience? Somebody reaches out to you and expresses that they’d like your help. What’s that? Experience that they’re now about to go through. Right. So at this point in my career, I am very picky about who I work with. You know, in the beginning, I, I would, anybody, I’d be like, Yes, I can do it.

No problem, no problem. As long as you have trauma. That’s the only area that I really love to work. But after years of realizing, Hmm. You know, there’s a big difference between the clients I work with who are really jazzed and excited to see what can happen and who really, really want to change, versus those who.

Just our, what I call e yours. You remember Eor from two, like they come into your office and like no matter where you go with them in, in the forest, it’s just your over, over and over again. . And, and so those, I’ve sort of decided I don’t, I don’t work with that cuz they’re not really ready for the stage that I love to work with.

I’m more like, you’ve already done everything. It’s not working. And you have come to that moment that I myself went through, which is. I’m done with this and I just need someone to teach me how to be done with this. Yeah. Because some people aren’t ready to to heal yet. They’re not ready to let go of their story and I respect that.

So at this point then, in my practice, you land on my website, you sign up for a V I P experience, which, you know, for them it’s a way for for me to walk them through some. Principles of being able to assess where they are and what they’re doing and why it’s not working and what they really are wanting.

And it’s a way for them to get to know me so that by the time they get into a session with me, they’re not trying to figure out who I am. They’re just, they’re, they’ve already gone through the emotional buy-in process so I can really get to. Yeah. But the flip side is it allows me to interview them without them feeling like I’m interrogating them.

Right? Yeah. So, so, so they do that, and then from there, if, if I feel like, yeah, this is the kind of person that I really love to serve, then I will invite them. You know, best practices. So you start the conversation saying, Here’s what we’re going to do. And if it feels like there’s an opportunity for us to discuss what it would look like to work together, we can move into that later.

Okay? Mm-hmm. . And they say yes. So that then sometimes I’ll go right into it, or sometimes I’ll say, Well, why don’t you just sit on this and you know, we can talk again tomorrow about what it would look like to work together. Yeah. And then once we do that, then I roll them into, Not roll them. That might be too aggressive a word.

I invite them Ooh, nice. Into a, a three month program. Because I do not do one off sessions. And I don’t like saying like, none of us wanna say, Oh yes, this’ll take exactly this many sessions. Yeah. Because you just don’t know. And I find that generally speaking, for, for major trauma and for people who have not really been able to bring the.

Just shy of the end, which is hard to do on your own anyway. It takes at least three months to move through the three phases that I love to work through, which is you have to create that, that look, all trauma survivors need two things, safety and control. Those are the things they seek. So that’s what we do first, is create that sense of safety and control, and then we move into the change work.

And then after that, we move into the creation phase so that we’re changing the trauma and resolving that addiction element. And I’m using that loosely, but in my world, that’s how I describe it, because you just can’t let it go even though you know it’s killing you. And then, The third phase is to create the identity of who you are, not as a survivor, but as somebody else.

Yeah, because that transition, nobody talks about that. And for me that was a really big struggle. I I, I was done with hypnosis. I had no symptoms, but I was lost. And for a year I was lost. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I have a really, Three step process for creating your post-trauma identity and, and it smooths that transition into your, your next self.

And I’ve written a book called Your Life After Trauma for Norton, and that was the basis for how I started working with. Identity and hypnosis at the end of that change process. So that takes at least three months and then some people are done, and then other people continue on for another three months because you know it, it’s sort of you.

If you think about building a house and you’re renovating it. And you look at the interior and you’re like, Yeah, it looks okay. Like if I just like rip off the wallpaper and slap up some paint, we should be good to go. And then you rip off the wallpaper and then there’s black mold underneath it and you say, Whoa, I didn’t know that was there.

So that change phase for trauma is sometimes I find so multi-layered. That they have to go slowly because they’re dissociative or, or they are triggering before they even get into my office. And so some people go slower, some people go faster. But at the very beginning, at least it’s a three month program.

And then after that, some, some people extend for the next three months, depending on how their pacing. Yeah. What’s great about that is I love the intention of starting by building the resources, starting by building that new story, and then I’m assuming that’s only once. That’s let’s say in motion, are you then going after the specific trauma?

Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. Because I think until you can start telling the news story, and in my practice, Jason, and this is what I love about hypnosis, and this is clearly, it’s written in big, bold letters on my website. Stop talking about the past. Yeah. So in, in my practice, you get one shot at telling your story.

That’s it. I will listen to it once and after that we’re. Going over it every week. If there’s some insight you wanna tell me, I’m fine with that. If there’s a detail you forgot that’s crucial, we can add that, that’s fine. But I am not going to listen to that story over and over every week because that’s therapy and that is not what I do.

So I think that that’s, that’s sort of. Expresses , , my, the, like, my whole approach here is because, because of what you’re saying, like it’s, it’s really important to be able to tell your story, but to tell it from a place of strength and also to stop telling it from a place of strength. Yeah. So that then you can change it.

Because if you still feel the need to tell it every week, you’re something in you. I think is not yet ready to let it go. So, you know, we use hypnosis on both sides of that equation to move through that process. Right. So then in terms of, just to get specific, what are some of the strategies, what are some of the techniques that you’re finding to be effective?

So I’m sort of, I know some people like, uh, strategy. The same with everybody. And I tried so hard to work in a way that was that methodical. It’s right. Yeah. Just not me. Nice. Um, and it took me a long time, and I’ll just say this, for the newbies out there, it took me, that’s the, uh, sation of my training sometimes.

I’m like, what do you do with this client? What are their goals? Yeah. Right. Who are, I’m gonna ask them questions and I’m gonna find out what their model of the world is and use that based on matching that up to specific techniques. So there, there’s a catchphrase of, there was a training one time where this one person in a class, every break, she goes, What do you do with the person with ibs?

And I always respond, What’s their goal? What about a person with like a d. Well, what’s their goal? , What about a person with history of trauma? What? What’s their goal? That until we have that answer and until we’ve heard it in their neurology, in their terms and their representations, it kind of needs to be that blank slate.

Otherwise, we’re just funneling someone through a system and hoping they’re matched for it. That’s right. And and to take what you’re saying, even even deeper, is sometimes I find a lot of times with trauma survivors, they don’t have a goal other than I just don’t wanna feel this way. And you can ask them to be specific, but because they’re not present in their mind, they’re not present in their body, they don’t have the language for their goal specifically.

Mm-hmm. trauma often. The frontal lobe. And so you know, your language and emotion connection is not always tip top. So I, I’ve developed ways to reverse engineer them, being able to discover the specifics. But sometimes, depending on how settled someone is, sometimes it’s not even appropriate to do that for sometimes I just listen to them and like you said, you discover their neurology.

I literally had a woman come to me, I worked with her once. That’s it. A therapist recommended her to me. She came in with all kinds of dysregulation and I said, Oh, you know, I did the pre-talk. We started talking and she ultimately said to me, You know what? I just feel like if there was some kind of drain at the back of my head, all this stuff could drain out and I’d be.

And I thought, Okay, I know what we’re doing. Forget that five step process or that like thing that, that, that everyone tells you to do. I’m, I’m doing that and I literally did this whole session. You know, I did a regular induction and then I. Created this experience where she manually created and built this drain.

She was pretty handy with tools. I knew that from our conversation. And so I walked her through choosing the right tools and deciding where to put this drain and all this stuff. And, and then I gave her silence while it drained and, you know, and then she, I had given her a command to give me a signal when the draining process had completed.

And then we walked through, you know, finishing. That so that there was something else in its place and you know, all the good practices that we do. And then she walked outta my office and she felt great and I, and I thought, okay. I said, Well, you know, come back next week , because we need to just sort of make like, I wanna.

Just sort of deepen and expand this. Yeah. And, and she didn’t come back. And I reached out and I didn’t hear from her. And I thought, Hmm, all right. That doesn’t feel good. And the funny end of the story is a year later, she reached out to me and said, Hey, you know, Can I buy you dinner? Because what you did for me that day changed my life.

I have been completely fine. Ever since I’ve gotten out of that abusive relationship, I’ve gotten a better job. I’ve moved, and now what I’ve decided I want to do is I wanna do for other people what you did for me. Nice. Sit down and tell me how I do that and. Cool . So, so that’s a, just a great illustration.

When we listen to our, to our clients, they, they tell you what they need. Yeah. And for the ones that don’t, you know, we have all the standard tools, the gray room, age regression, timeline therapy, like all the different things that, depending on what I feel, Each client’s window of tolerances. Cause that’s a, such an important component of trauma work, I think.

Right. Depending on what their window of tolerance is, matching them to something that will be comfortable for them. Because I remember when af after my training, I, I just didn’t, I didn’t understand how to use, for example, age regression. I work with a lot. You know, childhood sexual abuse, for example, and age regression seemed particularly harsh for that kind of thing.

Yeah. But I did it because that was my training and I was gonna, and I hated every minute of it. My client hated every minute of it, and I, and I thought never doing that again. Mm-hmm. . So, so I started, you know, playing with let’s just match the right technique to the right client. And, and now when I use age regression in the, in the moments that I do it, it’s perfect.

But it’s because I’m not going into every session saying, Okay, it’s session number one, here’s what I have to do. Right. Yeah. It’s when we deem this would be a good thing, that would actually help. That’s where we go that direction. And I think this is important to highlight because there sometimes is that, that absolute dialogue, that this technique is good, that technique is bad when no, the technique is only as good as how it’s actually put into use.

And if it’s the right technique at the right time, absolutely. If it’s the wrong technique at the wrong time. Oh dear. So it comes back to that customization to the individual and truly listening to the person. And letting that be the intention of the work. That’s right. And then part of it, you tell me what you think.

It’s, how do you teach someone how to know which technique to use with which client on which day? I would say my, my answer to that is the use of stories. And you know, my answer is that this is why I train my trainings with the I C B C H and the way I do things the way that I do now because the opportunity to have a hybrid approach to education.

Allows me to be the most effective when I can be appropriately self-referential to go, Here’s the story of this client. Oh, and by the way, that’s inside of this product. You can go watch that session. But meanwhile, here’s a case study. I mean, the one that always stands out. As people would ask about, like an instant induction.

Yeah. But do you do that in the first session? And my answer is, well, traditionally no. But here’s the guy who came into the first session to stop smoking and he was fidgety and he was uncomfortable looking. And I just had to break the wall to go, Are you, Is everything all right? And he suddenly reveals that his wife left him that morning.

He woke up to an empty house. She had taken the kids, blocked the calls, blocked the text messages, and I slip and go, Why the hell did you drive here? He was like an hour and a half away, you know, Cause I’m thinking something bigger is going on. Deal with the smoking. Later. He goes, Well, I’ve been dialing the same phone number all morning.

And the same, you know, no, same lack of response. Might as well quit smoking and accomplish at least one thing. And in my head I’m going, What the hell, ? And I’m thinking of the classical training of Good. Now close your eyes and send relaxation down throughout. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You know what? Focus on every bit of that anxiety.

Focus on every bit of that concern. Close your eyes and focus on that fear that you might never see your kids again. And just imagine every bit of that negative energy moving out of your body, down your arm into my hand. I’m standing up. I can take it. I got leverage. Remember standing physical, touching inductions.

Those, those used to be a thing. This is the training. So instant inductions, watch’s, the videos, Do ’em in 2023. So that was an example. Focus on all of that stress and sleep and just melt into the chair, which I’ve done that once and I probably won’t be doing that anytime again soon. But telling the story is not just to give the illustration a look how clever Jason is, but it’s instead, it’s an illustration of recognizing, as I say, now, everything is an asset.

And it’s about listening to the person where they are and matching it up to the stuff that is in our toolbox. So by teaching every technique as a universal approach, and now the artistry is how it’s applied to the individual, that’s what the focus of trainings need to be, as opposed to, here’s what you do for trauma.

Here’s what you do for smoking. That’s nobody. No. Nobody puts hypnotic techniques in the corner in my . No, I love it. And this is also a great moment just to call out the difference between, you know, the traditional techniques that we’re taught. And the ericsonian and storytelling approach that we also have that sometimes, especially for trauma, is easier.

Yeah. Because a lot of my clients, like if you try to do anything with them, they’ll tell you, My brain hurts. You know, like, I can’t do this. It’s, mm-hmm. , it’s too much. And if I just. Say, Okay. And I put them into a trance and start telling a bunch of stories. They come out feeling like they didn’t have to do any work, but suddenly there are all these changes that week and it’s been just comfortable for them and, and they struggle all day anyway.

So to make them struggle through, you know, learning quote unquote how to be hypnotized, they don’t feel like they’re doing it right. No matter how much pre-talk you do, they get into their heads. So, And so knowing that for those people, I’m thinking of one gentleman that I’m working with in Boston right now, and it’s just, you know, I was trying out a bunch of different things.

He was very resistant. He came to me of his bone volition. It wasn’t like family was forcing him or anything, but then every session he would just resist. Everything. Mm-hmm. , not just hypnosis, just the very fact of healing and you know, I didn’t create this problem, why should I have to heal it kind of thing.

Yeah. And I realized, you know what? He’s just gonna do better with story. And I just do a lot of ericsonian stuff with him. And the physician that put him in touch with me just texted me actually yesterday to say, I just saw him. I can’t believe what you’ve done and. That’s the beauty of hypnosis baby, which, just to highlight exactly what you said in that story and tell me if this matches up, it doesn’t mean that something was wrong.

It meant that there was another style that he would respond to better. Yes. Yeah, and I think that’s a, that’s, that’s sort of the, that’s been the rant that I’ve been on the last two years of. You know, barking and commanded a client that they have to decide if they’re gonna work with you or not. It’s like, no, you know, if they’re not responding to this model, we can seamlessly pivot.

We’ve got enough great strategies in this session, and as much as you know, I use someone else’s protocol, for the most part, for stopping smoking. Here’s the guy this morning that just as I’m listening to him, I’m going, All right, so we’re gonna get that arm up in the air and we’re gonna arrow this thing Jacque.

Just that made sense cuz he gave me a gesture to his chest when he kept talking about craving and I had to go. Cool. Let’s, let’s do that first I’ve gotta ask you, you mentioned the blog was what got you started, So are things now, would you say just kind of on autopilot and taking care of themselves or what are you doing to.

Keep the business driving attention, driving traffic in, Well that’s, that’s like podcast part two. So I’ll just tell you the bottom line, . So building the community the way that I did and leveraging it into the podcast and the award-winning blog and all this other stuff. Then I started getting offers from publishers.

I, I still to this day, don’t have an agent. Publishers started calling me saying, Would you like to write a book? And I said, Yeah, actually I have this idea. And they said, Great. Run with that. And then, Sure called. Do you wanna write a book? Yeah. Well what do you wanna write it on? Well, you know, my audience has been asking me to turn the healing thought of the day that I was sending to them every morning into a book.

So we did that. So, and then I started traveling all over the country to speak and I had a full practice and I was running groups and I was. Trying to keep up with the podcast. And to make a long story short, I crashed and burned because when you’re not intentional in how you build your business, yeah, bad things happen.

and I ended up with an autoimmune disease and sepsis, and it was. Bad. So I took a step back from everything and now I’m a couple years back into work and I’m working entirely differently and sort of pivoted so that the community was there and launched me and now I really, I don’t do much marketing at all, to be honest with you, because of my reputation, if you will.

I get a lot of referrals from clients, from physicians, from the community that I’ve built and I’ve built too. So I was just telling you about the survivor community, but since coming back after the crash and burn, I’ve built a professional community that drives a lot of traffic to me. And so with those things going, yes, everything’s on autopilot, and I just have the.

Playing in my office. Nice. Which is awesome. Awesome. Where can people track you down? How can they find you? Very simply, my trauma coach.com, everything is there. My approach to trauma, a slew of podcast interviews and a way to get in touch with me personally. I’m also obviously on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, so all over the place except Instagram, which I.

I don’t know. I just can’t get myself to do it. Pick the ones you like and those are the ones you do. There’s, I think so. , this has been fantastic and a lot of great information for anybody looking to reinvent where they are. A lot of great information for someone looking to start something, so thank you for coming on and sharing it.

Any, any final thoughts for the listeners out there? Yeah. Thank you Jason so much for being the leader of this great community and for inviting me to share what I’ve learned. And I, I think the, the thing for us all to remember is to come from the place in ourselves that feels on fire with the desire to share.

Because when you come from that place, Everything else takes care of itself. Jason, Lynette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program, for sharing it on your social media streams, and absolutely do this, especially now, reach out to the people who have been on the program and let them know what stood out.

This is where. You should join the Work Smart Hypnosis Community. It’s free, it’s on Facebook. The details are in the show notes [email protected] cuz as we post this, Michelle will be there answering your questions. I’ll be there too. You can find links to her websites over at the show [email protected].

And again, for more on this in terms of growing your business, check out hypnotic business systems.com or if you want the free preview. Check out hypno formula.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week for part two of, If I had to start all over, which I think we’ll call it, if I had to start all over once again or something like that.

Keep washing your hands. I’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.