Zoe Clews, hypnotherapist, businesswoman, trauma specialist & Founder of Zoe Clews & Associates in London.
I was surprised to find out that hypnosis was the first iteration of the modern form of talking therapy, practised by Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud’s contemporary. Despite its history, why do you think hypnosis and hypnotherapy aren’t taken very seriously?
Stage hypnosis has a large part to play. Hypnosis is hypnosis — it’s a master tool and therefore its application is varied, so whilst you can use hypnosis for entertainment to get an audience member up on stage in front of hundreds of people barking on all fours believing they are a dog or talking to fairies, you can also use it to communicate with the true powerhouse of change, that is the subconscious, to free people from lifelong struggles. Or you can also use it to stick peoples hands together in the pub!
People watch stage hypnosis and it is so fantastical it looks unbelievable - whereas actually it is legitimate - stage hypnotists will do suggestibility tests with the audience to pick out those that will be the most susceptible. I trained in stage and street hypnosis long after I trained as a hypnotherapist and stage hypnotists are looking for what, we call in the hypnosis realm, ‘somnambulists’. About 5% of people in the world are somnambulists and they go into hypnosis very easily and very quickly. A stage hypnotist is going to want someone to go under quickly for entertainment purposes. Viewers find it unbelievable as it’s such a phenomenon and likely make their initial decisions on hypnosis, and therefore hypnotherapy, from that point.
It does frustrate me though that CBT is continually recommended as the cure for all mental health ills by the NHS when CBT doesn’t work with the subconscious it works purely with the conscious, and when you have a stubborn issue that won’t budge despite your best efforts you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s a subconscious issue not a conscious issue. And your subconscious is an absolute heavyweight compared to the conscious, it will dominate every time (until you do the necessary negotiation).
It’s worth remembering that in the early 19th century, several hundred surgical interventions were described with hypnosis as the sole anaesthetic. Hypnosis is very powerful stuff indeed!
What conditions or objectives is hypnotherapy good for treating, and is there anything it isn’t good for treating?
Contra-indications for hypnotherapy are epilepsy and psychosis and as hypnotherapists we are treating neurosis, not psychosis. So mental health conditions such as bipolar, schizophrenia and those that fall under the psychiatric umbrella myself and the team do not touch but refer on.
It is excellent for all anxiety related issues, confidence, self esteem, phobias, smoking, weight loss, habits, depression, trauma and ptsd and complex PTSD (with a very experienced Hypnotherapist), public speaking, tics, trichotillomania, sexual issues, relationship issues, jealousy, anger management, stress, burnout, bruxism, body dysmorphia disorder, OCD, sports performance, psychosomatic pain, children's issues such as bed-wetting, anxiety, head-banging and temper tantrums. It can also be helpful for eating disorders and serious addictions. However, if the case is severe then a hypnotherapist should not be their primary care, more part of a multi disciplinary team, whilst the individual would be under the care of a psychiatrist or recovery centre and we are assisting.
Conditions that generally take longer are Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety that have complex trauma as their foundation, remember whilst hypnotherapy is generally a much faster therapy than most therapies as it is working directly with the subconscious, which is the true powerhouse when it comes to change, speed should never ever compromise safety. Growth often needs to be slow-ish, for it to solidify into health.
How important is language in hypnotherapy, and can you give us some of the ‘secret’ tricks (sorry, techniques would be fairer!) that you and other hypnotherapists use?
Language is vital. I love language, I try to learn a new word every day. I also love poetry and I think of hypnosis as poetry. We are speaking to peoples souls as well as their minds with hypnosis, so whilst a firm hand is needed with the subconscious to shift it out of old patterns, tenderness is also required. The right language to achieve the balance between achieving results without ever compromising safety has to be mastered over time.
This is reductionist but I see the way I work with people in two ways: clearing and suggestion. We are compassionately unpacking and clearing the original wounds through inner child work and cleaning up the limiting beliefs, patterns, cognitive distortions, toxic family rules and then re-templating with positive and, sometimes simply, neutralising suggestions and working with installing the kind of beliefs and patterns that will champion rather than flatten us.
One of my favourite ways of working with suggestion is the confusional technique, whereby you overload the conscious with confusional language to then directly access the subconscious to put in the new positive commands - this is particularly useful when working with highly logical, analytical and sceptical individuals like lawyers. Generally right brainers are much easier to hypnotise than left brainers. Creatives will go out like a light!
The language of the subconscious is also metaphors (think about dreams!) so I also use a lot of metaphors.
What led you to train and practice as a hypnotherapist?
It found me!
I was a lost party girl working admin jobs in the music industry. I was terrible at working for other people as many entrepreneurs are. I would always start off strong then gradually see what I could get away with, like turning up at 11am and going for 3 hour pub lunches. I was always getting fired or, if not, I hung onto the jobs through sheer personality and certainly not conscientiousness, I remember having a lot of mindless fun but I also remember thinking, ‘I’ve got a brain and I’m really not using it’.
I did lots of different weekend taster courses, at no point did I ever think ‘I will become a hypnotherapist’, I was simply exploring and grasping around in the dark for things I was interested in other than partying hard - and then when I did the hypnotherapy course it gripped me by the throat. My tutor told me I was a natural and deeply encouraged me. It was the first someone had ever really believed in me. I will be forever grateful to him for that.
I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with hypnosis and over two decades later the love affair continues.
Everyone laughed when I told them I was training as a hypnotherapist because I really was, at the time, the very last person you would go to with your problems as I had so many of my own, but it was a deep embodied course correction for me and for the first time in my life I began to take myself more seriously.
What is one of the most outstanding experiences you have had as a hypnotherapist?
As I’ve been doing it for over two decades there are countless examples of extraordinary freedom achieved from poleaxing issues. If I had to choose one it would be this as it demonstrates so clearly how the subconscious works:
One of my earliest case studies was working with a lovely elderly gentleman who had lived with a crippling phobia for decades, that in his own words ‘had completely ruined his life’. After one session it entirely dissipated and he couldn’t access the fear or even remember it! In our follow-up session I asked his subconscious, 'if it was that easy to remove, why did you not let go of it before?’ and his subconscious simply answered, ‘because nobody ever asked me’.
This is the thing with the subconscious: it is an entirely different animal to the conscious, it is a very powerful archaic computer that doesn’t understand time, it creates a defence (in this case a phobia) based on something that happened often decades ago and it will continue to run that defence in a well meaning but distorted attempt to protect you, ‘it will always do what it has always done until is negotiated with in hypnosis’. .
Can other people hypnotise you?
Yes I actually go out like a light! I’ve had it to overcome previously crippling fears.
During Covid, the term ‘mass hypnosis’ was popularly applied to the results of the propaganda, saturation of Covid coverage on TV and behavioural science strategies that were used to generate mass adherence to the rules. Is that fair? Is it strictly speaking an accurate way to describe hypnosis? And, if so, aside from that, are there examples of large scale hypnosis you are aware of?
Yes. I believe so. Conspiracy theories during the pandemic were hardly in short supply, and some were more ‘out there’ than others; but there has still been noticeable evidence of the use of modified hypnosis and NLP techniques by the government in its interactions with the public.
These include:
Fractionation: encouraging the subject to do the same thing repetitively. The magic number in achieving compliance through fractionation, as in so many things, is 3. The fact we had three lockdowns may well be pure coincidence, but even if it is it will have had some effect in conditioning the national psyche.
Create a ‘Yes’ set: The eliciting of agreement – and therefore compliance – in stages. Often this starts with something small and easy to accept (for example, ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ – it’s just 21 days … that’s do-able, right?).
Over time, this gradually increases, but the steps from one state of being to another are manageable. Three weeks of lockdown becomes six weeks, which becomes six months. Christmas is cancelled. Vaccines became a moral mandate.
And the more you say yes, the more likely you are to say yes again.
Confusion: Maintain uncertainty. The conscious mind responds to uncertainty by ‘going offline’ as in search of an appropriate response to something it has never experienced before. And when the conscious mind is no longer present, the subconscious steps in.
Between March 2020 and the end of January 2021 the rules by which we lived were in a state of constant change. Every day was new and no-one – including the then Prime Minister of the country, or so he would have had us believe – was entirely sure what is allowed and what isn’t anymore.
Repetition: The same messaging and news was repeated over and over and over again. How many days did we wake up to headlines about Covid-related deaths and infections? How often were we given statistic after endless statistic on the efficacy of the vaccines?
Create an illusion of choice: If you want to persuade someone to do something specific that is likely to prove unpalatable, there are two approaches:
You can either enforce it – which is likely to provoke resistance. Or you can offer a choice in which the option you prefer is either marginally less obnoxious than the other or delivers the same desired outcome.
In the case of the pandemic, we were given a choice: either comply willingly, and you’ll be in lockdown and reasonably content; or resist, and you’ll be in lockdown and fairly unhappy.
Social Proof: celebrities are used to endorse or advocate the behaviour the ‘manipulator’ requires. This effectively leverages the trust we place in those occupying the public spotlight and whom we often admire. Because when James Corden does a song and dance routine on the streets of New York in support of the vaccine, it must be okay …
Scarcity: By suggesting a shortage we create immediate demand. It’s not just the vaccine take up that was evidence of this, fuelled as it was by a booking system to manage supplies; look, too, at the petrol crisis last when the mere suggestion that forecourts might run dry led to wholesale panic buying at the pumps.
Hypnotising a nation or large groups of people really isn’t all that difficult if you know the levers to pull and the buttons to press.
What is your proudest and most important achievement?
I was born into an extremely dark, criminalistic, impoverished and violent background - my father was a failed armed robber as well as a very talented artist. One of the therapists I worked with to recover told me that with my level of trauma plus intelligence meant that I was psychologically profiled to become a criminal sociopath! The others I worked with all told me I should have at the very least become a chronic heroin addict.
Unsurprisingly, I was feral as a teenager and there were many very real sliding doors moments upon being kicked out of school in which I could have taken a very dark path indeed. There but for the grace of God, plus incessant inner work to not repeat two very long, dove-tailed paternal and maternal lines of devastation and lunacy.
Ancestral trauma is a very real thing: one generation pounds its insanity into the next and the beat goes on, until there is a cycle-breaker of sorts. Thankfully I was blessed with furious tenacity and I have put the shifts in to weave a parachute out of everything broken.
I take this into my work to encourage and support others to do the same and reverse the emotional oil tanker that is severe and complex post traumatic stress disorder.
I have a business, team, relationships and life that I now adore. All of that has been hard won. I think when things have been hard won you value them incredibly deeply. And despite whatever Biblical style plague and locusts initiations life has put me through, or how increasingly insane the world becomes, I’ve never lost my ability to laugh a lot of the time. Gallows humour is undoubtedly my love language.
What is the most significant criticism you get about hypnotherapy?
People are non-believers, which is fine. I quite like it when people come in cynical and perhaps irritated that they’ve had to resort to this ‘ludicrous hypnotherapy thing’, as they are somewhat gagging for a resolution to this stubborn problem. Hypnotherapy is often seen as their last chance saloon. And then they are pleasantly surprised when it works. I've had a few apologies over the years from people who came in thinking it was a made up thing but were desperate enough to try.
This is one of the many great things about hypnosis: you don’t have to believe in it for it to work, you just have to follow my instructions.
Considering I’ve been doing it for over 20 years with a very well established business in Marylebone, the question I get asked the most is ‘does it actually work?’, as if I’m simply some extremely duplicitous conwoman that’s been getting away with it undetected for decades. Yes it works, not only does it work, it really, really works!
Describe your biggest epiphany and how it shaped you?
If you grew up in a childhood like mine you will inevitably grow up with a dominant negative inner voice, some people call this the ‘inner critic’ or ‘inner chimp’ but the correct term is actually the ‘Negative Introject’.
You aren’t born with this voice - it is made up of all the damage, neglect, harm you received from your caregivers and also their damage that you inherit and absorb from them, also any other negative significant figures in your formative years, such as siblings, extended family, teachers, bullies etc.
We can define it like this: abuse is all the bad things that happen to you and around you and neglect is all the good things that didn’t happen to you (legitimate good things that all children need: love, affection, kindness, good boundaries and enough consistency) so the good things that didn’t happen to you will also form the Negative Introject.
The Negative Introject is the voice of fear but as it is so psychologically enmeshed and you’ve never known any different it feels like the voice of truth.
It runs and ruins peoples entire lives, filling them with cognitive distortions, making them believe they are not good enough or worthless, driving them to compare themselves with others and into shame based perfectionism, make terrible life decisions and get dragged headlong into addictions and other snake-pits in an attempt to escape it.
Two really important things about the Negative Introject to remember are this:
Everything it says is a lie (but it’s sneaky and insidious and will use half truths about your life to punish you)
It’s entire purpose is to keep you locked into old dysfunction (which you likely grew up in).
My belief is that this voice is the main driver behind all mental health issues. Addicts drink & take drugs to escape it. It’s one of the reasons anorexics starve themselves (it tells them they are fat), it’s why those with BDD indulge in endless plastic surgery (it tells them they are ugly), it’s why people stay in abusive relationships (it tells them it’s what they deserve), its why someone with contamination OCD compulsively washes their hands until they are red raw (it’s tells them they are unsafe unless they do so) it’s ALL the negative introject it just chooses a different topic to torture someone with.
My epiphany after living with this horrific inner voice that did nothing short of run & ruin my life until my mid twenties, driving me endlessly and compulsively into bad decisions and chaos, was a moment when I was crossing the road on one of those beautiful early Spring sunny days - I had been working with a therapist on the origins of this voice and how actually it wasn’t even mine, and I had one of those rare powerful beautiful incandescent moments when suddenly I saw everything through new eyes and realised, and most importantly felt deep in my body, that that voice wasn’t true - that everything it said to me was actually a lie and I has this realisation ‘well if nothing it says is true then I really can do anything’. And in that moment everything changed. I became brave.
Don’t get me wrong it still pipes up in a more moderate version but I have become Grandmaster Level adept at kicking its sorry ass to the kerb. It was the beginning of true freedom for me. I believe we are hardwired to heal, but only with the correct information and the right support.
If you were an absolute monarch for a day, what law would you introduce?
Scrap VAT - it is absolutely rapacious for SME’s especially if they are B to C. I have this conversation with other business owners at least once a week: it’s becoming extremely difficult for SME’s to grow no matter how hard, smart or deep you work, it’s mental gymnastics on the daily. And it’s madness as so many businesses remain under the VAT range as it’s just not worth the hassle and cost, so therefore they don’t grow, so just one of many of the current own goals our Government continue to implement in our country.
What is the most interesting thing you have learned in the last year?
That actually given the right (and necessarily extreme) circumstances every single one of us is capable of being brainwashed. Because no matter how strong and evolved (and resistant to previous manipulation) we may be, we all have nervous systems that will collapse if put under enough consistent pressure.
What is next for you?
Continuing to build the team I have — the World is very unwell indeed — the most powerful thing we can do for ourselves is get as strong emotionally, mentally and physically in order to survive incoming electrical storms. Having a very well-resourced inner world in which you are your own benevolent ruler rather than a tyrannical dictator, and having a well regulated nervous system is the key to surviving all that we have going on in the external. By continuing to expand the team of therapists, coaches and hypnotherapists in my business I hope that we are helping people to resource themselves, recover and most importantly, thrive even in these treacherous times.
I also know I have a book that is the length of the Dead Sea Scrolls in me so I’m currently cracking on with that.
And I really want to train as a Cult Deprogrammer - I’ll need to do that in the US but I have long been absolutely fascinated with cults, despite it always being the same story arc: a raging narc with a God Complex forms a high control group and brainwashes people into handing over time, money, sex and all personal agency. I’ve devoured every cult documentary there is and I’m always hungry for more. In a way, hypnosis is a deprogramming on the micro (the individual's negative self image and conditioning from childhood or other adverse events) but I’d love to learn how to do it on a bigger scale. The internet is the Cult Leader's dream and the more armour we have against that the better.
Brilliant, and so utterly sane.
Interesting!
I once trained as a hypnotherapist, 30 years ago, but never actually practised it. Used it only few times. Would love to get back into practising it. I'm going to start reading about it. Question is where to start....