Hypnosis Isn't Mind Control- It Puts You In Control!
SHOW NOTES
This one goes out to the skeptics, the deep thinkers, and anyone who's never been won over just because someone says "this worked for me." I used to think hypnosis was pure woo-woo, the same flavor as the call-in psychics and faith healers on TV, and as a naturally critical, highly intellectual person raised in an African household where everything was up for debate, I had no interest in exploring it. So how did I end up trained in it and using it with clients?
In this episode I walk through exactly what shifted, including the moment I realized I was in full control of my own mind the whole time, and how hypnosis turned out to overlap with the evidence-based tools I already use as a psychotherapist. I'll tell you what it actually feels like, what it can do for the beliefs you've been quietly mistaking for facts, and how to try a simple practice for yourself, free, right away.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro & Why This One Is for the Skeptics
Hi, I'm Linda, an emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
This one goes out to all my skeptics, all my deep thinkers, my critical thinkers, those that are not easily swayed or won over just because someone says this thing worked for me. You know, hypnosis is something that for a long time seemed very woo-woo to me. Like it just seemed really out there.
It just seemed like it had that flavor of the call-in psychic back in the 90s, like you would just pick up the phone and call, like Miss Cleo, I forgot what her name was. But it just felt like on the level of magicians and faith healers who live in big mansions and ask poor people to give them lots of money. That's what hypnosis felt like to me for a long time. I just didn't even really explore it or look into it, because what was the point? Like, it was just out there.
[01:27] Where My Own Skepticism Came From
Linda: I'm naturally a skeptic myself. And this is as a result of being, I would say, pretty highly intelligent, very intellectual. I also grew up in an African household. So everything was up for debate. Any thought you had, any idea you had, especially if it differed from any of the elders, it was debated heavily. And I had to fend for myself on any point where I thought differently, which I often did. So I'm pretty familiar with kind of breaking an idea down and being highly critical of it, and looking for all the weak points, and thinking, okay, there's nothing, there's no there there, right? This is empty of anything real.
And so for a long time, I didn't even, again, debate hypnosis, because I just thought there's no there there. What's the point of debating it? It wouldn't stand up to any amount of scrutiny. I also believed, as maybe most of you can relate, that if I can't understand something, then it must not be real. And it's easy to have this belief and not even realize that you think this way. But as I've gotten older, I've realized, well, this is completely untrue. Just because I can't understand it doesn't mean that it's not real. It just means that I don't understand it.
Now, if the promise of a technology or a tool or a technique is strong enough, promising enough, attractive enough, something that feels relevant to me right in my real life, then it's probably worth me taking some more time to explore it, learn about it, maybe even experience it for myself to see what all the hype is about. Is this a real thing? Are people just making it up? Let me find out.
With hypnosis in particular, I wondered for a long time if using something like that, doing a practice like that, would actually be at odds with my own personal faith as well. I just had a vague suspicion that it was something that was wrong, or that just didn't spiritually align for me. And this was really a projection, really an interpretation based on who I thought this was for, who I thought was doing it. And again, this was completely wiped away once I realized that I was actually in full control of my own mind.
That was the big thing, right? It came down to, am I just letting go of control of my own mind? That seems like not the best idea, not something I would choose. So when I learned more about it and realized that's totally not the case, that was when I had more of a willingness to see, well, let me try this out for myself and see what it's really all about. What is it actually like?
[04:37] From Skeptic to Trained Practitioner
Linda: So I can tell you, as one who came from all these things that I just mentioned, where I am highly critical, highly skeptical, want things to make rational sense, I came from there to having a willingness and openness to experiencing the thing for myself. And to the point where I then became trained in it and started doing it for other people, because I just thought, wow, this is beautiful. This is amazing.
And I want to preface everything else I'm going to say with the fact that I am actually a psychotherapist. I use lots of evidence-based treatments in the work that I do with my clients. That's, again, part of the whole skeptic thing. I really want to make sure that I'm using strategies and tools and therapeutic exercises that have been proven to be really effective, and to do no harm, because that's really important to me too.
So one of the funniest things, once I started looking into hypnosis and doing hypnosis myself, is that I saw how much overlap there was with some of the evidence-based tools that I use as a clinician. So I use a form of eye movement based therapy. Some of you may have heard of that. Some of you may have no idea what I'm talking about, and it really doesn't matter, you can look it up if you want to. But I use a form of eye movement based therapy, excuse me, I'm getting over a cold, called Accelerated Resolution Therapy, with my therapy clients. And hypnosis has so many indirect correlations to the way that I process things with my therapy clients. And I just thought, oh, isn't that interesting, just that synchronicity. It's just that the way that things that are highly effective, highly valuable, have this way of kind of overlapping with each other. It was funny to me. It was like a confirmation that, okay, we're on to something here.
[06:52] What Hypnosis Actually Feels Like
Linda: Anyway, so back to hypnosis and what it's actually like. Doing hypnosis is like going deep undercover into your own mind. It's like doing an excavation, right? Like at an archaeological site where you're digging up bones and fossils and old bowls and pieces of pottery, and figuring out how people hundreds, thousands of years ago lived, and how they built community, and what materials they used, and how they lived, how they died, how they birthed, how they loved, just by digging deep enough into the ground to pull all this stuff up. So with hypnosis, you go deep undercover into your own mind and do that excavation. And you pull up the roots of these negative core beliefs that have been driving so much of your life without you realizing it. And you get to look at them and examine them and see what's been shaping you all this time.
You can see what's been shaping, especially some of the most difficult patterns in your life. You can see it with this wild amount of clarity. When you use hypnosis, you see both the origins, again, how it's been affecting you, the parts that aren't even true, all of it, it becomes so much clearer. And it happens very quickly. It doesn't have to take weeks at a time of reflecting and journaling and talking with someone about it. You can just kind of go in there, and it can be very immediate. It's really wild.
Now, the even cooler thing is, it's not just the looking at what's wrong, or let me look at what's been hurting me. And that's interesting to some extent, but really, you're doing that because you want to solve the thing that's been hurting you. You want to solve the issue that's been getting in the way of resolving the lack of intimacy in your marriage, right? You want to solve the thing that's making you yell at your kids, even though you want to raise them differently than you were raised. So you get in there, you see the source, and then you can change so much of it.
When you're in that state of hypnosis, you're in that medium to deep trance state. It's called a trance state. It just means that you're really, really relaxed. And so you're able to access parts of your memory and your core beliefs that normally we have a lot of defenses against, like we don't want to go there. So when you get into that deep state of relaxation, it lets you go to the places that you're trying to go to, because you want to do something about it. So now you can develop this new relationship to a fear or a thought that's been dragging you down this whole time.
[09:40] What Would Change If You Let Go of the Belief?
Linda: Like, okay, wow. So think about this. What would it be like to no longer believe that you will never rise above a certain level in your company or in your business network? What would change if you no longer believed that you were unlovable, or unattractive, that you were too much, or not enough? What would happen if you no longer believed that? And what would you choose to believe in its place?
If you believe that you're too much because you get that feedback from people, they're like, oh, you laugh really loud, can you tone it down? Are you angry? You always seem angry in meetings. You don't speak up enough, I never know what you're thinking. You're too shy. Whatever the thing is that you tend to get, what would you choose to believe about yourself instead? And how would that new belief ripple across your entire life?
There are things that I believed about myself for my entire life that I didn't even question. It wasn't like I questioned it, it wasn't like I was debating it. There were things that I just assumed were straight facts. Come to find out that wasn't the case at all. Think about how much time and opportunity you could save if you decided to make changes with some of those false beliefs now.
I know that those beliefs that I was like, oh, let me see if I could address this, and hypnosis, let's see what happens, the amount of just space that opened up after I did that, it's hard to put into words. And until you experience it, it's just hard to put into words. But when I tell you that it has had ripple effects across all areas of my life, every time I've gone into that state and really processed something in that way, beautiful, like life-changing.
So I want you to not miss that opportunity to have that new experience with these beliefs, because so much of our core beliefs are what shape us and affect our day to day, the way we interact with strangers, loved ones, whoever, the way we make decisions on a daily basis, what we think is possible for us or not possible. So I would really love for you to have the opportunity to experience how profound the changes can be when you incorporate hypnosis into your personal development practice.
[12:29] Try It for Yourself
Linda: There are a ton of hypnosis downloads in my course, Self-Love Skills. I include a bunch of hypnosis recordings for very common problems that I find people often have, as well as some deeper level processing to help you make breakthroughs more quickly with things that have been making you feel like you're blocked, like you're stuck, like you're sabotaging yourself, all of that.
But before we get into the course, and that's something that you can totally go by and all that, I want you to actually head to the link in the description below for free resources. Because you can sign up and download a simple hypnosis practice right away that does a lot of clearing of negative thinking and beliefs. So it'll give you a taste right away of what it's like to gain greater control over your thoughts and the emotions that come from those thoughts. And you'll be able to see like, oh, wow, this is what it's like. It's not scary at all. No one has taken over my body. And also like, wow, I'm tapping into this deeper power and intuition within myself that feels pretty amazing. So I want you to experience that. Make sure you go to that link and try that out for yourself. Be sure to let me know what that was like for you. And happy listening. Till next time.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
[Editing Note: The Love Yourself Liberated! group program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
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