How I found clinical hypnotherapy
For nearly a decade, I worked in strategic policy and project roles across mental health and paediatric community health services in Western Australia.
Throughout my career, I worked alongside psychiatrists, executives, policy makers, clinicians and people who had dedicated their lives to improving the health and wellbeing of others.
I also saw first-hand how many people, particularly children and families, were struggling to access the right support at the right time.
There were exceptional clinicians doing incredibly important work, but there were also long waitlists, fragmented systems and people whose needs did not fit neatly within the services available to them. Even when medical and clinical care was accessible, it was often only one part of what someone needed.
My experience taught me two things that I continue to hold at the same time.
Medical intervention is essential.
And the medical model is only one part of a much larger healing picture.
I was deeply committed to my work, but I always felt pulled towards something more personal and more direct. I wanted to work with people at the level where their patterns were actually being created. Not only helping them understand what was happening, but helping them change the beliefs, emotional responses and automatic behaviours that continued to shape their lives.
Clinical hypnotherapy gave me a way to do that.
The Release Room is the place where the different parts of my experience finally make sense together. It brings together my background in health, mental health and policy, my understanding of people and systems, my intuitive way of working and my unwavering belief that people have an innate capacity to heal.
My path into hypnotherapy did not begin in a classroom.
It began when I needed it myself.
In 2024, I was preparing for major surgery. Two years earlier, the birth of my son had become a traumatic emergency caesarean, and the thought of returning to hospital brought much more back to the surface than I initially understood.
I was intensely anxious in the lead-up to the operation. My thoughts were racing. My body was constantly braced for something to go wrong. I was exhausted, overwhelmed and operating from what I can now recognise as a deep sickness mindset.
I was focused on everything that could happen to me rather than what my body was capable of moving through.
A few days before the operation, almost on instinct, I booked a hypnotherapy session.
I did not know that decision would change the direction of my life.
I walked into the session panicked, stressed and frightened. I walked out feeling clear, relaxed and genuinely excited for the surgery.
I remember saying something along the lines of, “Get me to the hospital.”
It sounds ridiculous when I compare it to how I had felt only hours earlier, but the fear had gone. I was not forcing myself to be positive or trying to talk myself out of being anxious. Something had shifted underneath the fear.
My body felt safe.
The surgery itself was straightforward. My recovery was a walk in the park. Physically and emotionally, I moved through the experience with a level of calm and resilience that felt completely different from anything I had expected.
I credit that hypnotherapy session with changing far more than my thoughts about the operation.
It changed my nervous system response. It changed my relationship with my body. It released something in me that I had not realised was still frozen after the birth of my son.
That was the moment I understood hypnotherapy properly.
I had spent years working in and around mental health. I understood trauma, behaviour, emotional distress and the limitations of systems. I understood the importance of evidence, clinical care and professional responsibility.
But this was the first time I had personally experienced how quickly the subconscious mind could create change when it was approached in the right way.
The session did not erase what had happened to me. It did not pretend the fear was irrational or tell me to simply think differently.
It helped my mind and body understand that I was no longer in the original experience.
That distinction changed everything.
The subconscious mind influences so much of how we experience life. It holds the beliefs we formed before we had the ability to question them, the protective responses our bodies learned during difficult experiences and the patterns we continue to repeat even when we consciously know better.
This is why insight alone is sometimes not enough.
You can understand exactly why you react a certain way and still find yourself reacting. You can know a belief is unhelpful and still feel as though it is true. You can want to change and still feel like some deeper part of you is pulling you back towards what is familiar.
Hypnotherapy allows us to work with that deeper part.
My own experience became the spark that led me to study clinical hypnotherapy, but it also clarified the type of practitioner I wanted to become.
I did not want to reject the medical system I had worked within for so long. I wanted to add to the healing picture.
I wanted to offer people a place where their experiences were taken seriously, where the mind and body were not treated as separate things and where healing did not mean becoming a completely different person.
Often, it means releasing the beliefs, fears and protective patterns that are no longer allowing you to be who you already are.
The Release Room was created from that belief.
It is a space for people who are ready to understand what sits beneath the surface of their patterns and begin changing them from within. A place where clinical knowledge, subconscious work, nervous system safety and genuine human connection can exist together.
Hypnotherapy helped me heal something I did not yet have the words for.
In doing so, it also showed me the work I was meant to do.
