2024 update: while this is one of my older posts, it is still well read. That’s because when people are considering hypnotherapy to help them with anxiety, confidence issues or something else, they first seek out proof that their hypnotherapist has a good track record.
And Dame Kelly Holmes’ testimonial is as good as it gets.
While I’ve now treated more than 5,000 people, Dame Kelly was a relatively early client, and my story of helping her to overcome her fear of drowning is still one of my favourites. Here’s the original post (from back in 2015) in its entirety…
This week on the BBC Radio 4 show ‘I’ve never seen Star Wars’, Dame Kelly Holmes stopped her fear and phobia of water using hypnotherapy in just one session. As I’m the hypnotherapist who worked with her in our session in London, I can explain just how normal the process is and how it works.
What I can explain is how to stop a phobia, though as I’m sure you’ll appreciate from a confidentiality perspective, I can’t explain what happened in the session.
As you can hear here (from 12 min 40 secs), Dame Kelly talks about her ‘lifelong fear of drowning’. As with any phobia, the idea of being presented with a phobic stimulus is grimly unpleasant. However, as you hear later in the clip, Kelly dived straight in and swam 5 x 25 metre lengths after her treatment. When asked she gave her experience of our hypnotherapy session 10/10.
So, how do you stop a phobia using hypnotherapy?
Essentially, there are 3 key steps, and I call them ‘E.E.O.’. This stands for ‘events, emotions and outcomes’.
- As a phobia is a learned behaviour, it has a start point. It may be something minor or major; the key is to identify it. Once it’s been identified, a client will scale emotional intensity (called a SUD) from 0-10, with 10 being the worst. Using various techniques, we work until that intensity becomes manageable across the key moments in someone’s life where they’ve been phobic.
- If there is any emotion/s attached to a phobia e.g. fear, we work through all of these these too, bringing them down to a level where the client is comfortable. Again, I use a SUD scale to do this.
- Some clients have had a phobia a long time and don’t necessarily know how to be around the stimulus that used to make them phobic. As a result, I work with them to help them know how to be different and OK around the thing that made them phobic.
As Dame Kelly mentions on the show, one of the techniques I use is called Havening. It has been developed by a leading neuroscientist, whose published work on the likes of phobias, panic attacks and trauma can be found here.
As one of only a handful of people trained in Havening, I use it in my practice alongside hypnotherapy, NLP, TimeLine Therapy & TFT to help my clients get their result in just one session.
Full marks for hypnotherapy from Dame Kelly Holmes
When asked, Dame Kelly gave the experience of hypnotherapy 10/10*. Lots of other reviews and testimonials can also be found on my site, and these show many other success stories. I often say to my clients, ‘I can’t get you to love what you’re phobic of, but I can help you be OK around it’. And as Dame Kelly said: she dived in and swam 5 x2 5 metre lengths.
