Hypnosis is the process of inducing a state of deep relaxation of the body and a focus of the mind, commonly known as a "hypnotic trance". The use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes to facilitate changes in perceptions, feelings, and emotional response patterns is called "hypnotherapy". 

There are two fundamentally different techniques used to facilitate these changes: The generative, or additive hypnosis - specific to the vast majority of Ericsonian and New Age approaches, which is about adding new states of mind, new feelings, or behaviours added on the top of old ones; and the subtractive, or ablative hypnosis - technique specific to Somatic Hypnotherapy, which is about removing or getting rid of whatever bothersome states of mind, feelings or behaviours that tend to poison one's life. In additive models, the "poison" remains in the glass, and water is added to dilute it. In Somatic Hypnotherapy, one empties the glass of one's poison.

Somatic Hypnotherapy is an innovative holistic approach that uses hypnosis to facilitate the release of unresolved trauma, stress, anxiety, anger, pain, and many other unsettling sensory experiences encoded as interoceptive signals, and manifesting as trapped feelings “within you.” These signals, perceived as body mapped raw sensations - such as tension, knots, lump in the stomach, pressure, heaviness, trembling, burning, or pain - constitute the biological substrate of emotional experience. Emotions are subsequently constructed when the conscious mind reads, interprets and integrates the bodily signals with memories, meaning and narrative, and contextualizes them into full-fledged emotions. Somatic Hypnotherapy intervenes at the level of these fundamental signals, allowing access to, processing and safe release of trapped feelings at their source, without requiring an understanding of causal relationships, or in-depth cognitive analysis.

More than an evolution of traditional methods, Somatic Hypnotherapy positions itself as a bold breakthrough and a true paradigm shift in emotional healing. This innovative approach consistently transforms lives with a level of effectiveness that exceeds expectations, establishing itself as a true game changer. Its unique blend of pragmatic methodology, embodied insight, and ethical commitment to results positions it as one of the most transformative therapeutic approaches available today. Clients frequently describe the experience as liberating, rapid, and life-changing. Emotional and physical burdens that felt immovable for years can shift instantly, as if by magic! Traumatic imprints dissolve, chronic stress and anxiety - related tension - both emotional and physical - are just released at a depth that clients did not believe possible. The outstanding outcomes are not rare exceptions. They are the norm!

How is this possible? The surprising power of Somatic Hypnotherapy lies in its conceptual clarity, and its ability to bridge the gap between the ancestral know-how of traditional healing techniques and the rigor of several scientific models it incorporates. This approach demystifies vague and ill-defined concepts, as well as the cryptic language that obscures true human nature and hinders the healing. For, even if nothing describes happiness better than metaphors, I doubt they can help overcome trauma, suffering, anxiety, or pain when life treats us harshly. Only by grasping the true meaning of words, and understanding what thoughts, feelings*, and emotions truly are, can we finally understand that what determines the quality of our life is what we feel within. Serenity, happiness, fear, anxiety, pain, misery, and everything else that truly matters in life are feelings we experience within, not intentional thoughts that cross our minds. 

While conventional approaches in hypnotherapy aim at facilitating changes in mindset and emotional response patterns by inducing new layers of emotional feelings* through "re-programming the mind", Somatic Hypnotherapy changes this paradigm, bringing the desired changes by "de-programming the subconscious" of unwanted emotional response patterns - through alleviating or completely releasing the related feelings. Let's say you are dealing with an irrational fear of spiders, or you overreact to a past traumatic event. In this case, instead of convincing you that spiders aren't dangerous, or that the traumatic event already happened and you should put it behind you - what you most likely already know - this approach aims to help you reset the irrational fearful feelings of spiders, or the feelings driving your overreaction to your traumatic memories.

Since this pragmatic approach is nothing like what you might guess or assume, it is only by reading this website that you can understand what Somatic Hypnotherapy is and what to expect during a therapy session. Somatic Hypnotherapy, as an interactive and highly personalized holistic process aimed at relieving various unwanted emotional and somatic feelings, is a coherent ritual healing process carried out in a very particular, hypnotically induced state of mind called "somatic hypnosis". Your therapist will not simply try to see what might come out under hypnosis; he follows a precise plan and knows at all times where he is heading with the entire therapeutic process, because this approach is based on a set of presumptions, paradigms, and well-established scientific facts, such as:

• Living systems naturally tend toward balance, health, and well-being. Just as your body knows how to heal a wound or mend a broken bone without conscious effort, your subconscious mind has an innate capacity to restore emotional balance and inner stability when the right conditions are present. The role of any holistic therapeutic approach is not to force change, but to support and reactivate these natural self-healing processes.

• As long as a person is calm, emotionally equidistant (serene), and not overwhelmed by strong sensations, they tend to think clearly, make rational decisions, and behave in ways that serve their long-term well-being. When intense or persistent feelings such as fear, stress, anxiety, pain, or emotional tension arise, they tend to, temporarily, disrupt the rational mind, and take over attention, decision-making, and behavior. This is not a weakness of character or a lack of willpower; it is a built-in survival mechanism. Strong feelings exist to signal that something needs attention and resolution.

• When the body is physically injured, it automatically deploys protective responses. A person will limp without thinking about it, not because they choose to, but because the body instinctively limits movement to prevent further damage and allow healing. The limping does not stop when the person understands the injury intellectually, nor when they try to ignore it. It stops only when the injury heals. Emotional injuries operate in much the same way. Persistent anxiety, fear, or emotional pain are signs of unresolved emotional wounds, not of faulty thinking.

• Numbing emotional pain, denying it, or trying to suppress it may reduce discomfort temporarily, but it does not heal the underlying issue. Just as painkillers can mask physical pain without repairing tissue damage, emotional suppression can hide distress without resolving the cause. As long as the emotional wound remains unhealed, the body and nervous system continue to react as if the danger or threat were still present.

• Emotional response patterns are learned once and then managed automatically by the subconscious mind, much like learned skills. You only need to learn to ride a bike once; afterward, the skill runs on its own. In the same way, emotional reactions formed during stressful or traumatic experiences can persist long after the original event has passed. These reactions are not deliberate choices. They are automatic responses rooted in the past and projected into present-day life.

• For this reason, unresolved emotional experiences often resurface as anxiety, overreactions, intrusive thoughts, or chronic emotional or physical tension. They are not sustained by intentional thought, but by patterns of emotional responses stored as feelings trapped "within" - whether you call that space your body, your soul, your spirit, or your nervous system. As these underlying feelings are released, associated patterns and emotional memory naturally reorganize, leading to lasting emotional regulation and persistent physiological relief.

• Somatic Hypnotherapy works by addressing emotions at the level where they actually operate: as bodily and sensory experiences. Thoughts are mental processes, but feelings are physical sensations perceived within the body. Emotions emerge from how the conscious mind interprets these sensations. While thoughts can influence perspective, they cannot, by sheer intention alone, create or erase emotional or bodily feelings. This is why simply “thinking positively” or trying harder rarely produces lasting emotional change.

• By focusing on emotional and somatic feelings directly, Somatic Hypnotherapy disrupts the automatic emotional patterns that sustain distress. Because emotions function as coherent systems - linking bodily sensations, physiological responses, thoughts, and behavior - changing the somatic component reorganizes the entire emotional experience. When the body no longer reacts as if the past were still happening, thoughts and behaviors naturally follow.

What makes Somatic Hypnotherapy truly exceptional is its pragmatism, its unwavering commitment to what actually works, relying more on ancestral wisdom and verifiable scientific models validated by direct experience, than on speculations or pure theoretical models. This approach follows a clear and pragmatic phenomenological approach: anything that can be described as a feeling (bodily sensation) that can be felt, located, modulated or released, becomes a reliable path to healing. Because feelings are at the origin of emotions, and pain remains a painful feeling, whether we describe it as physical, emotional or idiopathic pain. Add to this the surprising power of language and rituals as coherent semiotic systems, and the ability of neuro-linguistic modulation to shape not only perception and behavior but also various phenomena at the somatic and physiological level, and you will understand how this innovative approach not only covers a wide range of issues, but consistently delivers good results and often succeeds where other methods fail. 

Your patterns of emotional responses are not only the most significant ingredient of your identity and a major aspect of your quality of life, but they are also the most undeniable proof that you are not a soulless, heartless, and purposeless biochemical machine, but a sentient human in search of meaning, purpose, and happiness! Of course, everyone wants to be happy. Yet, since there are so many unhappy and sick people, daily reality does not necessarily stem from people's wishes and desires. Even if you can think what you want about your feelings, and through your willpower you manage to control to some extent the behavior induced by your emotions, I doubt that your willpower alone can put an end to your pain or anxiety, just by wishing it away! Because by all scientific standards, your feelings*, long-term memory, and emotional patterns are processed and regulated by the limbic system - a part of your brain that evades control of your conscious mind. If you're doubting, try to erase the feeling (sensation) of hunger, thirst, or pain, or try to selectively erase a disturbing memory or image and see if that works.

Of course, when you mentally review your emotionally significant life experiences, your thoughts can change your "state of mind" by triggering emotional feelings* related to those memories. Furthermore, some purely theoretical models assume that, from an ideally neutral, serene, and cognitively available state of mind, "top-down emotional induction" can be initiated voluntarily, and possibly induce feelings out of nothing. However, contrary to a widespread popular belief, none of the 82 known behavioral theories asserts that, in actual real life human phenomenology, intentional thought alone or sheer willpower could create or induce emotional or somatic feelings*. Even though emotions are mental experiences, neither happiness nor misery is created by your intentional thoughts alone. While thoughts are pure mental experiences and feelings are sensory experiences, emotions are defined as the result of a process of cognitive reading (mirroring) of emotional feelings. It is important to understand that by any linguistic or scientific standard, feelings, thoughts, and emotions are concepts with substantially different meanings.

While the cerebral cortex is in charge of your intentional thoughts, when it comes to feelings and emotions, all roads lead to the limbic system (LS) and peripheral nervous system (PNS), which regulates unintentional processes. Whether it is about inducing (generating) emotions, about their expression (smiling, laughing, crying, screaming, etc.), their experience (the way we feel them: blushing, heartbeat, nausea, breathing difficulties, tightness, stiffness, pain, etc.), or even the recognition of emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, etc.), the role of your LS, your PNS and the EMF of your heart is essential. Even though these complex processes linked to emotions are non-intentional and the brain's ability to control them by your sheer will is therefore very limited, understanding their coherent nature is the right key to achieving control over the disruptive emotions you would like to overcome. If you have a different opinion, don't feel offended; you might also be right! Human beings are not all the same. Furthermore, remember that, by definition, science is always open to question, verifiable, and falsifiable. What is promoted and accepted as an indisputable truth, is probably just a dogma fuelled by ignorance and epistemic capture.

While most approaches to emotional wellbeing focus on the mental experience of emotions – which is the cognitive reading or mirroring of emotional feelings, Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses exclusively on the emotional and somatic feelings* – which are a sort of sensory or physical presence in your body. Since your emotional feelings are a coherent component of your subconsciously driven emotional responses, by altering or suppressing the emotional feelings (the somatic component) associated with an unpleasant emotion, one breaks the coherence of the emotional experience. Thus, the cognitive reading (mental understanding), the physiological manifestations, and the negative behavior associated with the disturbing emotion will change accordingly.

The large variety of contemporary behavioral theories helps us understand that despite the many fundamentally different philosophies of approach and therapeutic protocols used to modulate unwanted emotions, there is no scientific contradiction between psychiatric, psychological, and naturopathic approaches. Each of the above approaches focuses on only one of the three manifestations of emotions, not because one particular manifestation has been scientifically proven to be the source of the other two, but because all emotional manifestations are coherent! For an emotion to manifest, the three inter-conditioned experiences must manifest simultaneously!

This is why, although all therapeutic approaches to emotions aim to control unwanted emotions by disrupting the coherence of the emotional experience, psychological approaches focus on the cognitive (mental) component, psychiatric approaches focus on the physiological component, and naturopathic approaches focus on the somatic experience. A somatic hypnotherapist should focus more on what you feel than what you think about your problem. Somatic Hypnotherapy helps you change the patterns of your intrusive thoughts and unwanted behaviors by helping you change your feelings and your mindset ; because behavioral responses are modulated by the perception rather than the observation of objective reality.

The holistic or mind-body concept of healing the human being as a whole, rather than treating individual diseases, is ancient. What is now called "hypnotherapy" has been known to exist in almost all ancient societies. Although the term "hypnosis" has only been used since the 1840s, many priests, shamans, healers, and medicine men began using this technique, or some form of it, centuries earlier. There are written records of hypnosis dating back 5,000 years in Mesopotamia and Egypt and 2,500 years in ancient China and Greece.

This practice has been kept alive by many traditional healers, priests and shamans, as well as famous practitioners such as the Persian physician Avicenna, the Swiss physician Paracelsus, the charismatic Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud, Dr. Gustav C. Jung and Dr. Milton Erickson - the founder of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, and by many other famous doctors and hypnosis enthusiasts such as Dr. John Elliotson, Dr. James Esdaile and Dr. James Braid - who coined the term "hypnosis" in 1843 and described Traditional Hypnotherapy in terms of an holistic empirical medical approach.

Although some health professionals use several types of hypnotic induction as integrated tools in different approaches, there are no similarities in terms of their philosophical approaches or therapeutic protocols between Somatic Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy, and Psychiatry - except for sharing some concepts. While most approaches to emotional well-being focus on thoughts, Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses exclusively on emotional and somatic feelings - which are sort of a physical presence in your body. You feel them as physical sensations, including butterflies, heart palpitations, sweating, dizziness, shortness of breath, knots in your stomach, chest pressure, body tightness, body pains, smothering sensations, restlessness, or a sense of impending doom.

The practice of Somatic Hypnotherapy emerged from Traditional Hypnotherapy, from which it inherits an ancestral pragmatic approach to wellness and health, adding to it the rigor of the scientific methods of several visionary scientific models of human behavior that it integrates, in particular the Somatic Markers Theory developed by the American neuroscientists Prof. Dr. Antonio Damasio and Prof. Dr. Joseph LeDoux, and the concept of coordinated changes across somatic, physiological and behavioral response systems known as emotional coherence, and the theory of ritual healing. Various archaic forms of Somatic Hypnotherapy are popular in Eastern Europe, where they are known by various local names.

The core idea of Somatic Hypnotherapy is not to teach you how to better manage your problems, but to help you improve your life by fostering change, According to this approach, decisions about daily life are rather the result of impulses triggered by instincts, habits, and emotions, than by rational choices - even though, as long as strong emotions are not involved, people are likely to act logically and rationally. The hallmark of Somatic Hypnotherapy is a process of neuro-linguistic modulation which is a very special way of speaking to your subconscious mind using metaphorical language that appears to be a regular conversation, clearly understandable, and very precise in its healing intentions.

The hypnotic suggestion within a hypnotherapy framework is the hallmark of any type of hypnotherapy. Unlike conventional hypnotherapy approaches which focus on reprogramming your mind by adding new layers of positive feelings to your lingering fears and traumas, Somatic Hypnotherapy is all about deprogramming your mind of stress, trauma and anxiety by releasing the associated disturbing emotional feelings and thereby reorganising the present reading of your past unpleasant events. This therapy works with your world model and involves you in the therapy process so that changes are easily accepted and long-lasting.

Although Somatic Hypnotherapy uses verbal cues as a specific tool, it does not rely on your hypnotist's fancy speaking ability, but on his ability to understand how the subconscious mind works. Somatic hypnosis has nothing to do with stage hypnosis, nor is it a magic trick. Those who practice it do not have the slightest supernatural power over you. Their only "magic" is that they know how to put their techniques, talent, and passion at your disposal to allow you to access and use the immense resources of your subconscious mind.

This approach relies on the experience and talent of the practitioner, but the results are largely determined by his solid understanding of human nature and how the human mind works. However, the hypnotherapist cannot take credit for your healing because he is not the one who heals you. His work consists mainly of guiding you to activate your inner self-healing resources.

Besides skills, it is the talent and passion of the therapist that can make the difference between endless therapy sessions and a brief professional therapy with constantly good results**. Negotiating with your subconscious the changes you want to experience is more of an art than an exact science.

Whatever your fear, pain, or other issues may be, don't allow it to cripple your life.   Contact me and book your appointment today!

The "No Results - No Pay" principle guarantees my integrity and applies to all my therapies.***

As stress and anxiety are most likely the leading cause of your issues, before filling in the appointment request, please self-assess your anxiety online and make an informed choice.

You can reach me by filling out the contact form below.

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Disclaimer: The content of this page reflects the opinion of its author, is provided for educational and general informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. I do not make any diagnoses according to recognized classifications (DSM-5, ICD-10) and I do not interfere in any way with ongoing treatments.

If you are already under medical care or treatment, follow their advice and treatment. I am not a doctor or licensed psychologist in Quebec; therefore, I cannot establish or continue a treatment based on your diagnosis. If you decide to consult me, be prepared to tell me what is bothering you and how you feel about it. 

For any medical emergency, call the Info-Santé service by dialing 811.

*In Somatic Hypnotherapy, the terms "feelings" and "emotional feelings" are often used interchangeably and refer to sensory experiences perceived onto or within the body, assessed, interpreted, and integrated through interoception and conceptualized by the rational mind as "emotions." - which is consistent with their traditional, biological and medical meanings, but differs considerably from the meaning of the term 'feeling' in cognitive psychology, where it often converges and merges with the term 'emotion'.

**The results may vary from person to person.

***In other words, if at the end of your session you don't see any improvement in the issues addressed in therapy, I won't accept your money!

Somatic Hypnotherapy - 186 Sutton Pl, suite 104, Beaconsfield, Montréal, Qc, H9W5S3