In this diary‑style vlog, hypnotherapist Caroline Cavanagh reflects on a week of client work that illustrates the breadth of issues hypnotherapy can address, all often rooted in anxiety. She describes five distinct cases: a mother who used alcohol to mask anxiety and, through hypnosis, learned to control her drinking rather than abstain completely; a man confronting guilt and regret as his mother nears the end of her life, learning to act on unspoken wishes; a client with severe depression and suicidal thoughts who, after hypnotherapy, shifted from hopelessness to a future‑focused outlook; a disciplined military client who struggled with food cravings, showing how existing self‑control skills can be transferred to new domains; and a woman experiencing layered, suppressed emotions (the “onion” metaphor) who, despite repeated emotional surfacing, can choose which feelings to work on, maintaining an overall upward trajectory. Caroline emphasizes that anxiety often underlies these varied behaviors, that hypnotherapy offers flexible, choice‑based interventions, and invites listeners to reach out for informal conversations. The episode ends with a hopeful wish for the weekend and a promise to improve her vocabulary for the next diary entry.
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Hi there, and welcome to the next edition of Diary of a Hypnotherapist. And it's almost half a year since I started doing this. I think this is episode number 25, maybe? Um, something that I started not only to practice what I preach, but also to help change people's awareness of what hypnotherapists actually do, because it's not about swinging watches and making people cluck like tish— like chickens, even. It's such a varied practice. Much of my work is around anxiety, and I call myself an anxiety specialist, but the reality is a lot of anxiety leads to symptoms in other ways that hypnosis is really, really effective with dealing with. And this week has been no exception to that. I've worked with a lady who is pretty much coming towards the end of our work together now, She was struggling with her alcohol consumption, and through our work, she recognized that it wasn't just an addiction to alcohol. She was using alcohol to mask a feeling of anxiety in that she'd actually lost who she was as a busy mum. Her life had changed, and she was yearning for that person who she used to be. And so through our work, it's understanding that that person isn't gone, she's just changed. We all evolve. And the wonderful thing about the work that we're doing is, unlike a lot of other practices, it's not about never having alcohol again if you have an alcohol problem. It's about learning to work with it. She came and saying, I hadn't drunk anything for 4 weeks, which was brilliant, but then I decided to have a couple of glasses of wine with a family barbecue that was going on, But she said, I did just have a couple of glasses, and when someone asked me to have a cocktail, I could say no. So she is now in a position where she controls the alcohol, not the other way round. There was another client who was, uh, he booked in with me after having not seen him for quite a while. His life had changed in that his mum is now coming towards the end of her life, And he was feeling a huge amount of guilt of things that he hadn't been able to say. So a lot of our work was around the emotion of regret, because regret has 2 prongs. There's regret of things that you've done, and even then there's positives that can be taken from that because you can learn to not do those things again. However, regret of things that you haven't done can be very, very corrosive. So we spent the session looking at what he wanted to do so that he didn't end up going down that path of having lots of regrets of things he didn't do for his mum or tell his mum or even ask his mum before that opportunity was no longer there. I had a session with a lady who we've been working on depression She had very much come to the decision that she didn't want to be on this planet anymore, but now she's thriving and we're now looking at not only what has gone on in the past, but how can she change the future? Her energy has very much changed and she's looking forward rather than wanting to actually cut off from the world. I still do a lot of work with people around food and a bit like alcohol, it's not about obviously not eating food. Things like chocolate or cakes, but it's about being in control of those choices. And interestingly, this was a military man, someone who is normally very controlled and disciplined in other areas of life, but with food he couldn't bring that discipline across. And again, therapeutically, that's a very common thing that we can use when you have a skill but it tends to be kept in one particular drawer. And our work is taking it out that drawer and said, well, you've got the skill, but let's apply it here. And that can have very quick and almost transformative results when you don't need to learn something new, you just adapt it to a new application. And the other lady that I've been spending quite a lot of time with recently was a great example of what I call an onion. She came to me because again she had lost her way, wasn't quite sure what life was all about, and wasn't quite sure she wanted to be here. And through the work she is now also thriving and was feeling life really, really escalating until there was a drop. And this is not atypical for work with any form of therapy, but especially through hypnosis, because some of the sessions lead to To such an escalation, and people are like, wow, this is amazing. But then there's a but. Something else comes up. And that's often because we suppress a lot of emotions, and we just deal with the thing that's on the surface. We pull that away, and something else bubbles up, something that people often didn't even realize was there. But then we deal with that, and then maybe there's something else. That pops up. And she was concerned, Caroline, am I going to have to keep coming back for all of these things that I didn't even know was there? And the answer is, it's a choice. We do, as human beings— I can't speak today— suppress so much, and that suppressed emotion will impact on how we feel, how we react, how we behave on a day-to-day basis. basis, but whether you want to deal with that emotion is a choice. Therapeutically, what she's learning is we can deal with that relatively quickly and the upward trajectory stays. There's just little blips along the way. So this just hopefully gives you a bit of a feel for the variety of things that a hypnotherapist can help you with. I love dealing with that variety, and as I said, often anxiety is at the basis of a lot of the behaviours that we want to change. But whether it is anxiety or whether it's another emotion, please do reach out to me if you would like to have a chat, or to another hypnotherapist if you just want to see, can hypnotherapy help you. So I hope this has helped you to maybe help yourself or even help others. And please do give me a call if you want a very informal, no catches, no— what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know, so I'm going to let that go. My brain's not working this morning. Just let's have a chat. And if I can help you, I'd love that opportunity. And for now, I wish you a wonderful weekend. And hopefully, by the time I record the next diary of a video, I'll have got some words back in my vocabulary. Bye-bye for now.
