Hello, I am Susanna Sweeney. This page is where I get to tell you my own story and why I do what I do. I am glad you are here and are giving me the opportunity to connect with you on that level.
This article tells the story of why I actively promote hypnotherapy and work to dismantle the many prevailing hypnosis myths - so that hypnotherapy will become more accessible for people like you and so that you can more easily benefit from the miracles it has to offer. It tells the story of why I created the Online Hypnotherapy Clinic.
Furthermore, I will tell you my story of how I came to focus on the area of therapy I focus on- which is helping people heal the wounds caused by immature and toxic parenting.
I think might be a lot like you. From a young age, I had a strong desire to be uniquely myself, to express myself creatively and forge my own path.
At the same time, I felt blocked and I struggled with anxiety. I felt this huge potential, but also always knew I was holding back. Anxiety, for me, came coupled with imposter syndrome- great that we now have a word for what I could not name back in the day.
In hindsight I know all this was as a result of childhood trauma and also inter-generational trauma that was passed down to me. The anxiety manifested as toxic emotions such as anger, fear and persistent sadness that I felt practically all the time.
Overall, for many years, living my life felt like I was trying to drive a car having one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes.
I underwent many years of psychotherapy with a very good therapist. With her help I stripped layers upon layers of pain and anxiety. The work was excruciating and painful to be honest, and way harder than I'd like it to be for any one of my clients.
I was not aware of any alternatives back then. But my desire to truly be myself was strong, and my pain levels were such that I stuck with it. Part of my motivation was also that I was determined not to pass my troubles on to my future children.
For a period of about some years I made good progress. Anxiety levels were dropping. My life changed too, according to how my inner state was changing- for example, I was now in a loving long term relationship. But then, after sustaining severe soft tissue injuries in a car crash in 2004, everything ground to a halt. I was out of work, in pain and unable to function.
In hindsight I can say that, triggered by the car accident, another, much deeper layer of trauma was surfacing. All I knew at the time was that, feeling unsettled, I questioned everything I was doing. Anxiety levels were up once more. And I was about to discover that the familiar tools I had used were no longer working to reduce it.
I knew well it was the inside that needed changing so that the outside world could align itself for me once again. So, I reached for my usual tools.
By now I was fully trained in sensorimotor psychotherapy. I got good results with clients. But for me, talk therapy no longer provided any anxiety relief.
This was very disappointing and also hard to admit or understand at the time as I had trained under the assumption that psychotherapy was the most reliable way of shifting unconscious material. I now met its limits.
When I found that talk therapy no longer worked, this led me to trying out many other ways of working. For example, I tried out different forms of complimentary or so called alternative therapies with mixed results.
Mostly, throughout this time, I felt like I was groping in the dark. I was growing increasingly frustrated and I felt utterly lost.
The lesson I learned the hard way: the most effective way to heal anxiety and trauma is not to focus on either the physical body and medicate or treat that or on the conscious mind with talk therapy, but rather to focus on the subconscious mind which controls both and gives direct access to traumatically encoded memory.
In other words,, I have come to see that getting to the very bottom of the barrel of the trauma that underlies anxiety requires different types of tools. It requires tools that address the subconscious mind directly.
During this period of feeling utterly lost- one day, in an online search, completely by accident- I stumbled upon hypnosis. In the spirit of Western World rational left brain thinking, my first two responses were suspicion and doubt. Thankfully, my third response was curiosity.
I figured that since I had nothing to lose, I might give self hypnosis a go, working only with a simple recording. Well, I have never looked back.
In that first session of self hypnosis I went deep into my subconscious mind where I could embrace all my dreams and ideals without censoring them.
I got unstuck in the space of only twenty minutes. Hypnotherapy, by bypassing by conscious mind, helped me tap into my inner resources. This was followed by an unprecedented rate of change in the months and years that followed.
Why? When you use hypnotherapy for change you learn to harness your subconscious mind. This was a complete revelation to me. I had neglected bringing my subconscious mind on board when I was looking to make changes! Now that I was tapping into it, things were moving.
After seeing the first few dramatic changes, I fell in love with hypnotherapy and trained in it. To me, hypnotherapy is the Rolls Royce of therapies, turbo-charging the pace of change, making for a safe and effective change process.
Using hypnotherapy for change has helped me to:
I now work with professionals and entrepreneurs helping them heal the wounds of immature and toxic parenting. Why?
Firstly, the effects of that are something I struggled with myself. I love my mum and dad dearly. Being the generation they are, born during the war, they didn't have any proper parenting themselves and hence, had nothing to give on an emotional level. I was never left wanting on the material level, but that was all they had to give.
Combine that with the cultural background of growing up in a dictatorship (East Germany) which was very much fear based- and you get the right mixture to produce both anxiety and depression which is what I grappled with in my twenties.
But even when I overcame the worst of the anxiety and depression, I found that a severe impact on me remained: I lacked self belief, self esteem and confidence. I felt stuck for most of my thirties and was in a rut I just couldn't get out of.
That's until I started working with other therapy methods that help us process trauma much faster, even when the source of it may be elusive. Having broken through myself, I now help my clients achieve the same- in short term therapy programmes that deliver life changing results.
Here, you can study the program page for my bespoke one to one REPAIRenting® Program .
Join my free Facebook group for free resources and informative Lives. I am looking forward to having you on board.
Regards,
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