Many people come to hypnotherapy and trancework because of its reputation for fast change — and that reputation is well earned. Under the right conditions, trancework can interrupt habits, soften symptoms, and open surprising new possibilities in a relatively short period of time.
That said, the way I work is not primarily symptom-focused. It’s systemic.
This is often where expectations begin to shift.
Someone may come hoping trancework will help them feel less miserable at work — with a difficult boss, an unprofessional colleague, or a workplace that quietly erodes their dignity.
Others come to meditation or trancework hoping it will make them happier inside an imbalanced or even harmful relationship.
Some arrive wanting to stop smoking, lose weight, or resolve chronic pain, saying they’re ready to do “whatever it takes” — until it becomes clearer what that might actually involve.
What tends to surface is not a single habit or symptom, but a pattern.
Patterns formed early.
Patterns shaped by relationship, environment, and survival.
Patterns that once made sense — and may no longer fit.
When work goes this way, change can begin to look slow, or sideways, or even like nothing is happening at all. In reality, something subtler is unfolding: the nervous system is renegotiating its assumptions about safety, agency, belonging, and purpose.
This is one of the reasons I don’t use any “aversion-based” approaches designed to remove an unwanted behavior without engaging the larger context it belongs to. Sometimes those methods might work. More likely though, the pattern simply finds another place to express itself — through what’s called “conversion”.
The work I do with people is less about forcing a particular outcome and more about helping them re-orient their conscious lives toward what actually matters to them. That can mean releasing old mythologies about who they have to be, untangling inherited relational roles, or coming to terms with the quiet cost of adapting to systems that were never designed for their well-being.
From the outside, this doesn’t always look like progress. There may be a period where familiar coping strategies stop working before new ones are fully embodied. Insight may arrive before integration. Relief may lag behind clarity.
But this phase is not a failure of the work — it is the work.
Change that lasts tends to be slower at first and more thorough in the end. It doesn’t just make life more tolerable; it asks whether the shape of one’s life is actually aligned with their values, their limits, and their deeper sense of purpose.
If you’re in a season where things feel unsettled, where old solutions no longer suffice and new ones haven’t fully formed yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stuck. It may mean that something more honest, deeper, and more powerful is trying to take root.