Hypnotism, if nothing else, has been largely misunderstood over
time. Its association with scary movies and mind control over
others has made it difficult for hypnotists today to convince
others that what they do has nothing to do with smoke and mirrors
and everything to do with helping people gain focus in their
lives.
Hypnotism, if nothing else, has been largely misunderstood over time. Its association with scary movies and mind control over others has made it difficult for hypnotists today to convince others that what they do has nothing to do with smoke and mirrors and everything to do with helping people gain focus in their lives.
But two South County hypnotists, both women who were exposed to hypnotism while in school, are finding that people are starting to become more open to what they see are lasting benefits through hypnotism, both physically and psychologically, even if their methods are nothing alike.
Hypnotherapist Jayne Marsh once was a young student on her way toward a career in interior design, but was struggling with exam anxiety when a friend recommended a hypnotherapist for her.
“It was quite successful for me,” said Marsh, who quickly was cured of her anxiety and when onto being an interior designer – at least for a little while until she felt the need to go back into hypnotherapy as a therapist in hopes of helping others who had psychological barriers to overcome like she did.
“Eventually I saw that it was a career that I could do well in,” she said.
Now 12 years into a career in hypnotherapy, including a year at her office in Morgan Hill, Marsh has completed the needed 300 hours of training in various areas of hypnotherapy to become board certified. She said she handles many different types of problems, including eating, smoking, chronic pain, exam anxiety, improved memory, self-confidence and improved athletic performance.
“This is a complementary tool if someone has a chronic condition, chronic headaches for example,” she said.
Marsh said that hypnosis doesn’t leave people under control of the hypnotist. It just helps them to focus on their problems.
“I try to make it very relaxing for people so they can slow down and use the mind’s innate ability to focus,” she said. “Hypnosis is a very natural state of mind, it’s a state of mind we enter every day without knowing it, like when we zone out driving, that’s an example. We don’t realize it. You can more or less go on autopilot.”
However, when the mind goes into this state, hypnotherapists can help reinforce subconscious messages.
“We can reprogram in a very positive way the messages from the mind to the body,” she said.
Marsh said her clients usually come in for three sessions, which are taped. She talks with her clients to understand their problems and then puts them into a hypnotic state by giving them relaxing messages and slowly putting them into a relaxed state. She then gives them positive messages to strive to eat low-fat foods or to not have the urge to smoke. She then gives them the tape to listen to during the week and keeps in contact with them about the effect.
“I highly recommend that people have the most success with a minimum of three sessions,” she said. “It’s a little more effective when you do a little at a time. My clients feel that they’ve reached a goal by themselves, and they’ve learned a lot as well.”
Many people fear being hypnotized because they think that they can be controlled or that they will tell their deepest, darkest secrets, but Marsh said this isn’t the case.
“You won’t say anything,” she said. “I’ve never heard anyone say anything to me while they’re hypnotized.”
Marsh also said that a hypnotist can’t control the mind of a person because they have to believe what they hear to actually act on it.
“We’re developing a relationship of trust,” she said. “A person’s value system is still there. If something was said to them that was just way off, they would just dismiss it.”
Marsh said that the sessions are focused on controlling “mind talk” or what is commonly referred to as “negative self talk.”
“Everything we do here is changing self talk to positive self-talk,” she said.
Marsh said that hypnotherapy can cost anywhere from $70 to $150 per session in the Bay Area, and her prices are on the lower end.
“I like to make it accessible to people,” she said.
While Marsh spends much of her time helping others with their current problems by telling them what to do now, Ann Barham, a certified regression therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist, takes people back in time to help them with deal with their problems.
Once her patients are put into a hypnotic state, Barham takes them back into another time by asking them questions, and often the stories people tell come from past lives or their early childhood.
“It’s not smoke and mirrors,” she explained. “Even if you don’t believe in second lives, the stories can be looked at as very rich metaphors for our problems. It can give them some purpose.”
Barham was raised as a Catholic, a church that doesn’t lend itself well to the idea of reincarnation (although Barham said that it appears more than once in the Bible), but she said she always felt that people may have past lives.
“Even from when I was a kid, I had a feeling that there was more than just this lifetime,” she said.
As Barham grew up and ended up going into the field of therapy, she was taking a class on therapeutic imagery in the early 1990s when the teacher called her up and used her as a guinea pig to show how some patients may have images that can be interpreted as memories from a past life.
When she was hypnotized, she began talking about a problem with her foot – she had such pain in it that she couldn’t put much strain on it. Barham began to talk about a memory of being an adolescent Asian girl who had her feet bound by her parents and the pain it caused. She said she tried to run away but was caught, and it brought shame to her family and she was sold into servitude.
After coming out of hypnosis, Barham said she felt a huge relief and that the pain in her feet had stopped.
“I was out playing tennis a few days later,” she said.
Barham continued in her field and became a marriage and family therapist, but six years ago she felt the need to look deeper into regression therapy.
“I thought this was great, and there must be more to it,” she said. “My patients seemed to be looking for more, too.”
She began training with two of the top doctors in the field of regression, Brian Weiss and Roger Woolger.
“I was extremely fortunate to be able to work with them,” said Barham, who then quietly opened up her regression therapy clinic in Gilroy. She started a Web site, www.pastlives.org, to tell interested people about her presence in town and began drawing people from Europe, the East Coast and Texas, but she said didn’t want to scare off locals who might not agree with her field of study.
“Gilroy is still a fairly quiet community,” she said.
Barham said she tapes her two-and-a-half-hour sessions for her clients, who pay $185 to find out about past lives and to try and solve inner issues.
“It’s a variety of things,” she said. “I have some who have relationship issues, good or bad; emotional issues; fears that have no basis in people’s lives, like going out in public or even spiders. Then there are people who want to know what their purpose is.
“It’s really fascinating, the stories you find,” said Barham, who added that some of her clients have talked about past lives as people in different time periods, genders and religions.
“You may go from a lifetime when you were rich and wealthy, and a life when they were quite poor,” she said. “It really breeds a lot more tolerance toward other ideas and beliefs. It gives us a bigger sense of who we are and the eternal soul.”
Barham said her clients have talked about their prior deaths and have seen themselves leave their body and gain perspective on those lives.
“I had a young man come to me in his 20s who had strange nightmares about him being in the Vietnam War, even though he was way to young to have been in it. He wasn’t even born during the war. He also had this five-digit number that kept running through his head.”
During regression, the man indeed began to talk about his experiences in a platoon in Vietnam and how his fellow soldiers were all killed. He said he was the only one alive, and he decided to drop his weapon and surrender, hoping his life would be spared or that he would die quickly. Instead, the man said he was tortured and died slowly in the hand of the enemy.
“What was running through his head is that he shouldn’t have thrown his rifle down and he might have had a way to fight and live,” Barham said. “The five digit number was from the serial number on his rifle. Soldiers had to memorize the last five-digits on their rifles. It was his dying thought.”
She said after meeting with her that his nightmares had stopped.
“He felt a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.”
Barham said other patients often have experiences where they know people in their current lives that they knew in their past lives.
“We tend to hang out quite often together, and we are born into the same families,” she said. “When you meet someone and you have a good feeling about them, you might be picking up the threads of people you’ve known before.”
