Hypnosis in Rhode Island

The (virutal) doors are open! Welcome to the blog, the website and Jacob Pet Hypnosis. It has been over a decade since hypnosis and I collided, and I feel so privileged to be able to now share this practice within the community where I grew up. It was in Rhode Island where my journey began - a curious kid looking through my father’s medical textbooks. Dad, Dr. Pet, a psychiatrist by training, was also fascinated by hypnosis. He explained to young me that the model of Psychiatry was ever shifting. He explained how a pharmaceutical/biological model had replaced a therapeutic model of treatment. He explained how wonderful new medications were, but that many effective treatments were lost to accommodate a pharmaceutically focused mode of practice. He explained that if hypnosis was a pill, it would be most commonly prescribed psychiatric medication for its effectiveness and safety. Unfortunately, psychiatrists no longer learned hypnosis in medical school. Learning it took too long, and its implementation no longer fit the 15 minute average visit time of modern psychiatry. I wanted to know absolutely everyting I could about hypnosis. I dived into the research head first. I knew there were physicians who still dedicated the time to learn the practice of hypnosis. I wanted to know why they believed it was a better way to heal the body.

I was a young artist when I discovered Joseph Albers’ color theory in Interaction of Color (the plates of which decorate the “hypnosis” page of the site). Albers demonstrated how the same color can appear different to our eyes depending on the colors it is next to.

It’s the same orange! Albers asserts that we have no lived experience of ‘just one color’. Instead, we only see color in relation to other colors. He shows us that when the same color is placed in different situations, we perceive it differently.

It made me wonder about hypnosis. It made me wonder about how the same experience can feel so different inside different people who experience it. We are all looking at the same orange, but our bodies perceive it as different. As a high school student with ADHD and dyslexia, I felt how my body perceived things differently. I felt how I could learn some things much faster than my peers, and how some things they thought were easy were so challenging for me. We were looking at the same orange, but we were seeing it differently. I saw this pattern repeat again and again in my life, and every time, I was curious…. Was hypnosis somehow hiding under the surface?

If the orange is the same, if life is the same, why are our experiences in it so wonderfully and painfully different? Hypnosis demonstrates that even though the orange is the same, it must filter through our senses before it reaches our understanding. We think about our senses as so factual, we forget that they are simply judgements. Pain is a judgement about discomfort. Delicious is a judgement about taste. Orange is a judgement based on our eyes, light and everything we already know about color. If these things are judgements - judgements and not facts - then we can change them. We can decide.

I first began exploring these ideas in art. What does “Beautiful” mean? Where does the art exist in our bodies when we take it in? Why does art make us feel so deeply? I discovered that research linking art, hypnosis and aesthetics had never been meaningfully explored. No art theorists have been curious about hypnosis (yet) - so I began my own adventure. I turned to the experts, the two hundred year lineage of physicians and psychologists that have been studying hypnosis for healing. I inhaled book after book on clinical hypnosis, and after a decade, had a towering bookshelf of medical tomes. Somewhere in the middle of that first book - Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley - I knew my project in hypnosis was bigger than just art.

I began feeling hypnosis spilling over into every corner of my life. As a teacher, I began training teachers in how hypnosis could empower their students to feel more in control of their education. As a boxer, I began coaching other athletes how to access their most powerful selves with hypnosis. As an artist, I began to lead workshops with art makers on how hypnosis can unlock their creativity and confidence.

After years in very academic art, I had the pleasure of studying in the theology school at The University of Chicago. My work with the chaplaincy students deeply instilled the desire be more directly in touch with healing and service. I realized that I wanted to find a way to work with people all the way through the change that they wanted to make. I wanted to be working with the people who needed healing the most. My father, still practicing psychiatry in Fall River, wanted to join me on the journey to receiving certification in clinical hypnosis. So began our (still wonderfully ongoing) weekly study group, sharing everything we knew about psychiatry, psychology, neurology, patient care, hypnosis and pedagogy. We sought out a teacher, and had the honor of training as clinical hypnotists under Karen Hand in Chicago. Soon after, I opened my first practice in the windy city.

I began coaching fencing at age 15, and have been leading classrooms since I turned 22. Working with clients in hypnosis felt exactly like the work I had been doing my entire life, just more effective. As my clientele grew, as I specialized in different areas of practice, I saw how the change clients were making had a reverberating effect throughout their whole lives. I saw how it effected things they never thought were connected to when they walked into the office. I saw how it effected their relationships with everyone else around them. A high tide raises all ships. Hope is so powerful. And here we are at Rhode Island again. “Hope”. Our beautiful motto.

A few weeks ago, I picked up my practice in Chicago, and brought it with me here to RI. It has felt so wonderful to be back home. I have begun working with the hospitals here in Massachusetts, and am so encouraged by the warmth that meets this work. Hypnosis works, and it is incredible to share its power with patients, clients and physicians. When someone is ready for change, you just need to give them the right tools. When they have them, they can push through with such ease.

It is so good to be in the business of change, of “Hope”. It is so good to be back in Rhody. I love you RI. I can’t wait to get to know you again.