Hypnosis is the process of inducing a state of deep relaxation of the body and a focus of the mind, commonly known as a "hypnotic trance". The use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes to facilitate changes in perceptions, feelings*, and emotional response patterns is called "hypnotherapy."

Somatic Hypnotherapy is a holistic naturopathic practice that uses hypnosis to identify, assess, and facilitate the release of trauma, stress, anxiety, and other unresolved emotional issues that the body holds and stores as trapped feelings* "within you". You perceive those trapped feelings within you as signals originating from within the body, which your conscious mind senses, assesses, interprets, integrates, and conceptualizes as emotions - whether you call that "within you" your body, your soul, your spirit, your subconscious mind, or your nervous system - and you perceive your trapped feelings* as trauma, stress, anxiety, anger, guilt, shame, pain, and other unpleasant emotional or somatic experiences.

While conventional approaches in hypnotherapy aim at facilitating changes in mindset and emotional response patterns by inducing new layers of emotional feelings* through "re-programming the mind", Somatic Hypnotherapy changes this paradigm, bringing the desired changes by "deprogramming the subconscious" of unwanted emotional response patterns - through alleviating or completely releasing the related feelings*. Let's say you are dealing with an irrational fear of spiders, or you overreact to a past traumatic event. In this case, instead of convincing you that spiders aren't dangerous, or that the traumatic event already happened and you should put it behind you - what you most likely already know - this approach aims to help you reset the irrational fearful feelings of spiders, or the feelings driving your overreaction to your traumatic memories.

Somatic Hypnotherapy, as an interactive and highly personalized holistic healing process aimed at relieving your unwanted feelings, is a coherent ritual healing process conducted by your somatic hypno-therapist and performed while you are in a very particuler, hypnotically induced state of mind called somatic hypnosis. Your therapist will not blindly try to see what might come out under hypnosis; he follows a precise plan and knows at all times where he is heading with the entire healing process, because this approach is based on a set of presumptions, paradigms, and undeniable scientific facts that are coherent and clearly stated, such as:

• The foundational premise in Somatic Hypnotherapy, as in all other holistic naturopathic approaches, is that the body and mind have an innate capacity to self-heal as a whole. Your body knows how to mend broken bones, heal wounds, restore physiological processes, and preserve vitality. Your subconscious mind knows how to heal emotional wounds, retrieve spiritual and emotional balance, and help you achieve mental clarity, serenity, and joy in life. The goal of this approach is to help you trigger and maintain your innate self-healing processes.

• As long as they are in a calm, serene, and emotionally equidistant state of mind, humans tend to listen to and follow their inborn logical and rational thoughts and decision-making processes, and thus live a thoughtful life. Whenever serenity is disturbed by pain, stress, anxiety, trauma, or other intense or persistent feelings*, they tend to disrupt the rational mind and take over thinking, decision-making, and behavior.

• Thus, when physically injured, humans, like animals, will feel the resulting pain and tend to restrict their mobility (to limp) as an instantly deployed survival pattern of behavior, to prevent worsening the injury and protect the healing—all intuitively, without the need for any mental understanding, nor for our approval or blessing. Indeed, when injured, both the smartest and the dummies will limp and their injuries will heal in the same way, provided they do not hinder the healing process, whether or not they understand what is happening to them.

• When injured, people with congenital analgesia (CIP) or those on painkillers will still limp, although less so, because what causes them to limp and accumulate lameness-related collateral damage is not necessarily the perceived pain, but the damage suffered, which results in weakened and hesitant movements. This is why, when you are emotionally hurt, numbing your pain by denying it or taking various substances may temporarily relieve the pain, but it likely won't eliminate the behavior induced by the injury, nor the acumulation of collateral damage, nor will it cure the wound.

• In real life, when injured, people tend to limp to the extent and for as long as their injuries have not healed yet and are still painful, not for as long as they remember the pain or the details of the accident that caused the damage and the limp. Therefore, the right way to deal with an injury is to do whatever is necessary to heal it, not to learn to live with it better.

• An arachnophobiac who panics when he encounters spiders, will react fearfully to spiders, regardless of whether he encounters them in real life, in his dreams during sleep, or under hypnosis. Under hypnosis, your feelings* and emotional reactions will always mirror your real-life reaction patterns. Therefore, once someone who was once arachnophobic is able under hypnosis to touch or pick up a spider without fear—a gesture that would once have triggered a panic attack—they will likely never again experience a fear of spiders, either in dreams or in real life.

• In real life, you only need to learn to ride a bike once. Once learned, our skills and reaction patterns are stored in the subconscious, and when needed, they are deployed and managed by the subconscious mind as reflex actions. Thus, the unpleasant emotional reality you are facing is more an involuntary projection into your daily life of the unpleasant emotional accumulation of your past, than an intentional, cognitively driven behavior. Therefore, in this approach, you'll have to identify and uproot the worst of your unhealed memories that are involuntarily projected into your unpleasant daily reality.

• After your Somatic Hypno-therapy, you will feel as if your heart has calmed down or completely forgotten the stressful, anxious, traumatic, or painful component of unpleasant events from your past, while your memory retains the factual details intact. By mentally revisiting the factual events of your past traumas, you will feel serene, watching them like a movie, as if your traumatic experience took place a long time ago and time has erased the negative feelings* associated with the events you have been working on.

• By releasing the patterns of your overreactions due to past traumatic memories, you will change your perception of those past experiences, which in turn will readjust your daily life reality so that you will be able from now on to think anything you want about the once troubling events, and your thoughts will no longer awaken your old, once painful, disturbing feelings. How is this even possible?

According to contemporary scientific models, emotions are complex experiences leading to  coordinated changes  across physical (somatic), mental, physiological (neuroendocrine), and behavioral response systems. Thus, emotional responses always have a sensory experience - called the physical or somatic component, a cognitive mental component (the meaning the brain makes of emotional feelings), and a chemical component (the neuroendocrine changes). Because these manifestations are coherent, you can control your emotions by controlling either the physiology (chemistry) of your brain, the associated thoughts (the mental experience of emotions) or by controlling the associated emotional feelings (the physical experience of emotions).

While most approaches to emotional wellbeing focus on the mental experience of emotions – which is the cognitive reading or mirroring of emotional feelings, Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses exclusively on the emotional and somatic feelings* – which are a sort of sensory or physical presence in your body. Since your emotional feelings are a coherent component of your subconsciously driven emotional responses, by altering or suppressing the emotional feelings (the somatic component) associated with an unpleasant emotion, one breaks the coherence of the emotional experience. Thus, the cognitive reading (mental understanding), the physiological manifestations, and the negative behavior associated with the disturbing emotion will change accordingly.

The large variety of contemporary behavioral theories helps us understand that despite the many fundamentally different philosophies of approach and therapeutic protocols used to modulate unwanted emotions, there is no scientific contradiction between psychiatric, psychological, and naturopathic approaches. Each of the above approaches focuses on only one of the three manifestations of emotions, not because one particular manifestation has been scientifically proven to be the source of the other two, but because all emotional manifestations are coherent! For an emotion to manifest, the three inter-conditioned experiences must manifest simultaneously!

This is why, although all therapeutic approaches to emotions aim to control unwanted emotions by disrupting the coherence of the emotional experience, psychological approaches focus on the cognitive (mental) component, psychiatric approaches focus on the physiological component, and naturopathic approaches focus on the somatic experience. A somatic hypnotherapist should focus more on what you feel than what you think about your problem. Somatic Hypnotherapy helps you change the patterns of your intrusive thoughts and unwanted behaviors by helping you change your feelings and your mindset. Because behavioral responses are modulated by the perception rather than the observation of objective reality.

The holistic or mind-body concept of healing the human being as a whole, rather than treating individual diseases, is ancient. What is now called "hypnotherapy" has been known to exist in almost all ancient societies. Although the term "hypnosis" has only been used since the 1840s, many priests, shamans, healers, and medicine men began using this technique, or some form of it, centuries earlier. There are written records of hypnosis dating back 5,000 years in Mesopotamia and Egypt and 2,500 years in ancient China and Greece.

This practice has been kept alive by many traditional healers, priests and shamans, as well as famous practitioners such as the Persian physician Avicenna, the Swiss physician Paracelsus, the charismatic Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud, Dr. Gustav C. Jung and Dr. Milton Erickson - the founder of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, and by many other famous doctors and hypnosis enthusiasts such as Dr. John Elliotson, Dr. James Esdaile and Dr. James Braid - who coined the term "hypnosis" in 1843 and described Traditional Hypnotherapy in terms of an holistic empirical medical approach.

Although some health professionals use several types of hypnotic induction as integrated tools in different approaches, there are no similarities in terms of their philosophical approaches or therapeutic protocols between Somatic Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy, and Psychiatry - except for sharing some concepts. While most approaches to emotional well-being focus on thoughts, Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses exclusively on emotional and somatic feelings - which are sort of a physical presence in your body. You feel them as physical sensations, including butterflies, heart palpitations, sweating, dizziness, shortness of breath, knots in your stomach, chest pressure, body tightness, body pains, smothering sensations, restlessness, or a sense of impending doom.

The practice of Somatic Hypnotherapy emerged from Traditional Hypnotherapy, from which it inherits an ancestral pragmatic approach to wellness and health, adding to it the rigor of the scientific methods of several visionary scientific models of human behavior that it integrates, in particular the Somatic Markers Theory developed by the American neuroscientists Prof. Dr. Antonio Damasio and Prof. Dr. Joseph LeDoux, the concept of coordinated changes across somatic,  physiological and behavioral response systems known as emotional coherence, the theory of ritual healing, and the theory of morpfic fields. Various archaic forms of Somatic Hypnotherapy are popular in Eastern Europe, where they are known by various local names.

Some might wonder how come they have never heard of the above-mentioned theories, despite their excellent academic background. Well, it's good to know that, by its very nature, science is never settled and rarely reaches scientific consensus. Not to mention that the purpose of school is to make people literate, teach trades, and produce disciplined professionals, and not necessarily to make them fulfilled or happy. Steve Jobs didn't learn to code at the art school he dropped out of, nor did Henry Ford learn mechanics at school, as he never went to school at all, just as Warren Buffett didn't study hedge funds in college. Intuitively, based on scientific models that were controversial at the time, they, like many other open-minded visionaries, invented their field of excellence.

The core idea of Somatic Hypnotherapy is not to teach you how to better manage your problems, but to help you improve your life by fostering change, According to this approach, decisions about daily life are rather the result of impulses triggered by instincts, habits, and emotions, than by rational choices - even though, as long as strong emotions are not involved, people are likely to act logically and rationally. The hallmark of Somatic Hypnotherapy is a process of neuro-linguistic modulation which is a very special way of speaking to your subconscious mind using metaphorical language that appears to be a regular conversation, clearly understandable, and very precise in its healing intentions.

The hypnotic suggestion within a hypnotherapy framework is the hallmark of any type of hypnotherapy. Unlike conventional hypnotherapy approaches which focus on reprogramming your mind by adding new layers of positive feelings to your lingering fears and traumas, Somatic Hypnotherapy is all about deprogramming your mind of stress, trauma and anxiety by releasing the associated disturbing emotional feelings and thereby reorganising the present reading of your past unpleasant events. This therapy works with your world model and involves you in the therapy process so that changes are easily accepted and long-lasting.

Although Somatic Hypnotherapy uses verbal cues as a specific tool, it does not rely on your hypnotist's fancy speaking ability, but on his ability to understand how the subconscious mind works. Somatic hypnosis has nothing to do with stage hypnosis, nor is it a magic trick. Those who practice it do not have the slightest supernatural power over you. Their only "magic" is that they know how to put their techniques, talent, and passion at your disposal to allow you to access and use the immense resources of your subconscious mind.

This approach relies on the experience and talent of the practitioner, but the results are largely determined by his solid understanding of human nature and how the human mind works. However, the hypnotherapist cannot take credit for your healing because he is not the one who heals you. His work consists mainly of guiding you to activate your inner self-healing resources.

Besides skills, it is the talent and passion of the therapist that can make the difference between endless therapy sessions and a brief professional therapy with constantly good results**. Negotiating with your subconscious the changes you want to experience is more of an art than an exact science.

Whatever your fear, pain, or other issues may be, don't allow it to cripple your life.  Contact me and book your appointment today!

The "No Results - No Pay" principle guarantees my integrity and applies to all my therapies.***

As stress and anxiety are most likely the leading cause of your issues, before filling in the appointment request, please self-assess your anxiety online and make an informed choice.

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Disclaimer: The content of this page reflects the opinion of its author, is provided for educational and general informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. I do not make any diagnoses according to recognized classifications (DSM-5, ICD-10) and I do not interfere in any way with ongoing treatments.

If you are already under medical care or treatment, follow their advice and treatment. I am not a doctor or licensed psychologist in Quebec; therefore, I cannot establish or continue a treatment based on your diagnosis. If you decide to consult me, be prepared to tell me what is bothering you and how you feel about it. 

For any medical emergency, call the Info-Santé service by dialing 811.

*In Somatic Hypnotherapy, the terms "feelings" and "emotional feelings" are often used interchangeably and refer to sensory experiences perceived onto or within the body, assessed, interpreted, and integrated through interoception and conceptualized by the rational mind as "emotions." - which is consistent with their traditional, biological and medical meanings, but differs considerably from the meaning of the term 'feeling' in cognitive psychology, where it often converges and merges with the term 'emotion'.

**The results may vary from person to person.

***In other words, if at the end of your session you don't see any improvement in the issues addressed in therapy, I won't accept your money!

Somatic Hypnotherapy - 186 Sutton Pl, suite 104, Beaconsfield, Montréal, Qc, H9W5S3