Hello and welcome to the Calmar You podcast. This is your host, Chloe Brotheridge. I'm a coach, a

hypnotologist, and I'm the author of The Anxiety Solution and Brave New Girl. And this podcast is all

about helping you to become your calmest, happiest and most confident self. Hello, hello,

thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you're doing

well. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about hypnotherapy. Again, I've done at least one

episode about this topic and it was very popular and I had lots more questions coming in about this

as a therapy, as a modality. And it's one of those things that is a little bit

mysterious and I think it's unfortunately quite often a last resort for what people will try

when it comes to therapy because we don't really talk about it very much or we have strange

ideas about hypnotherapy based on what we see on the TV or what we've seen

on holiday on the stage. So I wanted to talk a bit more about this and how you can get some of

the benefits of hypnotherapy. And I thought I'd start by sharing a bit about how I first discovered

hypnotherapy. So it was the summer of 2010 and I was

sitting in my small box room in the house that I shared with four others in Essex,

in Colchester, where I lived, all those years ago. And I remember at this time,

looking out of the window whilst sitting at my computer with tears streaming down my face.

And it was one of those beautiful evenings outside, you know, those gorgeous summer evenings

where the sun is really low

in the sky and the sunlight was just spilling across the long grass in the garden outside.

And my housemates were having a barbecue. I could smell the food and outside I could hear them

laughing, clinking beer bottles together. I could hear music,

the fire crackling. And of course, they'd invited me to join them. But I was in such a pit

...