Dr. Giorgi put Ira and me in touch with a wonderful psychiatrist in New York. Ira would go in person, and I would usually do my portion on the phone. Unfortunately, it really didn’t go anywhere. It was like hitting an impenetrable brick wall of anger and pride. Many times, I felt worse after the sessions. A lot would get stirred up, but there was very little if any process of where to go with it in the aftermath.
What I came to learn later on is that nothing gets accomplished until you reach a state of surrender. You have to realize that your overwhelming will and desire to fix things and all your best intentions are sometimes not enough. “But I can’t fail,” your pride has kept saying, locking yourself into a futile battle. Instead, you have to own up to the fact that you’re not perfect and that you can’t fix this. The act of getting knocked down a few pegs allows your humility to come forward. You accept the fact that you’ve failed; but in a loving way, you also understand that it is everyone’s failure, not just yours alone but a shared one as long as everybody takes responsibility.
The therapy in New York helped me in some ways but did not get me past the stage fright and fear of flying. A friend of mine suggested that I might try hypnotherapy. She told me about a clinic in Van Nuys, California, the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, founded by Dr. John Kappas, who is generally recognized as the father of modern hypnotherapy. “He’s very much in demand, so you’ll probably have to go on a waiting list,” she told me. I didn’t know the first thing about hypnosis, and I was quite frankly a little scared. I saw a newspaper article about a famous athlete who had attributed his success to the help he got from hypnotherapy. I thought, “Well, I’ve tried everything else. What do I have to lose?” I called, and three weeks later I came in for my first appointment.
From the first moment when I walked into Dr. Kappas’s office, I had no other thought than the strongest intuitive conviction that my life was going to change dramatically. The first session with John was wonderful. At the end of it, he said, “I’m sure we’ll find out much more, but the first thing we need to do is give you back your confidence. Everyone’s adoring you except the one person you want to—yourself—and that is doing a number on you.” It was the truth. I had no confidence in myself as a woman, a performer, or anybody. The fears of flying and performing were no doubt coming from that source.
After just a few weeks, I started to see major progress. In each session, John would talk in the beginning. The purpose is to determine what you want to achieve. What are the negative patterns that are causing you to be stuck? Where are the blocks? What are the unresolved conflicts that you have never really settled in your mind? Through the process, you are able to access that unconscious mind that is whirling 24/7 and controlling your thoughts and behaviors stemming from those old programs. You don’t deserve that! You’re not that smart! You’re poor, and you’ll always be poor! With hypnotherapy, I finally had a highly effective tool to break through all those kinds of negative programming.
Only during the last ten or fifteen minutes of the session would I actually be in a hypnotic state. You’re never completely asleep, but you feel afterward a deep state of relaxation just like you’ve had an incredible night’s sleep. Instead, it is your body that is at perfect rest, so still that you hardly breathe. The mind is extremely alert unless the therapist decides that it’s in your best interest to take you to a deeper level. The therapist is able to give different sorts of inductions to help achieve the specific depth or breakthrough. Once you understand how it works and how positive it can be (and most important, start experiencing some amazing results), there is certainly nothing to fear. You feel safe and empowered to journey into your past, into those places you once thought were too painful and terrifying to ever visit again.
Hypnotherapy also unlocked the revealing and highly powerful realm of dreams. Since childhood, my dreams have been extremely visual and colorful. What I learned from the work with John was the extent to which we work out a lot of issues in our dreams. The dreams you have right after you go to sleep are wishful-thinking dreams. The ones in the middle of the night are projections. And if you wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, I had the worst dream,” that’s good, because that time is for venting dreams that help you clear out stored thoughts and emotions. Because I’m so highly suggestible to the point of almost being a somnambulist, this was like finding a gold mine.
One remarkable example is how I carried inside of me such guilt that I didn’t say goodbye to my father or get to see him again before he died. After all, the second-to-last time we met, I had told him that I’d rather see him dead than in the drunken state I had found him. Over the many decades since his death, I had never had a dream about him. I don’t know what induction or suggestion John had given me in the process, but there was my father on a train. He had his ever-present hat on. I asked him, “Daddy, are you okay?”
“Yeah, Gal, I’m fine. I’m just fine. I’m okay.”
“I’m so glad,” I yelled back and waved goodbye to him as the train pulled away. I’ve rarely dreamed about him since, but it was palpable how the emotional burden lifted
