Advance Your Skills:
Level 2 Clinical Hypnosis Workshop Summaries

Leora Kuttner, PhD: Working Hypnotically with Adolescents: Keys to their Challenges

Some parents and clinicians are fearful of adolescents, their intensity, defiance, challenges and drive for individuality. These are aspects that hypnosis teaches us to utilize in this session we’ll explore what Adolescents want in their health care providers, how to engage them meaningfully to bring about the desired change, and what hypnotic strategies to use to address common adolescent issues like panic, somatization, self-worth and preoccupying worries.

Videos will be shown to explore how to address these issues and adolescents’ demand for authenticity.

James Stabler, MSW, RCC: Parts Work for Dysfunctional Ego States

Dysfunctional Parts are either Non-Dissociative or Dissociative Ego States. Both are not adapted to present circumstance and may be (1) habitual (2) affective or (3) dissociative. Non-Dissociative ego states experience themselves as the person, and Dissociative ego states are experienced as a separate sense of self. We explore Interventions to help clients to gain choice and conscious control over their parts or ego states to expand positive and adaptive ego states.

Harry Stefanakis, Ph.D. R. Psych: Threshold States: Hypnosis at the Edge of Change

Most people don’t resist change because they don’t want it. They resist because change threatens something that once kept them safe. This seminar explores how hypnosis can work at the threshold—the moment where desire and fear coexist. Rather than pushing insight or action, we’ll learn how to stabilize ambivalence, listen to resistance as intelligence, and create conditions where movement becomes possible without force. 

Davidicus Wong, MD: The Keys to Positive Change: Using the Power of Hypnosis to Achieve Your Greatest Goals 

Practical and inspirational strategies for helping patients, clients and yourself set and achieve personal goals with hypnosis.

I’ll be sharing the key strategies I have used to enable my patients to acquire new healthy habits that stick and achieve their most important personal goals.  

So bring a personal goal or new habit you would like to achieve. 

Shelley Ugyan, MACP, RCC: Clinical Hypnosis and the Function of Disordered Eating

This Level 2 workshop uses disordered eating as a primary clinical lens for understanding how clients organize attention to regulate internal experience and maintain psychological safety.

We focus on function rather than symptom removal, exploring how eating patterns provide stability, identity, and containment — and why change can feel threatening even when clients are motivated.

Although eating disorders serve as the central examples, the principles apply broadly to clients who rely on high-cost coping strategies across presentations. This training is relevant for clinicians seeking to identify the function of entrenched patterns and use hypnosis intentionally to reorganize attention in ways that support safer, more adaptive regulation.

David Bowler, MBChB: The Rehearsal Technique – Reverse Engineering and Resolving Rear of an Anticipated Future Event

Based on the work of the late Dr Marlene Hunter this technique distinguishes between fears and phobias, associated and dissociated experiences, and uses the hypnotic imagination to rehearse (dissociated) a time after the successful completion of the event, working backwards through a sequence of steps leading to that successful completion. Then experiencing, associated, the sequence again, evoking positive sensory modalities, forwards in time, to resolve the fear. 

This is particularly useful for fears related to flying, or public speaking, or smiler anticipated events.

If the fear is based on past trauma or is related to a phobia then it is best to deal with the initial and subsequent sensitizing events first.