Practitioner notes by Tim Thornton, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Sydney.
When men in their fifties come to see me, they usually present with "stress". What's underneath that word is rarely one thing. It's a stack.
This is an account of a recent first session with a client. His name has been changed to protect his privacy; everything else happens as it happened.
Who is in the room
Ivan is mid-50s. A marriage of more than three decades is ending. Two adult children, one still at home. He and his wife love each other but aren't in love any more. The intimacy is gone. They both know it, and they both want to go their own way, and neither of them is the villain.
The problem is that he can't move forward even if he wants to. Ivan works in property development. The last few years have brought a perfect storm: legislative change, a tighter economy, and harder-to-secure finance. He has a tactical, strategic way of thinking (ex-military background), and he can see light at the end of the tunnel maybe three or four years out. But three or four years is a long time to hold his breath.
So he carries a stalled marriage he can't leave for financial reasons, a career under real strain, and the quiet grief of a family unit coming apart. Stress doesn't begin to cover it.
How I set up the work
Every first session primarily involves intake. I need to know the whole picture before I know which thread to pull. With a stack like Ivan's, this especially holds. Trying to work on "the stress" without knowing which piece drives it is a mistake.
So we talk. A lot of listening happens. A lot of questions happen. By the end, I have the landscape of what we're working with. Then, as I do with every first session, I take him into a short piece of hypnotic work so he can feel the state and I can see how he responds.
The body scan
Where does he hold this in his body? For Ivan, the stomach holds it—a pressure. When I ask what it feels like, he says, "Fear."
That is useful information. Fear in the stomach is a very different signal from grief in the chest or anger in the jaw. It tells me what the physiological state does, which tells me which approach will land.
One thing I notice early: Ivan doesn't present as a man without resources. He has strong self-belief. He can see a future beyond this patch. That matters. A client who still has access to their own agency has somewhere to stand while we work.
Radio control
I use the same technique with first-session clients: radio control. The client sits alone at a radio. The volume is the intensity of the negative feeling that they are dealing with. First, I ask them to tell me, on a scale of zero to 10, how loud the volume/feeling is. Then I ask them to crank it up to ten, sit with how unbearable that is, and, in their own time, wind it back down, even trying to turn the radio off.
Ivan's starting level is around eight. That's high. He winds it up then down and turns it off, which is striking given where he started. It confirms what I read from him in the intake. He has control available. He isn't drowning. He is swimming in a very rough stretch of water.
In-life regression: where the feeling starts
With control established, we move into an in-life regression. When was the first time he ever had this physical feeling? Pressure in the stomach. Fear.
Ivan goes back to age nine. Up to that age, he grew up overseas with his family, and his childhood sounds idyllic. The family was well off and happy, and the environment suited him and his brother. Then, at nine, they get pulled out of that life and sent back to Australia for boarding school. Their parents think it is the right thing to do for the boys.
Underneath the practical story sits a loss. A sudden, unnegotiated loss of place, people, routine, climate, the whole shape of a life. When I ask him where he first feels the fear in his stomach, he goes there.
What Ivan carries now isn't only his current situation. The current situation presses on an old loss that was never fully processed. For a man of his generation, boarding at nine leaves no chance to process.
What this tells you about the work
Clients often arrive thinking they have one problem to solve: the business, the marriage, the burnout. In the first session, what often comes up is that the current problem (trauma) sits on top of earlier ones; it's like a repeating fractal. The earlier one isn't the whole explanation, but it often gives the current one its weight.
I use a protocol called Rapid Core Healing, combined with hypnotherapy. It integrates Family Constellations (the systemic piece, our family of origin, what we inherit) with Emotional Mind Integration (EMI) (a structured method for emotional disturbance including anxiety, depression and panic). It is predictable, practical, and, in my experience with men like Ivan, it gets to the root of things quickly. This is the psychotherapeutic element of my work.
Ivan's first session gives me the thread. The next three or four sessions follow it.
If this sounds familiar
If you are in a stressful chapter of life and your body tells you it isn't just about the current situation, you are probably right. Hypnotherapy for stress and anxiety is one of the areas I work in regularly. The work finds the earlier piece and resolves it so the current pressure stops amplifying.
Book a confidential consultation or call 0424 079 690. In person in Sydney CBD or online across Australia.
This post describes the structure of a first session. The client's name is changed to protect their privacy. Hypnotherapy is a complementary approach and not a substitute for medical or psychological treatment where that is indicated. Individual results vary.
