An Exciting (I Think) Announcement

In the seventies, while earning a degree in psychology, I found myself being held back by my hatred of math. Statistics was a required class, and I couldn’t bring myself to study. If I tried to wing my way through it (as I had with Algebra and Geometry in high school), I knew my GPA would suffer – a price I wasn’t willing to pay. I went to Dr. Irving Roy, a local psychologist, and asked him to use clinical hypnosis to help me move past my mental block.

With just one session I found myself eagerly attacking assignments, studying at every opportunity (including reading my text book while I soaked in the tub), and asking for extra help in order to gain a clear understanding of the course. Not only did I earn an A in the class, but when our instructor diagrammed the results of our final exam on the board, there was one grade in the 98th percentile -- surprisingly, mine. Need I say that I was unequivocally sold on the power of hypnotherapy?

Upon graduation, however, I married; and when my first child was born a year-and-a-half later, I dedicated myself to being a stay-at-home mom. Circumstances eventfully led me in a different direction -- toward a 20-year career as a legal secretary. When the time came for another change, I revisited my love of psychology and eventually earned my PhD, augmenting an interim doctorate degree in Clinical Hypnosis. I opened the first Evergreen office in 1992, my husband joined me in the practice in 2000, and in 2003 I was named Stockton’s Small Business Person of the Year. I immediately modified that title to reflect on our business, rather than on myself as an individual.

I loved helping clients, and the business flourished. A look at the bigger picture of hypnotherapy, however, disturbed me. I saw a growing number of schools of hypnosis “certifying” anyone and everyone who paid the registration fee, regardless of their actual prowess. I saw too many people practicing with little, no, or poor quality training, with no sense of professionalism, and with questionable ethics. (Hobbyists, dilettantes, and part-timers, I feel, are a disservice to the discipline.) In short, I watched the bar gradually being lowered -- until it reached a level where I decided to turn my focus from helping clients, to mentoring other hypnotherapists who wanted to follow in our footsteps to achieve the same level of success we experience, meeting the same standards we have set for ourselves. Mentoring was not a money-making endeavor for me, but my attempt to raise the bar, one practitioner at a time. This remained my area of focus until I co-authored a book dear to my heart, Charming Children, after which in January 2011 I chose to return to directly applying my training and skills in the clinical setting.

This is the long way around to my exciting (I think) announcement -- which is that I have officially come out of what might be termed semi-retirement. I am once again practicing psychology within the context of hypnotherapy, and am helping clients to the best of my abiity.