Sometimes the Case Study Is You

I always assumed that if I ever encountered an entity attachment in a hypnotherapy session, it would belong to a client.

I have been fascinated by this side of hypnosis and quantum healing for years. Parts work. Regression. The subconscious mind. Lost souls. Entity attachments. Dolores Cannon. The strange places consciousness can take us when we stop trying to control exactly what is supposed to happen.

I figured eventually someone would sit across from me, go into trance, and something unusual would emerge.

I did not expect my first experience with it to happen to me on an ordinary Thursday morning.

And I definitely did not expect it to begin with a popsicle.

For the past several weeks, I have been paying closer attention to my internal world.

Not forcing it. Listening to it.

I have been spending more time in nature, practicing radical self-forgiveness, slowing down, breathing more deliberately, becoming curious about my emotions, and asking the parts of myself that have been hiding to come forward.

Especially the frightened ones.

I have also been working with an image that has become very useful to me: my thoughts and emotions are koi fish, and I am the pond.

The fish can be scared. The fish can be angry. The fish can worry. The fish can swim in circles.

But I do not have to become the fish.

I can become the environment that holds it.

That morning, after spending a little time on my vibration plate, I went inward and followed a feeling of fear.

In hypnotherapy, there is a technique sometimes called an affect bridge. Rather than intellectually asking, “Why do I feel this way?” you allow the feeling itself to become the bridge. You follow it. You let the subconscious mind show you what it associates with that emotional state.

Sometimes you arrive at a memory.

Sometimes an image.

Sometimes a younger version of yourself.

Sometimes something much stranger.

I suddenly found myself connected to a memory from when I was about five years old.

I was in a kiddie pool in California eating popsicles. An older homeless man appeared near the property. My mother reacted strongly to him and told him to leave.

It has always been one of those strange, prominent childhood memories that remained in my mind without me fully knowing why.

During this session, something else came forward.

It identified itself as the Ancient One.

My first instinct was not to attack it.

I wanted to understand it.

I told it that it did not need to be afraid of me. I promised I would remain curious. I invited my guides, angels, guardians and ancestors into the experience, and I asked this presence what it had been doing in my life.

What followed was one of the strangest and most vivid dialogues I have ever experienced.

The Ancient One described itself as something that had been moving from person to person for an incredibly long time. It presented itself as oppressive, angry and exhausted. It described attaching itself to energy and suppressing it.

And eventually I realized something very important.

It was afraid that I would be angry with it.

That changed everything.

Because if this presence could anticipate my anger, then somewhere inside all of that darkness was awareness.

There was relationship.

There was something I could communicate with.

So I did what apparently comes naturally to me in the middle of an improvised Thursday-morning exorcism.

I gave it a popsicle.

I let it sit down.

I asked it whether it remembered joy.

I asked whether it remembered being alive.

I asked whether it wanted to continue existing this way.

It said no.

And suddenly the session stopped feeling like a battle.

It became a rescue.

I invited it toward light.

I let the imagery of creation pour down through the session. I used breath. Compassion. Permission. Forgiveness.

And eventually the Ancient One said it was ready to leave.

So I thanked it.

I did not thank it because I enjoyed what it represented in my life.

I thanked it because I no longer wanted to create another relationship based on hatred.

And then I let it go.

When I came out of the experience, my entire left leg was asleep and tingling.

That immediately meant something to me.

For years, some of my dreams involving fear, monsters, possession and attack have centered around my legs. I have also struggled physically with my feet and with periods of living a very sedentary life.

Movement and stagnation have become part of my own symbolic language.

Did my subconscious build those connections?

Was something spiritual communicating through them?

Was it both?

At this point in my life, I am increasingly comfortable not forcing every experience into one category.

One of the strangest lessons hypnosis has taught me is that an experience does not have to fit neatly inside somebody else's worldview in order to transform you.

Afterward, I felt drawn toward a book on my shelf about guiding lost souls.

I opened it to a section discussing what the author calls unconscious entrapment: the idea that after certain sudden or altered-state deaths, a soul may remain confused about what has happened and fail to transition.

As I read about overdose, sudden death and heart attack, something inside me became very still.

The man from my childhood came back into my awareness.

And suddenly I did not feel as though I were researching anymore.

I felt as though I were reading somebody's funeral rites.

I felt that whatever had happened that morning was not only about releasing something from myself.

It was about helping something else finally go home.

And then another realization arrived.

For months, I have been struggling with anger.

Resentment.

Irritability.

A strange inability to access the level of forgiveness that usually feels natural to me.

I have been more reactive. More easily frustrated. More caught in injustice. More prone to feeling that I need to defend myself, explain myself or fight something.

And since this experience, I feel something opening again.

Forgiveness.

Not the kind of forgiveness that pretends nothing happened.

Not reconciliation.

Not permission.

Just release.

I can forgive someone and never want them near me again.

I can forgive myself for behaving poorly without pretending the behavior was ideal.

I can forgive what happened without returning to it.

That door feels available again.

And perhaps that is what fascinates me most as a hypnotherapist.

Sometimes we think healing will look like forcing ourselves to become healthier.

We meditate harder.

We eat better.

We exercise.

We read the books.

We practice mindfulness.

We work on our self-talk.

We spend time in nature.

And we imagine that all of this should make the uncomfortable material disappear.

But sometimes healing does the opposite.

Sometimes becoming safer makes hidden material more visible.

Sometimes your system finally says:

“Okay.

You're ready to see this now.”

And that is exactly what this felt like.

I had been asking the frightened parts to come forward.

One finally did.

And it was not what I expected.

For years, I thought that if I ever worked with an entity attachment, I would need some elaborate technique. Protection. Command. Perhaps confrontation.

Instead, what emerged responded to compassion.

It responded to curiosity.

It responded to being seen.

It responded to being offered an alternative.

That may be the greatest lesson I took from the entire experience.

The thing I feared did not need me to become more violent.

It needed me to become more loving without becoming less powerful.

That is the kind of hypnotherapist I want to be.

I do not want to enter somebody's subconscious with the assumption that whatever frightens us must be destroyed.

I want to ask what it is.

I want to ask what happened to it.

I want to understand what it has been trying to accomplish.

And if it is ready to change, I want to help it find somewhere else to go.

Sometimes the case study is the client.

Sometimes the case study is the practitioner.

And sometimes, apparently, the first step toward releasing something ancient is simply sitting beside it and handing it a popsicle.