Linda Gentry, a hypnotherapist, uses hypnotherapy to improve people’s physical and emotional health.

WARRENSBURG, Mo.--A world of misconception surrounds one of today’s increasingly popular practices in psychological medicine-- hypnosis.

Some people might liken it to voodoo or witchcraft; others may write it off as nonsense, ineffective or mythical.

Those who have seen stage hypnosis used for entertainment may think it is just a trip people take for fun, a state of subconsciousness, in which the hypnotized person can have a good time, then wake up,without remembering what happened.

In reality, however, hypnosis is a real tool in psychological therapy and behavior modification, and can be used to improve people’s physical and emotional health, says Warrensburg hypnotherapist Linda Gentry.

“Hypnosis is not what you think it is, if you are like most people,” Gentry wrote on her Web site, www.hypnosismo.com. “Hypnosis is the state of being in control.”

Gentry uses hypnosis to help people overcome personal obstacles. Hypnosis is especially efficient in overcoming addictions, including smoking and other unhealthy habits, she said.
It’s not voodoo or nonsense; it’s medicine.

Gentry is a registered nurse, has a psychology degree from Central Missouri , and is a certified clinical and medical hypnotherapist. In 1996, she founded a statewide organization, the Missouri Institute of Hypnotherapy (MIH), to provide better regulation of the hypnotherapy field and a more professional certification and training process for students of hypnotherapy.

Founding an institute

Gentry has been a registered nurse since the late 1970s. Working in hospitals in Kansas City and later Warrensburg, she familiarized herself with various specialties over the years, a testament to her natural curiosity about the human body. She took a special interest in psychology, and specialized in that discipline for nine years.

While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she was inspired by one of her professors, who had used psychological techniques to overcome inoperable brain cancer. The professor told students that the human mind could overcome medical problems and be used to modify unhealthy behaviors.

Gentry, who was struggling with obesity at the time, was interested in psychology as a tool for weight loss. She researched mind and body control, and her searches kept leading to studies about hypnosis. She decided to take a chance and scheduled an appointment with the only hypnotherapist in Kansas City at the time.

“I went, but I didn’t think the hypnosis did anything for me,” Gentry said. But one day, she noticed her clothes were looser and she discovered she had lost 40 pounds without even realizing it. Amazed, she went back for another session and eventually lost about 150 pounds as a result of hypnosis. She decided to become a hypnotherapist, to help other people overcome weight issues, like she had.

Gentry was disappointed in the informality of her hypnosis training course, though, remembering that she was handed a card stating she was a certified “lay hynotherapist” after just two eight-hour days of classes. She resolved then and there to improve the professional standards of her discipline.

“At that time, there was no governing body for hypnosis,” she said. “You could even get certification online.”

A few organizations, such as the National Guild of Hypnosis, have loose guidelines, or “Standards of Care,” but no licensing regulation. Some states have regulations for hypnotherapy, Gentry said, but it’s very sporadic. Only the state of Indiana has a state licensing board.

“As a nurse, I have a Board of Nursing, with regulations I have to maintain, or I’ll lose my license,” Gentry pointed out. “Hypnotherapy doesn’t have that. If you don’t uphold professional standards, you can be ‘kicked out of the club’ [associations like the National Guild], but you can still practice.”

Gentry is working to change that. “A bad hypnotherapist makes all of us look bad,” she said. Her goal is for the MIH to provide quality education in hypnotherapy and a code of standards for hypnotists to uphold.

Missouri Institute of Hypnotherapy Training

The MIH is headquartered in Gentry’s office in Warrensburg, where she operates her private hypnotherapy practice. Until recently, Gentry has traveled all over the country to teach training courses on the weekends.

Now, she tries to remain in Missouri and have her students travel here to receive their training.

Gentry says the majority of her hypnosis students come from a five-state radius. They are willing to travel all that way for her instruction because they’ve heard good things about her program, even though every state now has hypnotherapy instructors.

Gentry’s training in basic hypnotherapy, which teaches hypnosis as a means of behavior modification, consists of 100 hours of “face time” in the classroom and 160 hours of homework. Students practice hypnosis on each other, and part of their final exam is to give a hypnotherapy session to a client, under Gentry’s supervision.

Gentry is a certified instructor with the International Association of Counselors and Therapists, so pupils who successfully complete her curriculum therefore become certified with that organization, too.

Not everyone passes the curriculum, Gentry said, but a majority of the students do. She estimates she’s certified about 500 people in the past 10 years. She limits her classes to 10 people or less; any more, she said, and it wouldn’t be quality training.
Many kinds of professionals learn hypnosis to use as an adjunct to their careers, Gentry said.

Counselors, mental health professionals, nurses, physicians and even advertisers, dentists and massage therapists can use hypnosis to enhance what they do.

Professionals with a medical background are classified as “medical hypnotherapists” at the completion of the training; all others are referred to as “lay hypnotherapists.” Although all hypnotherapists are qualified to hypnotize people for behavior modification, medical hypnotherapists are able to safely use hypnosis for things like pain control.

Gentry has seen many of her students go on to become very successful hypnotherapists. Students have been hired with psychologists’ firms to work in hypnotherapy, others have written books about hypnosis psychology, and several have started their own hypnotherapy practices.

Kansas City nurse Rachel Hill took Gentry’s training six years ago, and is now CEO of her own holistic health practice, Metamorphosis Holistic and Integrative Therapies.

Hill said she uses hypnosis in almost everything she does, from simply relaxing patients on the table to helping patients control their pain with less medication, and she also incorporates acupuncture and touch therapy with her patients.

She even uses hypnosis on patients’ caregivers to relax them and help them deal with the anxieties of taking care of their ill loved ones. Hill also uses self-hypnosis to help herself as a practitioner, and has written a book called “Nursing from Inside Out,” to be released in January, that promotes self-hypnosis as a way for nurses to take care of themselves and to provide the ultimate care for their patients.

Hill was impressed with the thoroughness of Gentry’s training, saying that she emerged from the training with a full knowledge of hypnotherapy. “You feel experienced at the end of the training,” she said, “Even though you sort of learn as you go with hypnotherapy, you feel like you’re ready to hypnotize people. You don’t feel like you’re experimenting.”

Nurse Nancy Beck of Columbia,Mo., agrees. “I have attended many other training courses, and none of them compare to [Gentry’s], because they do not have the in-depth understanding that she has,” Beck said. “I have had many other hypnotherapy trainers say something was not possible, when I had already experienced the ‘impossible’ with [Gentry].”

Beck said Gentry’s training allowed her to create scripts to use with patients in the hospital. She uses “progressive relaxation” to help patients relax, and also uses “guided imagery,” in which she has patients visualize themselves healing, with their bodies functioning perfectly, to speed the recovery process.

She said she has found that by simply putting words together in the right sequence, she has been able to reduce morphine use with her patients, while yielding even better results without the drug.

Harley Sears, a hypnotist in Kansas City, Mo., underwent training with Gentry in 2001 and continues to receive support from her today. Sears has continued hypnotherapy training with the University of Central Missouri’s Extended Campus, the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Mayo Clinic.

“I found [Gentry's] experience, both as a registered nurse and hypnotherapist, incredibly valuable,” Sears said. “Her classes were entertaining and educational, and because of the small size of each class, each student received plenty of hands-on personal attention.”
Gentry also teaches advanced training workshops and also holds conferences to speak about “the business side” of hypnosis with other holistic health practitioners once a month in Unity Village, Mo.

She also teaches weekly weight-loss and stop-smoking classes at State Fair Community College in Sedalia, Mo., that are open to the community. Gentry also sees clients in private hypnotherapy sessions and speaks at various public events about hypnosis.

Hypnosis for behavior modification

Gentry’s clients are typically dealing with personal struggles or wish to change something about themselves. Although the majority come for behavior modification regarding weight loss, smoking and other bad habits, Gentry also helps clients deal with anxiety, sports performance, study habits, self-esteem and creativity.

In hypnotherapy sessions, Gentry first speaks to her clients like a regular psychiatrist would do, listening to the words they use and finding out what issues they are struggling with, she said. She then hypnotizes them, and puts the words they used – their conscious desires – into metaphors for their subconscious to understand.

“The subconscious is sort of like a 3-year-old,” Gentry explained. “It is selfish and very irrational; it doesn’t have the concept of reason, like the conscious mind does.”

Since reason is associated with words, the unconscious mind doesn’t respond to words. Rather, it works in metaphors and meanings.

Gentry likened people’s problems with addictions like smoking and unhealthy or compulsive eating to the concept of computer programming. The reason a person has such a hard time overcoming addictions is because all he can do is simply tell his unconscious to change its learned program of behavior. He wishes to change the behavior, but he doesn’t understand the code to change the program.

Without alternate coding, the unconscious reverts to its learned pattern of behavior, and the person gets frustrated because he can’t seem to stop the behavior, even though he wants to and is consciously trying very hard to quit.

With the translation of her clients’ conscious words into the more simplistic metaphors, she shares with their unconscious minds in hypnosis, Gentry helps her clients modify their behavior. The majority of her clients who want to stop smoking are able to stop cold-turkey with just one session, she said, without withdrawal symptoms, such as irritability and weight gain.

Such symptoms are learned symptoms, she added; they have no physiological origins, they only occur because people expect them to occur.

Although the majority of Gentry’s clients enlist her services to stop smoking, a close second are clients who desire to lose weight.

Gentry says hypnosis works very well for weight loss because when she speaks to the unconscious mind, she reminds it that the human body doesn’t need to eat so much, and what unhealthy foods are really made of, fat and sugar.

Weight-loss clients say that the buttery, sugary foods they always craved don’t taste as good to them after hypnosis, because their unconscious minds remember what Gentry said about the raw ingredients.

“It’s absolutely fascinating,” Gentry said about what people’s unconscious minds do with her words. She said she loves what she does; every case is different and challenging, and she enjoys helping people overcome their personal struggles.

“I get to give every one of my clients a present, every time,” she said. “I show them where their power is, and they can use it the way they need it.”

As she wrote on the MIH Web site, “The problem is inside, and the solution is inside.”