How I Got Started: My First Hypnosis Session and What It Taught Me

Matt Sison, C.H. (Click on the author's name to learn more about him.)

I was recently asked about my first hypnosis session with my first my first real client. Here is the story and the valuable lesson that it taught me.

Well, it wasn't a paying client, but I sure did end up getting a lot of confidence from doing it. After taking Cal's class I was tentative but was more then enthusiastic about doing the work. I've never really been one to do something without first having that chatter box inside of my mind looking for what could go wrong. However, Cal's class left me with a knowledge and confidence that I could just do it.

This client had a non-malignant breast tumor at the age of 22. She'd been burdened with this tumor for 3 years despite all types of healing modalities ranging from both Western and Eastern backgrounds. So, why not I thought.

At that time I had what most hypnotists starting out have a fear of when using age regression... Is my client deep enough??? So, fortunately with Cal's 5-PATH® training I decided to do just phase I first to build up my client's confidence in trance but more importantly build up my own confidence. I used the Banyan-Elman induction and plop...boy did she drop. She responded so well, I decided to go for eye lock, arm catalepsy, and amnesia. I was about to go for negative and positive hallucinations but my fear of beginner's luck was settling in. Anyhow, from here I just anchored this trance followed by some Direct suggestions just like Cal had taught and emerged.

She felt amazingly well and said she didn't want to come out of trance...so, knowing how receptive she was to hypnosis I decided right there and then to go for a hand drop induction followed by amnesia of numbers as presented in the Elman. Perfect. Then Eye lock, arm catalepsy, and amnesia for the number 7.

From here I decided to move on to phase II....whew. I can't remember the details of that session but we followed the feeling to many events in here life and finally settled at what I thought may have been an ISE at 3 years of age. Again, I can't remember the details but it had to do with a perception of life that she must be the perfect little girl or she would not be able to feel her parents love...Well, parents (even with good intentions) sometimes have an expectation of their children that the child can never ever truly meet and this leaves a perception in the child that she's never good enough, creating an emptiness inside of her that needs to be filled somehow some way no matter how destructive it may physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually it can be. This was the case with this particular client. So, using the age regression techniques learned at Cal Banyan's Hypnosis center, I used informed child in Hypnosis to help her get the clarity of the events in her life as she released a wide spectrum of emotions.

This session ended taking up 4 hours of my time (mostly due to the inexperience of never doing this before), but when she emerged I could almost feel the glow radiating off her smile and tears of joy. We had one more session after that in which we moved on to Phase III of Cal Banyan's 5-path and never heard from her again until about 2 months later when she had called to tell me that her tumor had decreased to about 1/4 of its size. I found it unfortunate and dis-heartening that she never came in for phase IV as it is (in at least my opinion) the most important phase of 5-path. However, her not coming in for that last phase taught me a valuable lesson that has helped me out today. It has taught me that no matter how great a job you do, it will always be the client's responsibility to face her truth and until she's willing to face that truth completely then there's nothing I or anyone else can do to facilitate complete healing. This all goes back to the basics of the mind model we were taught in class that tells us that when the conscious and subconscious mind are in harmony you can literally do anything you want, but when they work apart from one another then problems and challenges arise.

Considering this was my first client, I was very pleased with the results and impressed with the technology that I learned and utilized from Cal's 5-PATH® training.