🍦💃 Yogurt Aisle Breakthroughs

Jesse recently worked with a performer who had been through the ringer. This individual was nearly 50 and had recently experienced a significant career crash. They had moved from Vegas to Atlanta, hoping for that big Marvel movie break, but it did not pan out. They ended up back in Florida, living with their parents, and feeling like they were far too old to be starting over.

When we finally sat down for a hypnotherapy session after months of building rapport, the breakthrough was explosive. This client came back the next week and told Jesse they were literally dancing in the yogurt aisle at the grocery store. They felt 20 years younger. They even started telling everyone that Jesse was a wizard.

As a therapist, you would think Jesse would be doing his own victory dance, right? Instead, he felt that familiar weight in his stomach. When a session goes poorly, you can just pedal through it. But when a session goes that well, the bar is suddenly set at an impossible height. You start wondering how you can possibly top it or even just meet that expectation again next week. That is the paradox of clinical success: the better you do, the more like a fraud you might feel.

Zac has seen this on both ends of the extreme. Whether a session is a massive failure or a roaring success, the principle is the same. Clients often want to look at us and say, “You did this to me”, or “You fixed me”. As tempting as it is for our egos to accept that wizard hat, it is a dangerous trap.

Zac once worked with a client who had been stuck on a specific trauma for 20 years. After we finally did some hypnotherapy, they came back and announced they had simply decided that the trauma did not bother them anymore. They actually told Zac that it was not the hypnotherapy at all.

In that moment, Zac had a choice. He could have pushed back and said, “Wait, you were stuck for two decades and we did two sessions of hypnosis and suddenly you are fine? That is a happy little coincidence!”.

But that would have been Zac trying to affirm his own ego. Instead, we have to recognize that we are just creating the container. We create the space, but the client does the work.

If you are just starting to use hypnotherapy in your practice, you might worry about your clients being “hypnotizable” or fearing mind control. Jesse handles this during the induction by giving the client total permission.

He tells them that their mind might speed up or it might slow down. They might feel heavy or they might feel incredibly fidgety. By validating every possible response as the “exact response you need in this moment,” you remove the fear of doing it wrong. Jesse often uses a metaphor of a house: just an open door that the client can choose to enter when they are ready. This keeps the locus of control exactly where it belongs: with the client.

This brings us to the most important thing we talked about today. Zac and Jesse both believe that nobody does anything without a positive intended outcome. Even the “bad” symptoms: the anxiety, the depression, the terrible boundaries: they all have a positive goal behind them. They are just the wrong way to achieve that goal.

Take Jesse’s client again. She was frustrated with her “gullibility,” which was really just an incredible openness to the influence of others. As a performer, that openness is her talent and her strength. Her subconscious was simply crying out for safety for that openness.

Jesse used a metaphor in her next session to help her hold two truths at once. He had her visualize herself as an open, soaking infant, but also as a curmudgeonly old woman. The old woman was bitter and angry because she was the one who knew how to protect that infant. You can be both. You can be the fertile field and the king who builds the walls.

We see so many young interns who want to discharge a client the second they start feeling better. Please, do not do that. It is not about keeping them forever, but we cannot send them out into the world thinking they are “fixed”. If they hit the next predictable obstacle and they do not have the wisdom to manage it, the self-doubt will come rushing back.

Stop trying to solve the behavior and start recognizing the goal that the behavior was created to achieve. We have a friend who tried to start a business once, and after a single trial run failed, they wanted to throw the whole thing away. That was just an avoidance of the feeling of failure.

Clinical work is tough, and success can be just as stressful as failure. But if you can help your clients find the healthy version of the goal they are already trying to reach, you are doing the real work.

Let us know where you are feeling stumped. Why is your client doing that weird thing? Let’s brainstorm the healthy goal together.