Expand Your Practice by Expanding Your Horizons

How We Became The Wellness Institute

In the early 80's I was a young marriage and family therapist seeing a wide variety of clients. Women abused by their husbands or boyfriends, mothers would bring in children who were angry or depressed and refused to go to school, and then there were the families of young sexual abuse victims. On many days, I felt overwhelmed and frustrated about what I could (or couldn’t) do to provide healing. Traditional talk therapy helped them to understand but did not seem to provide real, long lasting changes in their life patterns. I had done trainings with Dr. Fritz Perls, Albert Ellis and Dr. Eric Berne. I incorporated Gestalt techniques, using a pillow and talking to the other (absent) person in an empty chair. These tools were vastly more therapeutic than just talking, but still did not make lasting changes. Then I discovered hypnotherapy and the power of age regression work. These regressions opened up windows to the soul and gave us access to the subconscious mind. I realized that when trauma happens to us as very small children, we use those situations to make generalizations about ourselves. These generalizations or conclusions about ourselves, usually negative and judgmental, last for a lifetime unless discovered and changed in the exact place and time they were made.