109: Hypnosis as a Tool for Profound Change With Todd Goodwin

Title: Hypnosis as a Tool for Profound Change With Todd Goodwin

Guest: Todd Goodwin

Peter: My guest is Todd Goodwin. He is a board certified hypnotist and his practice is Goodwin Hypnosis. He and his wife, Gina, operate that together. They’re based in North Carolina, but they see clients all over The United States. Welcome to the podcast, Todd.

Todd: Thanks, Peter. Great to be here.

Peter: So today, I really want to talk about how you help people, the methods you use, what types of benefits people can expect. And I know there’s probably in some people a bit of a preconceived notion about what it is you do. Do you swing watches around and make people cluck like chickens and things like that? I don’t think that’s really what you do. What is it that you’re actually doing to help people?

Todd: Okay, great. That’s a great question. Broadly speaking, we help people when everything else has failed, usually. In other words, when people are struggling with a certain personal challenge, primarily either an emotional issue they’re struggling with, whether it’s resentment, guilt, shame, emotional trauma, which is a big focus for us, anxiety, phobias, regret. Any emotional repeating, basically emotional habit that’s negatively affecting the quality of their life, or in many cases certain behavioral tendencies, whether it’s emotional eating or drinking a little too much, or other unhealthy habits or behaviors that might be affecting them in their health, relationships, financially, or just their fulfillment of life.

And people tend to get stuck in those patterns because it’s part of the human condition. Through the methods that we use, we’re able to help them get unstuck and restore relative emotional balance, relative peace of mind, and help them move on with their life in a more fulfilling and healthy way. And very often those folks have tried other things like willpower, lengthy talk therapy, medication, all of which have their place, but are typically overused for a lot of issues where, the stuff that we do is far more efficient and effective.

Peter: Got it. Got it. So how long have you, been practicing?

Todd: For me, seventeen years since 2007. For my wife, Gina, nine years since 2015.

Peter: Okay. And is there, I’m guessing there’s some school that you attended or some sort of certification you received?

Todd: Yeah, the way it works in our profession is more of an old school kind of way where you do, I mean, it varies from person to person and there’s a wide variety of the types of training that people get. But typically there’s a mentor apprentice kind of relationship after doing an initial certification program or training. So basically most hypnotists, they learn the basics. They learn how to be technically proficient at the methods and also to understand their clients reasonably well, hopefully. And then at that point, it’s really in their best interest to work with or study with in some collaborative manner with someone who’s much more experienced.

That’s, you know, so I did that back in 2007, 2006, 2007, 2008 with different mentors. And then periodically since then, just to sharpen my skills. I was Gina’s primary mentor in 2014. And yeah, so that’s how it works with us at least.

Peter: Got it. So what was your journey into hypnotism? What got you there?

Todd: So that’s really interesting. I’ll try to be brief because it can be as detailed as wherever we want to make it. But I guess the abbreviated story, Peter, is that when I was around 20, so when I was a junior in college, I kind of went through this dark night of the soul for me. I had gained probably 20 pounds, maybe 25, I don’t know. I was very anxious, depressed, crying weekly about how miserable I was.

I don’t really know if my life was that bad objectively. I don’t think it was. In my mind, which is really what matters, it was. So I was eating like a gallon of ice cream twice a week, which will pack on the pounds quickly. Fortunately, I didn’t drink alcohol at that point, or I would have been a disaster.

But I thought about committing suicide. I had very low self worth. I was constantly revisiting things I did or didn’t do, whether it was asking a girl out and getting shot down or not doing well on a test, worrying about what was going to happen in the next week or the next year. So I was never really in the present. And I was getting sick constantly.

So it was kind of a disaster. And from there I started learning about stress management. I started learning about the value of eating healthier. And I started making some of these changes. If I had known my future self, then the change would have happened much more quickly, much more easily.

But nonetheless, after months of diligent application of some of these new things, I was eating healthier, I was thinking better, I was taking responsibility for my problems instead of blaming other people, which typically we all do. And I realized that no matter what other people were doing, my thoughts are what’s causing this. So over the course of months, I dropped the extra weight. My grades went from like a C minus to an A. My social life improved, pretty much everything improved dramatically.

And then I was like, wow, if I could do this for me, I want to do this for other people. So I was inspired at that point to choose a graduate path as a wellness counselor or something. That’s what I called it. Anyway, so I moved to Boston. I was in St.

Louis, Washington University in college, went to graduate school in Boston to get a master’s degree in nutrition, which I did do. And I was very excited to focus on helping people emotionally, but primarily through their eating because that has a big impact on their mental state. And after spending two and a half years getting that degree, I was really disappointed when as I was working with people mostly for weight loss, I found out that most of them had very short lived results. They might be eating healthier for two weeks, three weeks, and then they’d have a fight with their boyfriend or something would go wrong at work or whatever, and then they’d fall off the wagon and they’d get really hard on themselves. And I was thinking, why did no one tell me this during my graduate coursework?

None of my PhD professors would tell me that just giving people good advice, do this, don’t do that, doesn’t work. Really anyone who’s tried to diet or quit smoking cold turkey or quit drinking or stop worrying or whatever knows that just telling yourself to do it or having a well intentioned doctor or therapist tell you what to do is not usually enough because there’s a stronger, deeper part of us that seems bent on maintaining the status quo, however crappy it may be for us. And I didn’t learn this in graduate school, unfortunately. I actually got out of the field very disheartened and discouraged. But I was reading, still trying to understand how I put it is if we know what to do, why don’t we do what we know?

I mean, sort of obvious, and yet most helping professions, including therapists, physicians, nutritionists, personal trainers, you name it, are largely based on conscious willpower and rational thinking as their modality of change. A doctor says, Hey, maybe you should quit smoking. And then the patient says, That’s amazing. I never thought of that. Wow, thanks, doc.

That worked great. Says no one ever.

Peter: Well, actually, let me stop you there. I actually have an uncle, had an uncle, he passed recently, who in his 80s, he passed in his 80s smoked all his life. Did a lot of golfing to his skin was just leather, just from the smoking and everything. One day, when he was in his early 70s, his doctor said, Hey, Bill, you really got to stop smoking. So he just stopped.

The hell?

Todd: I

Peter: know. It sounds so irrational, not irrational. It just sounds like, you know, that’s all it took? Was this guy telling him to stop?

Todd: Here’s what I would say about that. It does happen. It’s not a reliable approach.

Peter: Clearly, it’s very rare that it does work, right?

Todd: Right. Well, here’s why it may and why it usually doesn’t. And this is what I had to learn on my own. So I was reading in the meanwhile while I was out of being a nutritionist and I started my own marketing consulting and market research firm with a colleague back then in in the late 90s. And so I was reading and basically it kept pointing to the reason is the subconscious.

What is the subconscious? Okay, well it’s a concept more than an actual part of the brain, although it does relate to certain parts of the brain. But basically, simply put, we have a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The conscious mind, which is a smaller, weaker part, kind of like the tip of the iceberg, is what I’m using right now. It’s left brain, rational thinking, logic, problem solving, and willpower is the primary tool of the conscious mind.

So that’s kind of the executive center. It points the direction for where you want to go. But the subconscious, which is vastly more powerful and is our primal brain, is responsible for habits, beliefs, emotions, and so on. And so I guess a good analogy that I have come to use is that the conscious mind can be the person riding the horse. The horse is the subconscious.

If the horse doesn’t want to go in the direction of the rider, it’s not going to go. And if the horse is very emotionally disturbed because of its past, or if it’s hungry or agitated or whatever for any reason, it probably will not be cooperative. And it might be dangerous and damaging and harmful to the rider. So we are basically the horse and the rider together. Most people have an undisciplined or traumatized horse, their subconscious based on childhood issues or anything that they’ve experienced.

And as a result, they often find that there’s a lot of internal conflict that they have whenever they try to change their behavioral pattern or direction in their life. So they’ve been in a pattern of smoking, drinking, overeating, worrying, having anger outbursts, whatever it might be. And then someone, maybe a doctor, says hey, why don’t you change that? Now there are very few people who will just like that flip a switch. And those are people who usually are right there on the fence and all it takes is someone with a little authority to give them what they perceive as good advice.

And then they’re like, okay, that gave me the permission to quit. But he was probably already there. But most people, they say that sounds great, I want to do it. I’m afraid it might not work. It might be difficult.

What if I fail? What if I gain weight? What if I stop worrying something bad happens? Whatever it might be. What if I stop grieving the loss of my mother and then maybe that means I don’t love her?

Or there’s all kinds of yeah, but. And so yeah, but is conscious mind, subconscious. And the subconscious, in the cartoons, you have the angel and the devil arguing, whispering in each ear, that’s kind of the conscious mind and subconscious metaphorically. Instead of thinking of the subconscious as the devil, not literally, but the saboteur, the part of us that messes us up and gets in our way and stops us from achieving greatness and health and all of that, it actually has a good intention to help us, but it operates on a different timeframe than the conscious mind. So the conscious mind thinks long term about being healthier, having more money, having a more balanced relationship, achieving goals, whatever.

And the conscious mind does that and points the direction. But the subconscious is focused more on short term, you might say immediate gratification, but it’s primarily in charge of keeping us safe based on perception, not reality, but keeping us safe. And that’s why it’s responsible for anxiety and phobias and fear issues, but also helping us feel good or feel better than we were feeling a moment before. So like when I was a junior in college and I was feeling depressed most of the time, the one thing I could count on Peter that would make me feel better temporarily was Baskin Robbins ice cream. So I would get to my dorm room, open my freezer, tear into the chocolate mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I would have this pleasure, which was a great contrast to the crap I was feeling moments before predictably.

And I’d feel great for a half hour, but then I’d say, oh, you dummy, you just gained another pound. And then I’m crappy again. And then what do you do when you feel crappy? You do something to feel good. And this is why people enter into these habitual or we might call even addictive patterns, because they’re not solving the real underlying issue.

It’s just temporarily relieving pain, emotional pain. So if we don’t deal with the subconscious and understand why and how it’s doing what it’s doing, and we just focus on the conscious mind through willpower and logic and oh yeah, that makes sense, maybe I should change that. Then people struggle, suffer, and enter into all these recurring patterns. And that’s a big reason why a lot of people are on psychiatric meds or might be doing talk therapy with wonderfully well intentioned professionals for months or years while making only moderate, if any, progress. And so really what I have been very focused on, mission oriented since starting my practice in ‘seven, is to focus on what is the underlying issue and not just treating symptoms.

Someone has anxiety or someone is overeating, that’s not the underlying problem. That’s a reflection or effect or symptom of something, usually a thought pattern. We’ve to deal with the underlying issue and change that. And the most efficient and effective way of doing that is communicating with the subconscious to shift the belief system or perception. And it’s like metaphorically, pulling up the weed by the roots instead of analyzing or spraying weed killer on the visible part.

It just so happens that hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming or NLP, I subsequently learned after reading about the subconscious, are two of the most effective ways to change the subconscious perception or programming, if you will. And so then I went about learning about that, studying it. I took some workshops. I took a course, a training to be certified in that. And then I found a mentor in 2008 and worked with him and learned a lot of things.

And I’ve been learning ever since. Most importantly, not just techniques, but really understanding the human condition and everyday psychology and understanding why people do what they do, how they create these problems, because most of these problems are self created unintentionally, and then using the same mechanism for creating the problem, but to solve it. And so I work collaboratively basically with my clients to help them understand, which by itself doesn’t usually solve anything, but it’s a good start, and actually shift things. And once they do, usually the change lasts, is persistent and lasts indefinitely.

Peter: Got it. So one thing I wanted to make sure that we talked about was the types of issues you help people with. I mean, we’ve just kind of touched on a few. I think traditionally when you think of hypnosis, you think of smoking cessation, eating, those are probably the most common. There’s probably a few others drinking.

As I understand it, you’ve got much wider range of things you help people with.

Todd: Yeah, so my practice in 2007 started with smoking cessation, and I’ve written a book called Break the Chains of Smoking about everything that I had ever learned and found effective for quitting smoking. So there’s that. Then I added in the eating habits and the weight loss and stress and all of that. And then it was a few years into this before I realized that most issues, as I’ve kind of already explained, are really very related. And there really are usually only a few underlying causes to why people have these dozens of superficial symptoms or issues.

People present whatever they think is the problem. Oh, I have trouble sleeping. Now, by the way, that can be a physiological or hormonal issue, but if it’s mental, we can help with that. But they might say, Oh, have trouble sleeping. I have panic attacks.

I am very moody a lot. I tend to have temper issues. I have a constant worry. I can’t seem to turn my mind off. When I get stressed, I reach for food or a beer, or I tend to sabotage my relationships, or I can’t stop thinking about that thing that happened in the past, whether it was someone dying, a traumatic experience, whatever.

So ultimately there might be, there are dozens of seemingly, oh, these are all problems. But I look at those as just aspects of the weed. But really the underlying core issue usually is something related to a self worth issue or a hypersensitivity to danger. Means that their mind is overestimating the threat, such as someone who right now I’m working with a client who has a fear well, had now a fear of flying. He knows logically that it’s safer than driving statistically.

But his subconscious, for a variety of reasons, creates an image and the belief that this is the plane that’s going to crash, the one in ten million or whatever. This is it. And so naturally, he created anxiety unintentionally, his subconscious created that fear to help him avoid getting on the plane that’s going to crash or to get him nervous when he feels trapped in there because he’s like a caged animal that’s about to get beaten even though he logically knows it’s not gonna happen. So that explains most phobias or what we would think of as irrational fears. Anxiety is simply just a usually more mild but pervasive form of that, which is the perception the person’s not safe.

And so what Gina, my wife, and I both focus on primarily, and we have for the last probably five years at this point, is what we call unresolved emotional trauma. And I don’t mean necessarily it has to be PTSD, post traumatic stress because that’s a diagnosis that I’ll leave up to a psychologist and that’s just based on criteria. Ultimately, almost every person has experienced traumas, emotionally upsetting experiences that they are still on some level holding onto. So maybe a little T trauma, not a big T trauma. We’ve worked with plenty of people who have sexually abused, been in a severe car accident, first responders, veterans, domestic violence, you name it.

But those are big T traumas, if you can judge it that way. But much more commonly though, Peter, is there are people who just, maybe their dad yelled at them a lot when they were a kid, or they grew up in a household where their parents were fighting a lot, or they got divorced, one of their parents had an addiction or a mental health issue, or maybe they were adopted and they never felt loved because they figured, well, unconsciously, if Now, I was given up, maybe I’m not it doesn’t have to be childhood related, but a lot of our baggage comes from when we were children or adolescents. It could be a more recent issue in life. But ultimately, any unresolved emotional issue, which is maybe half the time related to some kind of trauma, is still running in the background kind of like an app on your phone. So even if you’re not using the app consciously, if you opened it, at least with my iPhone, it’s still there.

And depending on the app, it’s going to draw on the battery and the processor even when you’re not using it. And so metaphorically, a lot of the work that we do with the majority of our clients is to identify those apps that necessary are but are still running and are draining the person in some way. And we help them shut them down, sometimes within minutes. And that in a practical sense is helping clear emotionally upsetting memories of their emotional charge so that one minute they might recall that time when something happened. We don’t even need them to tell us what happened, which is cool.

So unlike talking about it in therapy, we don’t need all the lurid details. They can just keep it in their mind. One minute they might be tearing up or they might feel their heart racing or they might feel the emotional or physical effects of that thought because they’re bringing it up consciously. And then very often within minutes, literally could be five minutes, could be two minutes, could be ten minutes, after working with them through a few different methods or techniques, they will be able to think of the same thought, think of the same memory, know exactly what happened, and have no emotional response. And that 95% of the time will persist indefinitely.

It’s remarkable how quickly a lot of this works. And the reason we focus on trauma is because when those memories are neutralized, the emotional, the threat that is kept alive by the memory is no longer there. It’s no longer there, their subconscious doesn’t have evidence anymore for why they should still believe they’re not good enough, they’re not safe, whatever. And so then the belief largely through hypnosis and the other things we do changes much more easily. And when the belief changes, the emotional response to the belief changes.

So if you don’t believe that something bad is going to happen or that you’re not good enough and so people are going to reject you, you don’t believe that anymore, you’re not going to feel anxious and you’re not then going to behave in ways that cause you to avoid those situations, like someone who will never give a speech because they’re terrified of being judged, or they’ll never get in an airplane even if they have to drive a thousand miles, or they won’t get in a relationship because they’ve had some intimacy issues or abuse in the past. So by clearing the emotional charge from the memories, and that uses a lot of tools based on fairly recent neuroscience research that we use, when that happens, the belief begins to change very quickly and then that’s pulling the weeds out by the root. The emotion changes, the behavioral compensation for that changes. And if the person ultimately getting it back to eating or drinking or smoking, if the person is engaging in that unhealthy behavioral pattern in order to make themselves feel better emotionally and the emotion has changed, they don’t really get any major benefit from that behavior anymore.

And at that point, it’s just like blowing on a house of cards and the whole thing collapses. Wow. So it’s very rewarding for us to work with trauma because even if the person doesn’t have any trauma they’re aware of and maybe they had a pristine background, but they still struggle with something, we can still help them. It’s just that we’ve found the most fulfilling and rewarding work is taking someone who is sometimes paralyzed by something in their past that’s still living in their mind in the present and clearing that. And then the effect on their life is usually so dramatic that it’s just, it never gets old.

Peter: Wow, that sounds very rewarding. So I’m curious, just you were talking about different issues and things that people are dealing with and how you’re helping them. Do you help athletes at all? I’m just curious.

Todd: I have in the past. I occasionally do, although I don’t do sports enhancement, enhancing hypnosis anymore. I used to. I’ll tell you though, I’ve worked with hobbyists, semi pro, some pro people across various sports and almost every situation I could think of had nothing to do with the actual game or sport. It had everything to do with their personal issues.

I had a who kept dropping his guard and getting hit and he trying to, he was like a welterweight or something like that. He was trying to go for the top ranked and he was really good technically, but he was going through a divorce or a fight with his wife and kid and all that. And so these images would flash into his mind when he was boxing. Wow. All it takes is one loss of focus to get knocked out.

And there was that. There was a pro golfer on the LPGA tour who for some reason had come up around the same time with another woman golfer, and they had some kind of rivalry going in the background. Now it wasn’t about her golf game that needed help, even though it manifested as she wasn’t scoring as well. But really it was because she just had self worth issues and felt insecure. So when she was playing on the same tour as that other woman, she would lose her focus thinking about her, trying to compete with her instead of focusing on the ball.

Same thing with a pitcher, same thing with another golfer, a football player, all these different things. And really it rarely has anything to do with hypnotizing someone to hold the ball a certain way, swing the club a certain way, jab or hook. It’s really about getting over their personal issues so they can do what they need to do best. And a lot of it really is if people get out of their own way, their mind and body is going to, including physical issues, like IBS and that kind of thing, which is largely psychosomatic in most cases. If you get the mind out of the way, they will naturally heal or balance themselves.

Peter: Sounds like my pickleball game. We might have to talk later. Sure. If somebody wants to find out more about you and Gina and get in touch, what do you recommend they do?

Todd: Well, can visit goodwinhypnosis.com.

Peter: Okay.

Todd: Which was our most recent version of that website. Your firm did a great job in building. We’re very happy with the way the website looks. So goodwinhypnosis.com is our website. We have a lot of things written there, a lot of great educational videos.

And then on there, they can read about the different issues we work with, what makes our approach different from what they likely have tried in the past, whether it’s with other forms of therapy or with other hypnotists, because we’re not really like most hypnotists in terms of the kind of work we do and the methods we use. And then if they want to work with us one on one, which is most of our business, then and we do everything Zoom based. Then they can complete an online questionnaire and schedule the initial consultation with us online. And then when we meet with people for the consultation, we get a better sense of what their particular goals are, what their challenges are, filling in the blanks from the forms they fill out. If we feel we can help them and they feel the same way, then we come up with a strategy or an action plan to get there, which usually involves some number of one on one sessions, and that’s usually some combination of a customized hypnosis recording that we make for them.

Usually there’s a number of those that we do over the course of our work together, and some one on one real time, I guess you would say NLP, neuro linguistic programming techniques, which usually involve some form of visualization, guided imagery, and real time shifting of how the person in their mind sees, hears, or feels that thought. And a lot of that is clearing traumatic memories, like I said. We also have a great YouTube page. We have, I don’t know what the latest count, but well over 100 educational videos. All of it’s free, covering a lot of different topics about human behavior, demonstrations of certain techniques, and a lot of the content comes from some recent podcast episodes we were on in different areas.

So we have a lot of educational materials because we feel like that’s a really good first step. The more someone can understand themselves, the more compassion they can have for themselves and their journey, and the easier it is for them to understand how they have the ability, like we believe almost everyone does, to change how they think, feel, and respond.

Peter: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that you’ve got that set up. It sounds like it’s really easy to approach you guys. And I really have appreciated the conversation today. This has been very enlightening.

I know we’ve worked together, but I haven’t really spent any amount of time really just having a one to one conversation with you about kind of the benefits of what you do and how you guys do your work. So as we wrap up here, Todd, is there anything that you want to add to the conversation that we might’ve missed?

Todd: It’s been a pleasure talking to you too as well. I love talking about the kind of work we do because I really feel like, to answer your last question, I feel like so many people, through no fault of their own, do not understand, do not appreciate the power of their mind, both in terms of harming and helping themselves. And because no one teaches us this stuff, we kind of go through life without understanding how to use the tools that are in our hands. We just don’t know how to do it. Gina and I know how to do it.

And so we work with our clients in a purely collaborative way where we can help them understand how they’re stuck, how to get unstuck, and then we work with them like in a dance. We lead, they follow. And together, in effect, we metaphorically dance our way to resolving their issue. Usually it’s a very empowering experience.

Peter: Thank you for your service to the community as well. That’s really a good calling that you have. Again, I really appreciate your time today And we’ll go ahead and we’ll make sure that we have all your contact details in the show notes. And so if folks are interested in getting in touch with you, we’ll have a link there and they can find you and we’ll put a link to your YouTube channel as well. I appreciate it.

Todd: I’ll talk

Peter: to you soon.