Accelerated Hypnotherapy
Talk therapy is helpful. But what else is available?
As a long-time published writer, I know for a fact that words are important. And often over-rated. Sometimes words obscure what’s really going on. In hypnotherapy, we use words to get beyond words.
Our inner resources have served us all our lives. They’ve enabled us to survive, usually to thrive. But we often forget what those resources are, or experience them as being bizarrely, frustratingly out of reach. We all need help, at times, to remember and re-connect to them fully, brain-body-spirit.
Do you need courage for your next big step? But find ‘something’ gets in the way?
I invite you to do a little experiment right now: Think of how you learned to walk, once upon a time. And forgot. Do you remember how complicated it was, how many times you fell down, how many times your own feet got in the way?
None of us remember the complexity of that process. You forgot how you learned to walk. Yet it’s a profoundly complicated undertaking. Each large, small, attempted, failed and ultimately successful step still resides in your unconscious memory. When it comes to our other challenges, the solutions—the knowing how—also resides in your unconscious mind.
Often people already “know” logically what the solution or next step is. Why is it so hard to take it? Let’s find out by using trance and self-investigation.
Trance is a natural state that we all slide into occasionally: think ‘staring into the middle distance.’ Think taking a walk and ‘suddenly’ arriving at your destination. Think listening to music, day-dreaming. Or even doom scrolling, another hour wasted!
Hypnotic trance, though, has a clearly defined purpose and goal, and I guide people into it in order to access their deeper minds, both resourced and ‘blocked' states. In trance, it becomes much easier to get out of our own way.
At the beginning of my long hypnotherapy sessions, I teach applied neuroscience skills, showing you how to take good care of your brain and facilitate the hypnotic process. Self-connection is one of the least talked-about “goals” of therapy. That’s what a healthy brain gives us: self-empathy, lowered reactivity, and easier access to our internal resources (like physical and mental feelings of calm, a sense of patience, sound decision-making, and ways to calm ourselves when we get upset or triggered.)
Then you can choose to extend that empathic self-connection outward, into the circle of your relationships to other people, to your work and play, to your communities, even to your ancestral history. I work with the whole brain-to-body-to-emotional world story. People often avoid therapy for years because it’s hard. With me, it's also fun, funny, & creative, an unfolding of deep intelligence and practical resource.
Are you ready to take the next step?
Please get in touch.
My Style (as Therapist and Human)
I’m down-to-earth, warm and empathic. I experience (and praise) the sentience and ‘feelingness’ of the Earth, animals and plants every day, and often bring these beloved beings and helpers into my healing work.
I treat the whole person, and I bring my whole self, in a bounded professional way, to this work. Brain-body-spirit—it’s all here. These three braid us together; they connect us to those who have gone before and to those who will come after.
Like you, I’m a flawed human in a complicated, dazzling world. Vocation-wise, I’m a therapist and writer, a mom and a wife. I’ve been a mentor, professor and coach to creative people for over thirty years.
A lifetime of practicing yoga and Buddhist forms of meditation give me respect and curiosity for our innate wisdom, as well as a love and respect for the old cultures, languages and peoples who discovered and refined these wisdom practices.
I bow to my teachers living and ancient who have shared their gifts with me and with countless others.
Clinical expertise and ethical care are fundamental to my therapeutic work and my always-ongoing professional training.
Cultural awareness, respect for sexual and racial diversity, and anti-racism are essential parts of my lifelong experience and continued learning in community. Some of that education has been here in Toronto, Ontario; a lot of it has been out in the world (Greece, Thailand, Myanmar, Spain, France, Iraq.)
I often work with the creative and gifted. Fellow empaths find me, especially those whose empathy has been co-opted by others: parents, self-involved friends, family members, institutions.
I often work with the creative and gifted. Fellow empaths find me, especially those whose empathy has been co-opted by others: parents, self-involved friends, family members, institutions.
Different people in several cultures have taught me the art of listening and looking. Though my training has been in English, I speak fluent Greek, Spanish, French and proficient Thai. Let me know if you would like to explore the use of these languages in session.
If you would like to make a preliminary appointment, please send me a note using the form below and I will send you my booking calendar. At the moment I practice mostly online (through Zoom).
When we succeed in shifting painful old patterns or limiting beliefs, we change our brains. Plenty of research now proves this.
Areas of Specialization
Accelerated Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy may provide a profound brain-body-spirit shift, a fluid often un-imagined movement into a new sense of possibility, even grace. This shift may come about when we work directly with the unconscious parts of the mind.
ACH usually focuses on one particular problem.
I offer one to three long sessions (duration of 2-3 hours) to help clients’ “solve” this problem, which may be a phobia, a compulsive habit, a specific relational pattern, or a particular limiting belief. Problems hold hands with other problems, so various breakthroughs / changes in old patterns are a common result.
These sessions are longer than regular therapy sessions to facilitate the deep dive that’s part of working with the unconscious mind. The cost for this service is a significant financial investment.
Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy (OEI) for PTSD, Anxiety, and “Stuckness”
OEI is a somatic and brain-focused modality developed by Audrey Cook and Dr. Rick Bradshaw in Vancouver, Canada. Because it’s a somatic therapy, it pairs well with hypnotherapy.
In my ACH sessions, I teach clients to use their eyes (along with body and breath awareness) to calm and even resolve intrusive traumatic memory, anxiety and compulsive states.
When triggers and emotional overwhelm related to trauma and anxiety arise, people have the OEI tools to calm themselves and feel stable again.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Of course. Trauma is not a prerequisite to working with a therapist. We can explore your needs and desires in various ways. I will listen. We will talk. We all have bodies, though, so somatic awareness and even some movement usually comes into the equation in my approach to counselling. Our emotions and our stories live in our bodies, sometimes without language, so I invite your body to communicate, too.
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In OEI, the therapist helps the client bring awareness to their body, their breath and their eye movements in an effort to track symptoms of dissociation, fear, sadness and bodily sensations associated with PTSD and intense anxiety. Working with the eyes can have a powerful effect on the brain and nervous system. I ask the client to uncover and cover their eyes, one at a time, as we move through a series of questions about physical and emotional sensations.
Over several sessions, by gently and slowly guiding a person to observe and experience different states related to visual and somatic (body) memories of past trauma, I help the client to process and integrate various memories and sensations. This processing and integration helps to resolve PTSD symptoms or at least make them more manageable. I teach my clients how to use OEI on themselves.
Neuroscience research, aided by MRI scan technology, now shows how traumatic emotional memory—even if we don’t recall precise scenes and people, but only feelings--affects different parts of our brains. Because of the close eye-to-brain-connection, someone who has experienced trauma sometimes ‘sees’ and feels emotional states differently through one eye or the other.You can research OEI further at: sightpsych.com/faqs-oei
Under the Home Page tab on the website above, you can also watch a Ted Talk of Dr. Rick Bradshaw explaining some of the neurobiological theory behind OEI as well as several therapeutic techniques.
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Our understanding of trauma is more complex and generous than it was even a decade ago. A traumatic experience doesn’t have to be loud and violent to leave a lasting negative effect on a human being. We are resilient creatures, but our big, complex brains make us vulnerable to intense and frightening stimuli.
Bullying at any age, ‘benign’ neglect in childhood, physical or emotional incest, repeated verbal aggression, abandonment by a friend, friend group or partner—all of these may leave people wrestling with intense traumatic stress that others may not understand or fully appreciate.
Trauma in childhood often means that separations and abandonments in adulthood may be experienced as intensely traumatic all over again. Clinical diagnoses can be important, even life-saving, but you are the expert of your own life. Each of us know when we feel broken, damaged and deeply hurt. I do not diagnose: diagnosis is outside the scope of my work. However, my work does not depend upon a clinical diagnosis of PTSD. I supply the list below to help anyone who is struggling to put words to their symptoms. One thing we do know is that trauma affects the language-processing areas of our brains—so finding language for the feelings of traumatic experience can be a challenge and, when accomplished, a relief.
Common PTSD symptoms include but are not limited to:
family of origin disconnection and high conflict
sexual and intimacy difficulties in romantic relationship, including inability to commit or meet a commitment-making partner
depression, persistent fears and phobias, extreme nervousness, uncontrollable worrying
anger management difficulties, feelings of rage
periods of daily crying, often due to feelings of isolation and abandonment
hypervigilance and heightened startle response (you become viscerally expectant of and frightened by loud sounds or sudden movements)
insomnia and nightmares
dissociation (a sense of not fully inhabiting your own body or ‘disappearing’ under conditions of stress)
nervous system dysregulation (the experience of physical or emotional overwhelm by external and internal triggers) and freezing or numbing of certain body parts.
intrusive traumatic memory even if the individual cannot ‘see’ exactly what happened
eating disorders, addictive behaviours, substance addictions
conditions now linked to ACES—Adverse Childhood Experience—such as hypertension, fibromyalgia, obesity, depression and others
Addiction is often a strong indicator of PTSD, though not always. Sometimes addictions are habits that we just can't get a handle on. Hypnotherapy can be an effective way of treating addiction, though I haven't specialized in the treatment of addictions. Gabor Maté asks wise, empathic question, “Not why the addiction, but why the pain?”
While I work with clients who have PTSD symptoms and addictive behaviours, I prefer not to have sessions with patients who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Rates
At this time, for regular hourly therapy, my practice is full. I’m accepting only long session hypnotherapy patients; I provide follow-up care for hypnotherapy patients ($250/hour)
I accept e-transfer and Paypal.
For hypnotherapy patients, I offer a 30-40 minute Discovery Call by phone or Zoom.
Interested in working together?
Contact Karen directly to begin your journey.