In March 2020, I, like everyone else, did my best to accept the bizarreness of quarantine living. Within a few days of nestling into my home, I started getting urgent texts from my clients, including a barrage of emails from people in far-flung places, all with some version of “I've got the virus. I'm isolated and can't pull myself away from the terrifying news. Please tell me you do remote sessions!”

I'd been aware of Zoom for a few years before the pandemic. I'd even participated in dozens of Brady Bunch-style talking head meetings with friends and colleagues. But none of those smacked as potentially dangerous if the power shut off or my internet service went out. I quaked at the thought of my computer glitching while a client was in the midst of a teary catharsis. 

Let’s back up a bit. I'm a hypnotherapist, which is most commonly practiced in person. If you're unfamiliar with hypnotherapy, it's not like you see in movies, like in Jordan Peele's Get Out, where Rose turns Chris into a quasi-zombie, luring him into the “Sunken Place.” Nor is hypnotherapy like stage hypnosis, where the practitioner snaps their fingers and turns an unassuming audience member into a gyrating Elvis impersonator. Hypnotherapy is a practice involving a deep state of relaxation to access the subconscious. Like most therapies, the more open and vulnerable the client can be, the more effective the therapy.

For example, a few years ago, Simon (not his real name because he was one of my clients), a rugged outdoorsman, came to see me in my Los Angeles office to help him shake his fear of flying. Amid the scent of lavender essential oil and soothing music, he reclined into the chair and closed his eyes as I counted him back, from ten to zero, to the first time his heart palpitated at boarding an airplane. He fitfully recalled being 8 years old on a flight with his high-strung mother, who'd had a panic attack during turbulence. I helped Simon reenter his memory and, as if in a lucid dream, envision his powerful adult self beside him on the plane. This provided him with a retroactive strength with which to rescript his narrative about the incident. After just a few sessions and a plane ride later, Simon reported that the fear that had been with him his whole life had suddenly vanished. 

But that was pre-COVID, when I could be in the same room as my client.

Back in 2020, as I stared blankly at my urgent requests for tele-therapy, I sought the counsel of George Kappas, the director of my alma mater, Hypnosis Motivation Institute (HMI), in California. His voice over the phone broadcasted as confidently as a newspaper headline, “Remote sessions are the wave of the future.”

“But, but, but …” I enumerated all that I feared could go wrong. He replied, “The most important thing about Zoom-hypnotherapy is teaching your client how to bring themselves out of hypnosis if the power shuts off, a family member bursts into the room, or their pet jumps on their lap.”