The healing

        Healing is an innate process that brings positive changes — including repair of damage and injury, remission of illness, relief of symptoms, regaining lost energy, serenity, joy, and meaning in life.

One of the core premises of Somatic Hypnotherapy, as a holistic naturopathic approach, is that the body and mind have an innate capacity to self-heal. Your body knows how to rebuild broken bones, heal wounds, repair or eliminate diseased cells, restore physiological processes, fight infections, and preserve vitality. Your subconscious mind knows how to heal emotional wounds, restore spiritual and emotional balance, and help you achieve mental acuity, joy, and emotional serenity.

The goal of this approach is to help you trigger and maintain your innate healing processes. Although these healing processes are natural self-healing mechanisms, they are energy-intensive — and therefore cannot unfold when you are so emotionally drained that you can only survive. By releasing stress, anxiety, and trauma, and pain — which are enormous energy drainers — and by resting, you regain vitality. The body then creates a positive feedback loop via the autonomic nervous system, which can trigger a healing process that significantly improves your state of mind and the symptoms of various medical conditions.

Healing and your beliefs

The only catch is that even though healing is a self-healing process triggered by removing or correcting the causes of your problems, it cannot go against your will, your understanding, or your beliefs. You cannot move forward in total darkness unless you know what you are doing — or at least have good clues, or a strong belief that you are on the right path.

If you understand the academic or spiritual dimension of healing, or if you believe that everything in life is a miracle and you have already had your Somatic Hypnotherapy session — do not waste time reading any further. You are almost there. At this stage, keeping busy with living your life, avoiding denial and disbelief, and expressing gratitude for your extraordinary experience, while learning to listen to your soul and spirit, are the best practices to nourish your ongoing healing.

If you do not believe in "miracles" and still want to actively embrace your change, you must feed your rational mind's curiosity with a clear understanding of the healing process. Whether it is about healing bones or healing the mind, you will need to understand it, make sense of it, and nurture your ongoing healing — or at least welcome and protect it. No therapy can push your emotional healing beyond the limits of your beliefs about the nature of emotions and how stress, anxiety, trauma, and other unpleasant feelings* can affect your state of mind, behavior, and overall well-being.

If you think the pain from a broken bone is in your head and you do not see a doctor to align and cast the broken pieces, it could hinder the healing of the fracture. If you do understand what a broken bone is and go to see a doctor, the best your orthopedist can do is line up and immobilize the fractured parts in a cast — and let it heal. Wanting to heal, and understanding that you must avoid straining the limb while it heals, is your job. When it comes to emotional and behavioral issues, rather than the one-size-fits-all model that applies to broken bones, we are dealing with 82 different scientific models.

The harsh emotional reality you face is likely due to an unintentional projection of your accumulated negative emotional buildup into the background of your daily life. This approach aims to help you uproot your piled-up stress, anxiety, traumas, pains, and other disturbing feelings* you have accumulated over time. Living with negative emotional response patterns is like walking with stones in your shoes — it will hurt your feet in the long run, and healing these deep wounds cannot happen overnight.

After your first session

The above principles were the guiding philosophy behind identifying and uprooting the top layer of your negative emotional buildup — your most burdensome memories — during your first therapy session. Not only did we release the unpleasant emotional feelings* associated with those experiences, but we verified twice near the end of our meeting to make sure all those disturbing feelings* were gone for good. Right after your session, when you mentally review the once stressful, anxious, or traumatic events we worked on, you will be surprised to find that your emotional reality has already shifted.

Although you can still think whatever you want, the pattern of your emotional reactions and the feelings* you experience when reviewing the once unpleasant memories is a new reality. When you revisit the experiences we worked on, you will feel as though your heart has significantly eased — or even completely forgotten — the stressful, anxious, traumatic, or painful component of those events. All this while your cognitive memory keeps the related images and factual details fully intact.

Just a few days after your first session, the once unpleasant feelings* will have lessened so much that you may begin to wonder whether the issues we worked on were truly as difficult as they once felt. Not only are your once most burdensome memories now rendered linear — as though you were watching them from the outside — but many other unpleasant, intertwined, or even apparently unrelated memories are quietly dissolving, leaving room for fond memories you thought were long forgotten. In most cases, after your first Somatic Hypnotherapy session, you will not need to return for at least the next few years.

Even if "removing the stones from your shoes" has already shifted your emotional reality and triggered the healing process, you are probably still in the early stages of your recovery — and most likely still some distance from being fully free. Although you have been an active participant in the process I guided — the process in which the causes of your problems were addressed — the healing that ensues is a process for which you are now in charge. From this point on, the path of your recovery is shaped by any residual layers of resistance to change, and most significantly, by whether you are someone who believes that everything in life is a miracle — or someone who believes that miracles do not exist.

Your path forward

If you belong to the first group, you already know that no matter what you think, your real life always happens within your heart and spirit — and you become aware of your real life by listening to and trusting your feelings*. You came to see me because of your overwhelming unpleasant feelings*, understanding that what has the power to fulfill or jeopardize your life is, above all, what you feel. In your case, avoiding denial or disbelief of your extraordinary experience, and expressing gratitude for the immediate shift in your emotional reality, is by far the simplest and most efficient way to protect and nourish your ongoing healing.

Even if you belong to those who believe there is no magic in life, you will have no choice but to notice that at the end of your first session in Somatic Hypnotherapy, your emotional reality has changed profoundly. You will be intrigued to discover that when you mentally revisit the once stressful, anxious, or traumatic events we worked on, your memories will unfold linearly — without triggering any disturbing feelings*. The emotional change you will experience after your first session is so undeniable that you will have no choice but to acknowledge that your once most burdensome experiences we worked on are simply gone — as though they had never truly had a hold on your life.

Your rational nature — and especially your initial disbelief, fueled by previous failed attempts to solve the problem — may keep you from marveling at and accepting your change as a gift, even though that change is undeniably there. You are not delusional. Your change is real. You can feel it and you can touch it. Yet your disbelief may remain strong. Whatever its nature, it will not have the power to reverse what has already occurred. Your recovery may be more gradual — but it is still predictable.

You may find yourself searching deep within the memories of once disturbing events, seeking to revive feelings* that were once so present and so painful. You will repeatedly revisit the images and cognitive memories linked to your once unpleasant feelings*, and find increasingly that the once disturbing feelings* are no longer there. Now is the time to pause and realize that you are no longer the same — that your emotional reality has changed for good. This moment could be one of those rare windows of opportunity to shift your rational certainties and understand, intuitively, that intelligence was given to us not necessarily to explain life, but to welcome and enjoy the miracle of it.

Even though during your first session the time available allowed us to work only on the upper layer of your most burdensome memories, your emotional reality has already shifted — and the change is significant. This is your opportunity to appreciate what has happened and to begin practicing gratitude. If, instead of enjoying your change, you allow yourself to be drawn into doubt, disbelief, or denial, you will continue searching through your negative memories and eventually discover others that have the power to awaken unpleasant feelings*. In that case, I encourage you to request a follow-up session — and we will continue working on your goals by releasing a second layer of unpleasant feelings*.

And so, layer by layer, we will continue emptying your shoes of smaller and smaller stones — until we have released all the layers of negative emotions accumulated over your life. Or you can end this process of shedding layers entirely — by allowing your belief system to welcome the miracle of healing, or by taking the time to understand that "miracle" is nothing more than a term used to fill the gap in our understanding of an extraordinary phenomenon. There are many pages on this site to help you gain that rational understanding — demystified and explained in accessible language.

Your follow-up

Whatever happens — please do not forget to send your follow-up email within a few days of your session. To assess your results, all you need to do is mentally walk yourself through the once unpleasant memories we worked on, browse the images associated with each of the issues we addressed, and note how you feel in relation to each of them.

Please keep in mind that your feedback is an important part of your therapy and can have a meaningful impact on your ongoing healing process.

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

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

....................................

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.