My journey from Adman to Therapist

It’s been just over three years since I stepped from advertising and film into therapy work.  Many who know me know me as the shorter blonde/grey chap of Bob & Doc’s and HYPtv fame. Bob being the taller, spindly, strawberry blonde longer-haired version of me. We shared offices, ideas and pretty much the same bladder for many years. (When you’ve spent so many hours with someone, you tend to get in lock step and everything synchronises.)

So I’ve been a writer, producer and general ad creative director for much of my career. It culminated, to some extent, in co-exec producing a movie called, ‘Us and Them’, which premiered at one of the world’s biggest film festivals in SXSW in Austin, Texas where it received some good reviews and a few awards.

But something was missing. For some while I’d hankered after something a little more, um...fulfilling, useful -  something more in line perhaps with my own interests, background and childhood struggles.

Finding Meaning

I’d completed an NLP, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching course back in 2003 which became nothing more than a comma in my career as I ploughed on with Bob & Doc’s, co-founding HYPtv and HYPvideo, raising funds, meeting great people, having a great time. Then a few years ago as the industry changed, and subsequent to our film, I decided to make the move into therapy more completely. I did another course (in Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy) and became an accredited Hypno-CBT therapist.

This fitted with my long-standing psychological, philosophical and spiritual interests. It also broadened my mind, aided my well being and mental health – and added to my previous qualifications in the field.

I think we all know, deep down, there’s nothing better and more uplifting than helping others, but sometimes that recognition takes time to sink in. I think it did for me, if I’m honest.

But if you can find something that helps yourself and others, then, bingo, you’ve hit the jackpot. You add meaning to your life, beyond just transient happiness.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the job I do now is better than anyone else’s, or more worthy - as everybody is contributing to someone else’s life in one way or another, but I can genuinely say that when I finish a session with a client, I feel a great sense of purpose and inspiration. Of course, often the issues I’m dealing with aren’t the most joyful and can be genuinely saddening and tragic, but there’s always a sense of sharing, of moving forward in some small way. Anyhow, that’s how it feels to me.

Coping and Acceptance

Helping people with anxiety, stress and insomnia has been my aim and speciality since the beginning of this journey. But I also help with fears, phobias and habits. After all, everything is linked, right? Even smoking and addictions and weight problems can be traced back to one anxiety or other.

Let’s face it, we all experience anxiety on some kind of spectrum. It’s how we deal and cope with the pressures we feel – from the society we live in, the background and expectations we’ve been brought up in, to our individual ambitions and drives.

I often say that Acceptance is a huge part of the healing process. Don’t ADD to the problems that life throws at us. And god knows we do! We’re really good at that as a species.

‘Mental Health’ is a term that’s been banded around for a few years now. It’s become something of a catch-all term. But it’s natural to be down occasionally, disappointed, disheartened. Even unhappy or insecure.  As sentient beings we need to feel and experience life with all its crap and loss and tragedy.

What we don’t want to do is make it a habit. Be overwhelmed consistently to the point of loss of hope, creativity and love.

The Multi-Crisis and what we have power over

Today we’re in a multi-crisis or meta crisis. As I write, in the UK and the west we’re surrounded by an energy crisis, high inflation, political uncertainty, the culture wars, social media pressures, Brexit issues, environmental concerns, war in Ukraine, nuclear threat, the incessant march of AI and job insecurity. Not to mention Covid, vaccine choices and post lockdown recovery. It’s an endless list. And I’ve seen and dealt with the effects.

So there are plenty of reasons to be anxious. But we can help ourselves more by not indulging the issues, watching too much news, hypnotising ourselves into the ‘what ifs’, over-focusing on the problems, overthinking, arguing amongst ourselves and thinking we should or can do something to change it all when, in most instances, we can’t, unfortunately. I’m a great believer in the idea that it’s best to start with oneself, get your own house in order, before you start on the outside world. That isn’t fatalism, or a call for apathy as I see it. It’s practical and realistic. There’s a lot of wisdom and truth in the ‘Serenity Prayer’. We need to really determine the things we actually CAN change.

Hypnotherapy and the stories we tell ourselves

So back to the work I do. And as primarily a hypnotherapist, most of it is around that hypnosis I mentioned. I often start by dispelling some of the misconceptions people have around hypnosis. The clucking chicken syndrome or the stage perceptions of people going into a forgetful trance state and doing ridiculous things.

Really it’s about the things we tell ourselves; often the disenabling, disempowering things we tell ourselves, the beliefs we have. We often imagine the worst. So as a hypnotherapist who works on anxiety, I find out what people are thinking, feeling. What behaviours they are doing. 

There’s a lot of self-hypnosis that goes on here because we tend to put ourselves into states of our own making by making up stories based around those ‘what ifs’. Or remembering the past - the times when we didn’t achieve x, y, x, or experienced something bad. We generalise, catastrophise and – make things worse. It’s a form of negative bias, which we seem to have innately written into ourselves.

Stories and our imaginations make up the world we experience. Science and quantum field theory is recognising the primary and fundamental nature of consciousness and how it shapes the world we see - and this has been extended into theories such as the Law of Attraction, manifesting and the like. There are some interesting ideas here that have been explored by biologists and scientists such as Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza.

My mission and teenage problems

So whilst our thoughts and our emotions aren’t often facts or truths, they influence our lives massively. And the good news is, we can change them. Firstly by becoming AWARE of them, and then starting to repattern them – with Hypnotherapy and CBT techniques and tools that are evidence-based which can help rewire our brains and develop new neurological pathways.

This is the area I’m interested in and work with in terms of Hypno-CBT.

My mission now is to help and inspire as many people to understand this thinking. To get the most out of themselves and their lives and to recognise that they are part of something fantastic. That inside them is something akin to genius if they can remove the blocks and beliefs that stand in their own way. That they can change the world if they start by changing themselves.

I also feel that younger people, teens, who are our future, may be suffering more than most and need our help more than ever.  The stats don’t make for great reading. Nearly three in five US high school girls reported feeling sad or hopeless in 2021 – 60% increase over the past decade. (Reuters) and as many as a quarter of 17-19 year olds are experiencing a mental health problem…up from 1 in 6 in 2021 (Mind). Many of my clients have been teens and I can tell you that anxiety in this demographic is a very real epidemic and cause for deep concern.

If you know anyone who might benefit from this article or my help, please share my details with them. Thank you.