How does it work?

            Hypnotherapy is a brief and highly effective holistic approach that uses hypnosis to alleviate a wide variety of emotional, behavioral, or somatic problems of emotional influence or origin.

Somatic Hypnotherapy is not simply an improvement on existing methods. It is a foundational reorientation of emotional healing — shifting the field away from cognition-centered coping and control strategies, toward embodied resolution. This makes it both a paradigm shift and a genuine game changer. This approach aims to solve the problem rather than help you manage it or understand its possible causal mechanism. The details of what actually happened in your past are therefore not of great interest to a somatic hypnotherapist — they are not essential to helping you solve your problem.

This is not a mystical claim. It is the logical consequence of what the science already says: if emotions have three coherent and equally valid components, then targeting the somatic one is not fringe — it is simply the most direct route! Nobody debates orthopedics.

What Somatic Hypnotherapy actually does

Most often, what prompts people to seek help in hypnotherapy are disturbing or painful emotional or somatic feelings*, intrusive thoughts, or various unwanted behaviors induced by traumas, stress, or anxiety. Several therapeutic approaches inspired by behavioral theories aim to disrupt thoughts that arouse unwanted feelings* — by distracting and refocusing attention on enjoyable activities, or by mentally controlling the pattern of thoughts. Which makes sense: if you could stop thinking about what is bothering you, there would be no more negative thoughts to trigger the associated unwanted feelings*, and the unwanted behaviors induced by those feelings* would end.

Now imagine how extraordinary it would be if you could think and do whatever you wanted about the unpleasant memories of your worst past experiences or future projections — and your thoughts would no longer arouse any of your formerly disturbing or painful feelings*. Because this is precisely what Somatic Hypnotherapy can help you accomplish. At the end of your therapy — one session, three at most — you will feel as though your heart has been relieved of, or has completely forgotten, the stressful, anxious, traumatic, or painful component of the past events we worked on — while your cognitive memory keeps intact the associated images and a clear understanding of the facts. You will feel healed, at peace with your past, and confident in your future.

Your emotions are not only the most important aspect of the quality and meaning of your life — they are the most undeniable proof that you are a human being in search of happiness. What makes the difference between a happy, fulfilled life and an unhappy one is your predominant state of mind: the balance between the positive and negative feelings* you have accumulated throughout your life, which persist in your emotional memory and are unwittingly projected into the background of your current reality. Although you cannot change the past, you can still shift the emotional reading of your past experiences. What has the potential to transform every aspect of daily life is not the events themselves, but the perception of those events.

How emotions work — and why that matters

When they occur, emotions cause a measurable change in the state of your body, your physiology, and your brain. According to contemporary scientific models, emotions are complex experiences that produce coordinated changes across somatic, psychological, mental, and behavioral response systems. An emotional response pattern always has three inseparable components — a bodily feeling (the somatic component), a chemical response (the neuroendocrine component), and a cognitive component (the meaning the mind makes of the emotional feeling*). Since these manifestations are coherent, you can regulate an emotion by addressing any one of the three.

Emotional Coherence Theory, which views emotions as integrated, interdependent, and coherent experiences, along with neuro-linguistic modulation (NLM) and the ablative approach of Somatic Hypnotherapy, redefines emotional healing. The three components of every emotional experience are:

• Somatic (physical): Felt experiences perceived as body-mapped raw sensations — tension, knots, a lump in the stomach, pressure, heaviness, trembling, burning, or pain — constituting the biological substrate of emotional experience.
• Physiological: Autonomic responses such as accelerated heart and respiratory rate, adrenaline spikes, cortisol release, and other hormonal and physiological changes triggered by the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
• Mental (cognitive): Mental awareness of emotions, resulting from the continuous unconscious reading, contextualization, interpretation, and integration of bodily sensations as interoceptive signals — woven together with memories, meaning, and narrative — and conceptualized into fully formed emotions: I feel joyful. I feel anxious. I feel angry. I feel serene.

That is why, although all therapeutic approaches to unwanted emotions aim to disrupt emotional coherence, they each target a different component:

• Psychiatry is based on the concept that negative emotions can be regulated by controlling the physiological (neuroendocrine) balance. Psychiatrists prescribe psychoactive medications that, by chemically rebalancing the neuroendocrine system, can numb feelings* and calm the areas of the brain where negative narratives are born — thus changing thoughts, feelings*, and actions. The psychiatric approach breaks emotional coherence by targeting its physiological manifestation.
• Psychology is based on the concept that negative emotions can be regulated by addressing the associated negative thoughts. Psychologists use approved therapeutic protocols to correct the harmful thoughts associated with unwanted emotions — thus changing how people feel and act. The psychological approach breaks emotional coherence by targeting its mental (cognitive) manifestation.
• Somatic Hypnotherapy, like many naturopathic approaches, is based on the concept that regardless of how emotions are determined, the most direct and efficient way to regulate unwanted emotions is to address the associated unpleasant emotional feelings* — and thus change one's state of mind, thoughts, and behavior. Once you no longer feel anxious, your once-anxious thoughts and behaviors immediately shift to follow your new emotional reality. The Somatic Hypnotherapy approach breaks emotional coherence by targeting its somatic manifestation — the felt experience itself.

When coherent, these three components work in synchrony to produce a unified emotional experience and response. Shifting one rebalances the whole. Consider how light exhibits a wave-particle duality: its material nature explains some of its properties, while its energetic nature explains others. Yet these two fundamentally different natures are coherent — they cannot exist without each other. Remove the photons from light, and its electromagnetic energy, and consequently light itself, disappears. And vice versa. Emotional experience works the same way: each component depends on the others, and releasing the somatic one sets the entire system free to reorganize.

This is why a practitioner of Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses more on what you feel than on what you think about your feelings*, or about your issues. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to stress, anxiety, trauma, or unwanted emotions — which explains why psychiatry, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, EFT, pet therapy, art therapy, mindfulness, yoga, craniosacral therapy, and many other approaches based on very different — yet each scientifically grounded — concepts, all exist and all find their clientele. The wide variety of contemporary behavioral theories confirms that there is no scientific contradiction between these approaches: each targets one component of emotional coherence, and because all components are coherent, each can produce genuine results.

What happens in the session

Emotional feelings* are pre-verbal bodily sensations generated by distributed autonomic, muscular, visceral, and endocrine activation patterns. These patterns arise both bottom-up from life events and top-down from memory reactivation. Through interoception, the brain continuously reads and interprets these bodily sensations as emotions. When such activation patterns remain undischarged, they regenerate emotional suffering regardless of cognitive insight. Somatic Hypnotherapy bypasses narrative cognition and engages raw bodily sensation directly — enabling autonomic completion, interoceptive decoupling, and memory reconsolidation.

The therapeutic process targets the persistent somatic activation patterns — often described metaphorically as "energy clusters" — that function as the true generators of emotional experience. Somatic Hypnotherapy helps you change the patterns of your intrusive thoughts and unwanted behaviors by helping you change your feelings* and your mindset. Consider an excessive fear of flying: my goal would not be to convince you that airplanes are not dangerous, but to help you reset the somatic component — the feeling* — of your irrational fear, so that you no longer feel an unreasonable dread of flying and never overreact to it again.

Contrary to popular belief, hypnotherapy is not a magic spell and it does not control your mind. A hypnotherapist uses talent and insight into the workings of the human mind to change the mind's perception of the emotional content of past events. It is like a magician who uses advanced knowledge of how human vision and perception work — not to alter the factual reality, but only the perception of reality. Because they are both rooted in science, both magic tricks and Somatic Hypnotherapy sessions are repeatable experiences with predictable results.

The somatic hypnosis practitioner helps you arouse and more clearly identify your unhealthy or painful feelings* — by recalling the events that may have initially provoked them — then helps you separate the factual memory from the negative emotional response, and finally guides you toward healing the negative emotional response pattern. With Somatic Hypnotherapy, you will not undergo a passive scripted therapy. You will be an active participant, overseeing your own process. My role is to induce and maintain your hypnotic state of mind and to assist and guide you throughout your therapeutic journey. It is this particular state of somatic hypnosis that facilitates a clear sensorial perception and then the healing process of your pain and other unpleasant emotional feelings*.

Using elements of Traditional Hypnotherapy and Transpersonal Psychology, updated with several interoceptive constructionist models — notably Dr. Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotion — I will guide you to identify and evaluate your unpleasant feelings*. Once identified, using Traditional Hypnotherapy techniques updated with ritual healing metaphors drawn from the Ritual Healing Theory, I will guide you to uproot and heal the unwanted feelings*. You cannot go wrong: your body, soul, and mind know how to draw on your self-healing resources. You will always be in control of the situation, master of your state of mind, and will keep vivid memories of the entire process. Throughout, I will be by your side, ready to help and guide you at each step of your change.

Why it works — the science and the spirit

From an academic perspective, by releasing stress, anxiety, traumas, and other unhealthy feelings* — which are all clusters of negative energy — the physical body creates a loop of positive feedback through the autonomic nervous system. This feedback can lead to a boost of energy and significant improvements in state of mind and in the symptoms of various medical conditions. From a spiritual perspective, since "Love comes from the Lord" and "there is no fear in love," healing is ultimately a self-healing process — one we experience when we are delivered from our fears.

For these transformative changes to unfold, you need to grasp — whether intuitively or through in-depth study — that emotions are not random thoughts crossing your brain. Joy, happiness, serenity, stress, anxiety, and misery are states of mind that manifest within as emotional feelings* — which your conscious mind senses, interprets, integrates, assesses, and conceptualizes as emotions.

The results speak for themselves — with the right approach, improvement appears immediately, almost as if by magic. Where "magic" means knowledge, understanding of the true nature of things, and know-how. Like treating a poisonous snakebite: if the antivenom is the right one, the improvement is immediate. Whether or not you fully understand how Somatic Hypnotherapy works may affect your ego, but it will not significantly affect your results — provided you are not in a state of psychosis, emotionally numb from drugs or medication, alexithymic, or intellectually unable to engage with the process.

Your subconscious knows the precise reason for each of your difficulties and can implement sustainable solutions adapted to your own needs and resources. Whatever your problems or your suffering — you do not have to remain there.

As stress and anxiety are most likely at the root of your difficulties, before submitting an appointment request, you are invited to self-assess your anxiety online and make an informed choice.

Your subconscious knows the precise reason for each of your problems and can implement sustainable solutions adapted to your own needs and resources. Whatever your problems or your sufferings, don't allow them to cripple your life.

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.

You can reach me by filling out the contact form below.

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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" - consistent with their traditional, biological and medical meanings, but differing considerably from the term 'feeling' in cognitive psychology.

**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!

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.

Somatic Hypnotherapy is an emotional health and wellness practice rooted in ancestral traditions and modern neuroscience insights. It does not constitute psychotherapy, medical treatment, diagnosis, or management of mental disorders, and is not intended to replace professional psychological or medical care.

On this website, the use of the masculine to designate people aims to ensure the fluidity of the reading and has no discriminatory intent.

Somatic Hypnotherapy - 186 Sutton Place, suite 104, Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 5S3, in the West Island of Montreal.