Hilarity and Hypnosis Approach, 3-Day Certification Training
2024 is looking amazing! I was selected to teach my Comedy Writing for Stage Hypnotists at the Performing Hypnosis Summit in February. In July, I'll teach my first 3-Day Certification of The Hilarity And Hypnosis Approach (HAHA!). This class is truly the culmination of my life's work as a comedian and a hypnotist.
When I went to hypnotherapy school, I began studying regression. You read about how regression works, and then you start watching video after video of people crying, screaming, and punching pillows, often while cussing out their family and friends. I came to hypnotherapy through a swinger cruise, and my first instructor (Renegade Hypnotist Mark Cunningham) used hypnosis to enhance pleasure. I had spent 15+ years using comedy and hypnosis to make people laugh. I had just given this hypnotherapy school thousands of dollars, and I just signed up for a side hustle that involves watching people punch pillows and scream and cry 40 hours a week.
Fuck that shit.
After we watched enough regressions, we had to begin practicing on each other. One of my classmates started the regression process on me, who at the time was nine months divorced after a 20-year relationship. My mother had passed six weeks earlier, after spending three years as her caregiver. I had moved her shit or my shit 12 times in the past two years and was moving into a new home with my deceased mother's two cats.
I'll spare you the details...but it was not pretty. Let's say my regression ended with the instructor having to intervene with several other skills besides hypnotic regression to bring me back to earth. None of those skills involved laughter, which was likely what I needed most!
I remembered how I broke bad trances with laughter as a comedian for 15 years, detailing some of the most painful moments of my life through humor. I filed this regression experience away. I decided to learn regression well enough to get through the class module and graduate, but the rest of my studies since then have been looking for ways to create lasting changes that did not suck as bad as "regression."
I will say that "Regression" is an effective way to deal with past trauma. Thousands of hypnotists around the world use it, and it's helped hundreds of thousands of people overcome their traumas. I will use "Regression" with a client if I feel they need it, but I dig it out only after my other 60 ways of changing behavior don't work. I'm happy to say the last time I used a formal "regression" in a session was sometime in 2021.
I took a class by "Faster EFT" Instructor Robert Smith a few years ago. I watched several of his videos, but the one that grabbed me was the one where he disintegrated a client's rape trauma with a fart machine in 25 minutes. A rape trauma that she had carried for 25 years and was sadly reinforced over 25 years of "therapy." Her trauma was ABRACADABRA GONE in 25 minutes! She was laughing so hard at the fart sounds, it completely scrambled any connection she had to the horrible feelings she had previously connected to her rape experience. I found a way to connect what I do best:
Creating laughter in others.
Creating the life changes my clients want.
Giving them their life back.
I have refined my Hilarity and Hypnosis Approach over the years, perfecting it over thousands of hours working with my clients. The most challenging hurdle I must overcome is the client's belief that life changes can happen quickly. Every client that comes to me says, "I've been in therapy for years." WTF? Mental health professionals have hypnotized most people into believing that healing journies are supposed to take years.
In many cases, the "ISE, or initial sensitizing event," which is "mental health speak" for "that shitty thing that happened to you," often happens in 30 seconds or less. Maybe it's just me, but 30 years of therapy seems like a highly disproportionate amount of time to fix "that shitty thing that happened to you." Even in cases where trauma has been repeated and reinforced over ten years, 30 years of therapy is too much.
I'm looking forward to training other hypnotists, hypnotherapists, and mental health practitioners to combine hilarity and hypnosis to work together by making the world a happier, mentally healthier place to live in...one laugh at a time.
