A Professional 180°
Before she turned to hypnotherapy, Erin McRaith was a financial planner. Almost twenty years later, Erin approaches hypnotherapy with the same measured, self-assured, straightforward energy expected of someone in her former profession.
At first, hypnosis was a side-gig. One of Erin’s loved ones struggled with alcohol abuse, and she wanted to know if hypnosis could help. “I got every single book I could find out of the library on hypnosis and learned it on my own,” she explains.
She realized her knack for it after she successfully hypnotized her older sister. “She had a really bad backache,” she says. “When she got up, she had no backache at all.”
Power of Suggestion
Erin’s work addresses the part of our brains that’s most vulnerable to suggestion, or our “subconscious.” To access the subconscious, she facilitates a deep state of relaxation in her clients. The sensation is different for everyone — Some describe it as a physical heaviness, others as a lightness.
Self-Confidence Helps Others
After six months of self-learning, Erin decided to get certified. The hardest thing about hypnotherapy school, she says, “was you don’t have that self-confidence about what you’re doing until you’ve really done it for a while.” The catch-22, however, is that the more confident she became, the better she became. Confidence comes from experience, and experience comes from confidence.
Marathon of Healing
Erin usually sees clients weekly (Nowadays, most sessions are held over the phone). From these sessions, she develops and records her hypnotherapy sessions into audio tracks that her clients listen to every day. These tracks are typically less than twenty minutes in length. She helps clients work through anything from anxiety and stress to various phobias. Once, she even helped a police officer locate a gun he misplaced.
Erin’s most frustrated by her job when clients don’t listen to their tracks daily. “It’s hard for me to see that they want help, but they won’t do the work,” she says. “But if they listen for thirty days, they pick up all those habits that I’ve put in their audio.”
Windows to the Soul
Some people are more easily hypnotized than others. Most of us can enter a hypnosis state called “theta,” where we know what’s going on around us; Still, our subconscious mind submits to the hypnotist’s suggestion. Less than 10% access a state of hypnosis so deep that they lose awareness of the world around them. The way to tell between these two types of people, Erin says, is to check your eyes. If you have more white in your eyes when you look up, you’re in the minority. Still, some people can’t be hypnotized at all. You can’t reach that theta state if you don’t want to be hypnotized. Some people don’t want to relinquish their autonomy. Those who do, however, see a radical positive change in their lives afterward.
Connect with Erin and learn more
After exploring hypnotherapy recreationally, Erin McRaith decided to change her career from a Certified Financial Planner to a Certified Hypnotherapist. Now, she has nearly 20 years of experience in the hypnotherapy field. Erin helps her clients kick bad habits, overcome their fears, and manage both physical and mental illnesses. Her favorite quote about hypnotherapy comes from her inspiration, Ernest Holmes, who says “I believe in the healing of the sick through the power of the mind.” You can check out her website (as well as how to remotely order a custom hypnotherapy audio) here.
