Once considered taboo, therapy, thankfully, has become more common for people trying to improve their quality of life–and the quality of their romantic relationships. In the latter case, it’s helpful to talk to someone about what you’re looking for in a partner, why you think previous relationships haven’t worked, and how the past impacts your present. But in addition to talk therapy, some are also incorporating hypnotherapy to find out what’s been holding them back and figure out how they want to move forward in the search for love.
Hypnosis is a method that puts someone in a trance or dream-like state, a relaxed condition, and it has been practiced for thousands of years. You may be familiar with seeing hypnosis as a form of “mind control.” On the contrary, hypnosis is a healing tool that helps people with anxiety, phobias, and everything in between. So when we think about dating or “finding the one,” why not explore another way to heal from past breakups and evolve from limited thinking that gets us nowhere?
If anyone knows the benefits of hypnosis first-hand, it’s Laurnie Wilson. She is a certified hypnotherapist and found her calling in the practice after experiencing a breakup of her own. By applying hypnosis, Wilson attests that her personal dating experience is now more aligned than ever. Hypnotherapy has transformed the way she approaches dating, the way she views herself, and her outlook on finding love.
“I used to pick the most emotionally unavailable people on the planet. I used to be in this bad cycle of constantly thinking that I wasn’t pretty enough or worthy enough. Now I’m like, ‘I don’t know whose thought that was. I don’t know why I was walking around saying that.’ But we’re done,” Wilson shares. “I feel so much more confident, clear, and really in my own agency around how I pursue relationships or how I don’t. I feel that having that clarity is satisfying because everyone deserves to have what they want in life. I feel so much happier as a person overall.”
We spoke with Wilson to learn more about hypnotherapy, the benefits of the approach, and how to level up your dating life by figuring out what lies beneath.
ESSENCE: What is the difference between hypnotherapy versus traditional talk therapy?
Laurnie Wilson: Talk therapy is taking place at a different brainwave level than hypnotherapy. Hypnosis takes place at the theta brainwave level, which is right above the delta, and the delta is where you’re asleep. When you’re in theta, you’re very relaxed and still awake. So your conscious mind isn’t driving the conversation, it’s your subconscious that you’re working with. Versus in talk therapy, you’re really in your conscious mind when you’re having a conversation. You’re engaging in the ways that you normally would.
Hypnotherapy allows you to put that upper-level mind chatter to the side and sink into what’s going on beneath the surface. It also allows you to rewire neural pathways in your brain or old stories that are programmed in your mind. So sometimes what people struggle with when it comes to talk therapy is that they feel as though they have talked about the issue to death. So with hypnotherapy, it’s a great addition. If you’re talking about the problem to better understand the origins in regular therapy and hypnotherapy, we work through understanding the origins of the problems. That way we can resolve those issues directly and then let you move in the direction that you want.
Talk me through the phases of a hypnotic session.
As a hypnotherapist, I’m looking to understand how you’re feeling now and how you want to feel in the future. So once we’ve talked about that on a conscious level, then I’m going to say, go ahead and relax.
Then I’ll guide the client through progressive relaxation. So relaxing from the top of your head to your feet feels very much like if you’ve done a meditation. Then, I count you down even deeper into the hypnosis so that we go into that theta brainwave state. Then I’m going to start asking, okay, what do you see or feel or what’s coming up for you? I’m creating a journey, and the client is telling me what’s coming up for them. Some clients experience this very visually, for some clients it’s more of a sensation, like the body might feel hot or cool. For other clients, it’s not that you’re seeing something, but you just kind of know something. So we’re tapping into all the different senses to activate the subconscious. So in that time, we’re going to ask questions like, what’s been holding you back? Why has it been holding you back? And what do you want to transform that into? Whatever it is that’s coming up for you, we’d call it change work.
At the end, we start saying, okay, well, what does this look like in your life in the future? Imagine yourself now going about your day, feeling this way, doing this. Like, how do you carry yourself? What do you wear? Again, we’re activating the senses to cement this in because that will stick into your subconscious. We do something called future pacing, which is imagining what’s going to happen in the future. So if you are visualizing yourself going out and having a successful relationship or getting the job that you wanted, or whatever it is, you are telling your mind it’s going to happen. That’s creating those new neural pathways because when we visualize, we start telling our minds that it’s possible.
With the rise of manifestation practices, does hypnotherapy provide similar results since we are essentially visualizing our future?
I think hypnotherapy supercharges any manifestation practice. Since a lot of the manifestations of writing down an affirmation or visualizing are happening on a conscious level, hypnotherapy can touch on what is not getting covered, which is the subconscious. The subconscious is about 90% of the mind, and the conscious is the remaining 10%. So tapping into the subconscious is going to let you achieve those manifestations faster and easier. It can be a lot more fun, I think, too, because it’s a lot more embodied.
What are some of the other benefits of using hypnosis?
Well, at the very top level, you’ll feel so much more relaxed, and you’ll get to enjoy where you are so much more. I think a lot of our dissatisfaction as people, or as I see with my clients, is not being where they want to go. So, not having the relationship, the job, the money, etc. Hypnosis shortens the timeline to feel better about life because it allows you to break through any limiting beliefs. It allows you to get over any sort of subconscious programming that would have held you back from moving forward. Hypnosis lets you see there’s a lot of beauty in where you are. I would also say, that with hypnosis, you start to realize more about who you are. A lot of people are worried about that. They may think, I’m going to find out this deep, dark, scary thing about myself. But in actuality, when people realize that who they are is wonderful and they just forget, they realize they have been conditioned out of thinking that, and that is life-changing.
Based on your expertise, what is the main blockage you have seen in clients with dating, and how can hypnotherapy combat that?
Everyone wants to find love. But we, as people, have a lot of trauma around romance and relationships, especially for women of color. It can be hard to know what a healthy relationship is. So we have a lot of conditioning around, this is what my partner should or shouldn’t do. A lot of that was based on our caregivers who maybe didn’t know how to teach us about love or from a society that showed us something that doesn’t actually align with us. So, with hypnosis, you’re able to take a look at what your beliefs are around your worthiness, what you want in your love life, and how you want to go about dating. So many of our ideas are so entrenched from such a young age, and we just don’t realize it.
With hypnosis, we can peel back all of those layers. We can, you know, heal the daddy or mother issues that come up for a lot of us. So, being able to use hypnosis to get rid of the beliefs that don’t serve us, to heal the different traumas that may have been making us pick the wrong partner or choose certain things that haven’t worked out for us, we get to get rid of all of that and free ourselves to have the kind of relationships and lives that we want.
What is a myth about hypnosis that you try to debunk with your practice?
The thing about hypnosis is that the client is in control the entire time. You are the one guiding the session. I describe myself as the bumper rails of it, so to speak. As the client, you are the one who’s saying what’s coming up and what it is that you want to be shifting. I can offer my suggestions or advice, but ultimately, anything that comes up that you take on is what you want to be taking on. It’s more about listening inside as opposed to assuming that someone else is going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t have.
What is something someone should keep in mind about hypnosis or hypnotherapy for dating purposes that a lot of people are not aware of?
I would say be really clear about what you want. Also, be clear about the stories that you keep telling yourself and get curious about why that is. So, if we’re talking about dating, a lot of women will say, “Oh, there’s no good men left.” I would ask, “Then how are you going to find a good one?” If you keep telling yourself that there are no good ones left, then that’s what you believe. You’ll always find what you believe. So, focus on what you want instead. Because if you know what you want, that’s really half the battle.
What is the success rate that you have seen in your practice when it comes to hypnotherapy for people looking for love?
The people who come to me always get what they want and what they need. Now, it might look different than what they thought, but they always do get what they came for. I’ll give you an example. I had a client who wanted to stop dating emotionally unavailable men. She was very uncertain that this was going to work for her. Throughout our process and our six sessions, she had weeks where she didn’t feel any change. But, you know, we trust the process and we go with it. I would say about eight or nine months after we finished working together, she messaged me and thanked me because since we finished, she has not dated a single emotionally unavailable man. She did not realize that this was going to have such a profound and lasting change on her. She did take a little break from dating afterward. But now she’s had so many successful experiences in dating and is so much more grounded in the people that she chooses.
Sometimes, the timeline isn’t what you think. It’s not like, okay, I’m going to heal these dating things and bada bing, bada boom, tomorrow I will find my soulmate. It’s about trusting the process because it can look different for everyone. I get so many people telling me many months after we finished speaking or working together, how they’re still benefiting from the work that we did and still seeing that change. So the work is really long-lasting. And I think as long as you trust that and let yourself be open to the timeline of it, then you’re going to be happy.