Hypnotherapy Podcast

Guy Macpherson
Welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to have as my guest today Zetta Thomelin.

Zetta Thomelin
Hi, Guy. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talking to you.

Guy Macpherson
Zetta is an author, therapist, coach, and recognised leader in the field of hypnotherapy. She is chair of the British Association of Therapeutic Hypnosis, vice chair of the UK Confederation of Hypnotherapy Organisations, and she serves as trustee for the Research Council for Complementary Medicine. Zetta has also served as CEO of Children with AIDS Charity and vice chair of Mama Biashara Charity, supporting grassroots projects in Kenya. She is the author of four books: The Trauma Effect, Exploring and Resolving Inherited Trauma, Genes Don't Lie, DNA Results and Family Secrets, among others. Prior to her career in therapies, Zetta worked in the media as a Director of Chronos Group Publishing and as Group Head at News International.

Share with our listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently.

Zetta Thomelin
I was born in England and I live and work in England, though sometimes across in Germany as well. I've had an interesting journey towards work in therapy through, as you've outlined, a business background that ended up in the world of therapy through my own physical illness, which caused me to need to change direction. A whole lot of new learning came my way on that journey.

Guy Macpherson
How did all this start for you?

Zetta Thomelin
I had viral encephalitis, and at the time I was CEO of a charity in London at the peak of my career.

Guy Macpherson
Viral encephalitis - which is what?

Zetta Thomelin
It's a bit like meningitis. The brain swells, and you have all sorts of physical problems. It left me at the age of 34 with difficulties seeing. I couldn't read. I couldn't write. I couldn't watch television. I couldn't cope with any light. So my life went from great success to a sort of void of nothingness. I was looking at how to recover, and one day a friend suggested I went for some hypnotherapy, to help me with my sleep and to help me deal with the situation I found myself in - this sudden change. I think the thing I found most difficult was I didn't know how to be Zetta without the identity of my work and all the other things I'd been doing. I had to really dig deep into myself, my sense of identity. Time is very long when you can't read a book or watch a television programme. You really have to dig deep into yourself.

Guy Macpherson
You got this job, you're loving it, you're successful. What were you doing specifically?

Zetta Thomelin
I was CEO of a charity in London.

Guy Macpherson
So how do these symptoms start to appear?

Zetta Thomelin
I became really ill one day. I had terrible head pain. I was being sick. I couldn't function. I was just really, really ill. For six weeks, I couldn't get out of bed.

Guy Macpherson
So you go to the doctor. And they say what?

Zetta Thomelin
Well, they're not sure at first, and then gradually they decide I've got encephalitis. I was told I need to change the way I live my life. A doctor looked at me and said, "You're not going to be able to read a book again. You're not going to be able to do all sorts of things. Just change the way you live your life." And I'm somebody who wasn't prepared to just give in at this point. I could have just said, well, this is my life now, I'm going to be limited and just do what I can do. But I wasn't prepared to accept that that was the way things were.

Guy Macpherson
What were the proposed treatments?

Zetta Thomelin
There wasn't one. Once I'd recovered, I was no longer seriously ill, but it left brain damage in my brain stem, and so it left me with some problems. It was a question of how I was going to live with those problems. I bought a huge scanner device that worked like a reading machine, and it would read out text to me so I could work. There were some audiobooks available, and I was trying to think how I could manage my life. But over time, gradually, my sight began to improve and things began to get better for me. I think the hypnotherapy helped me a lot, and it made me think: I want to know how to do this. So I studied to become a hypnotherapist.

Guy Macpherson
Talk to us about your experience with hypnotherapy. How did you get to hypnotherapy?

Zetta Thomelin
A friend recommended it to me and said, "Have you thought of doing this?" I had some hypnotherapy, which got me sleeping properly again - my sleep had been very disturbed. It helped me with my pain management. I had really bad headaches, which were quite debilitating. And I thought, I want to understand how this works, because I'm feeling a lot better, both physically and psychologically. So I approached a trainer and said, "Will you train me?" They said, "Actually, I've never trained someone who couldn't see to read and write - we'll have to do things very slightly differently." I was with a group of people, but because I couldn't sit and read a script or look things up, everything had to be in my head. I had to learn scripts by rote. I had to learn how it all worked.

I took my exam orally, whereas everyone else was writing an exam paper. I found it very, very enjoyable and liberating, and found I could do something. So I started to work as a hypnotherapist at a time when I was beginning to see more. I could take a few notes. I could do a little bit, and gradually I began to get more and more recovery. My doctor said, "It's amazing - your brain has kind of rerouted around the brain-damaged area through the work that you've done." I'm not one hundred percent, but I've reached a level of recovery I could never have dreamed of.

Guy Macpherson
Take us back to your first experience with hypnotherapy.

Zetta Thomelin
Well, at first I thought this isn't going to work for me - I don't know how I'll relax into it, I feel a bit stressed and anxious. But within five minutes, I was loving it. The relaxation I felt. I finally felt someone had some answers for me, and I responded really well to it.

Guy Macpherson
Was that a single episode or multiple episodes over months?

Zetta Thomelin
I had a few sessions, and then when I began to train, you all practised on each other, and the trainer practised on me. So I was having quite regular hypnotherapy for about a year. During that process I got stronger and stronger, and I continue to do a lot of work with self-hypnosis. I changed the way I lived my life, and understood the power of suggestion and belief. I wasn't prepared to believe I was done at thirty-four. I began to rebuild my life, and that belief helped my recovery. I'm not saying we can heal everything - I'm not making any grandiose claims - but I think we can work with certain conditions using the power of belief, because if we believe things are going to go wrong, they're more likely to do so. We just have to look at the placebo effect and the nocebo effect - I find that fascinating.

I did a lot of research in writing my books around the power of suggestion and how people respond to it. For example, there was a research project done at a university in Munich where they were doing a trial of antidepressants. One of the people on the trial took what he believed was an overdose of his medication - but it was a placebo - and went into respiratory arrest, because he believed he'd taken a real overdose. Just that belief made his system begin to shut down. So what we believe is so important, and I brought that passion into the work I do with my clients.

We're not big on self-disclosure to our clients, because it's about them, not about me. If I feel a little of my story will help my client, then I will share it. And this took me on a longer journey which brought me more into trauma. What happened to me - suddenly losing everything and having to start again - that was a trauma. But I began to look at how trauma affects a family.

Guy Macpherson
So trauma affects a family.

Zetta Thomelin
I found myself working as a hypnotherapist with people who'd experienced trauma themselves, but also people who'd had trauma within their family. That could be a parent or a sibling. There could be a suicide in the family, or abuse of a parent. Going back generations, I've worked with quite a few grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. I began to notice how trauma was affecting everybody in the family. When I got ill and couldn't work, this affected my parents - they were really distressed, and their life changed because they had to support me a lot. But then I was looking at other people's traumas in their families, and what sort of behaviours was it bringing in? How were people being affected, both physically and psychologically?

I began to notice certain patterns, which fascinated me, and then I wanted to know more. It led me to reflect again on my own story, because we learn most through ourselves, I think. There was a trauma in my father's generation, and I suddenly had a revelatory moment when I realised I was still being affected by what had happened in his family when he was younger. These things can affect us psychologically, but also physically. I just don't think we can separate the mind and the body. I went to a PTSD conference in London a few years ago, and a professor stood up and said, "When did we, as physicians, decide to separate the mind from the body? We need to bring them back together, because 50% of people with trauma report physical pain." There are also medically undiagnosed symptoms that people with trauma present with. Now, if you've grown up in a family with someone who has trauma, what are you learning in that environment?

Guy Macpherson
Whether consciously or subconsciously.

Zetta Thomelin
Often subconsciously. For example, if you have a wounded parent - as I had, I had a wounded father - your care all goes into supporting that person. You want them to be okay. You don't understand what's wrong. There's possibly secrecy around it because you're a child and you're not necessarily allowed to know. And so you start to protect the wounded parent. They talk about this idea of merging - you merge with a wounded parent, and therefore your boundaries become weak. It's all about "we" and not about "I." You don't develop a strong sense of self, and if you haven't developed a strong sense of self, your boundaries will be very weak in all your relationships.

I began to notice this within the clients I was working with. Protecting the parent becomes really important, at the detriment of the child. They learn that they have to look after everybody, and they don't look after themselves. This comes out a lot with people who've been in a family where there's trauma. Also, loyalty to the family - we pull together to deal with this trauma and repel all outsiders. You have to stay loyal, and there's a price to that loyalty. You develop unconscious patterns around behaviours such as guilt, blame and shame, and these things are more likely to happen if the traumatic event is something that's socially difficult - like a suicide in the family. We don't talk about it. It doesn't look good for our family that that's happened.

Guy Macpherson
Let me just pause you here for a second. I'm really struck by your story, Zetta. Here you were - CEO of a children's charity, you start to experience these symptoms, which have this major impact on your life and your health. Would you ever have thought you'd be sitting here talking about this? It's really inspiring to hear about the shift that unfolded for you.

Zetta Thomelin
It was life-changing. People will sometimes say, "A terrible thing happened to me, but good came out of it." Michael J. Fox has talked about his Parkinson's and how it changed his life in a positive way, as well as obviously all the negatives. My illness took me in a completely different direction. I would never have dreamed of being a therapist. I was very much a businesswoman type of person - very organised, telling people what to do.

Guy Macpherson
It's so interesting, because the way you've spoken about the work you've done, it's almost like you tapped into this other strength, resource, energy - like you opened this other door in your being.

Zetta Thomelin
And I have to say, I'm much happier as a therapist than I ever was as a CEO. Each day I'm working with people who have really difficult stories, and when you see their lives begin to shift and they begin to heal, it's just wonderful. It really is a gift to be able to help somebody.

Guy Macpherson
What drew you to the topic of trauma in your clients?

Zetta Thomelin
I think it just intrigued me because I saw the impact it was having on everyone around them - whether I was working with the individual who was traumatised, or with someone from a family where there was trauma. I was incredibly aware of the impact that was rippling out. There was one family in which there was a suicide, and I ended up working with the mother, three cousins, and a grandmother - all people in that one family. I helped one, and then they said, "Go and see her - she'll help you deal with this." I found myself working with three different family members to help them move through that experience. I find myself quite often working with more than one member of a family because they've been affected by the same issue, but it may have manifested in different ways for them.

Guy Macpherson
Are you using solely hypnotherapy?

Zetta Thomelin
I use hypnotherapy, CBT, NLP, and I do some coaching work with people. So it's a blend, and it depends what suits the individual. One client in particular had really extreme grief when their father died. They were very close to their father and didn't cope well with the loss. They became very seriously unwell, and it took them a couple of years to begin to recover. Someone sent them to me. I've helped her on her journey of recovery, and she's now talking to other people about how you recover from illness when you've been in a state of real distress, and how you often need to deal with what's underneath it. For her, that terrible grief was something we had to work with as part of her journey to healing her physical illness.

It's interesting how many different ways trauma can come into people's lives. Often it's somebody else's trauma - you learn from them, for example, to dissociate from emotional situations because that's what your parent does. You're not enacting your own response; you're enacting their response to their problem, and you're going to carry that into your children's lives. There's a lovely book by Emily Wanderer Cohen called Generation After Generation. Her mother was in a concentration camp, and there were many ways in which this affected the raising of her children. One was perfectionism. Because her mother had been in a concentration camp and didn't want to draw attention to herself by getting something wrong - you have to keep being right, you have to be good to stay safe - she had this incredible perfectionism which she brought into her family. Then the children were trying to live up to that perfectionism, and it created a lot of problems.

It's so interesting how you trace the psychological responses to a trauma and how it infects a family. Guilt is something that so many families carry. If there's a suicide in a family, everyone takes on guilt for not having saved that person, and then that might go on to the next generation. Shame is a very interesting emotion, because in our development it had a role - we had to be safe, we had to be part of the tribe, and we didn't want to do anything that would get us ejected. So shame developed to keep us behaving in a certain way, to keep us safe within the tribe. But if it's not your shame, and you've learnt shame, how can you deal with it? And blame - the seemingly safe thing to do is to blame someone else for what happened, and so we learn to blame other people rather than taking responsibility for our own lives. Blame is a really passive place to be, a stuck place, because if you're projecting outward and blaming somebody else, you're not taking control.

Guy Macpherson
And so you found all of this out through curiosity and research.

Zetta Thomelin
I was never allowed to ask questions about it. My aunt and her three children all died, and this was something that wasn't talked about. There was a picture of her in my grandmother's home, but we didn't talk about it. It was a secret, and secrets are really scary. Secrets make us quite fearful, and dealing with the reality is often better than living with the secret. There's a really good writer, Gabrielle Schwab, who wrote a book on the haunting of secrets and trauma in a family, and it's like fighting shadows - because you don't know what it is. My father, up until he died, said, "I don't want you to research this. I want you to promise me not to look into this, because I don't want you to be hurt by what happened in the family." And I am hurt by what happened in the family - because you know you've had this secret all these years and nobody will talk about it.

As I began to unpack it, I realised how much it had influenced his behaviour. He had clung to me as a child, because he had lost two nephews and a niece under the age of eleven when he was a young man, and so I was the surviving child in this family. My father only had one sibling, so when I was born I was like the survivor - the only person coming out of this family. It was only after he died that I felt I could research it, and I did. It was a very emotional journey, because it was a story that involved newspaper headlines. I was seeing headlines about my own family in the press going back to the nineteen-fifties - all before I was born. I remember saying to my mother, "How could you think this wouldn't affect me?" And she said, "Why? It happened before you were born."

And we started to talk about it. I began to explain to her - a woman now in her nineties - how this trauma had affected her marriage, her life, our life, and that we needed to work with the healing. It needed to end now. I'm very proud of how she has gone on this journey with me. Now we'll be watching television together and she'll say, "Oh darling, that's generational trauma, isn't it, what's happening there?" And I'll say, yes, it is.

It all led to me writing The Trauma Effect, which is in part my own journey, and then advice looking at the themes of guilt, blame and shame - all the things that come out of generational trauma - and then how to deal with it. When I was researching all this, I found a lot of people discussing the theory and the ideas, but no one was telling you what to do to make it better. So I thought: I'm going to heal myself, and I'm going to take that information and show other people how to do it.

Within three days of writing the last full stop, I had a new door open. I suddenly found out I had a half-sibling I didn't know about, through a DNA test I'd taken just to find out my genealogy. I'm an only child. I'd spent fifty-six years as an only child. Suddenly I had a sibling I didn't know. I thought I'd dealt with all the family trauma, and now I had a whole new subject. What does this mean? My identity changed. I'd been an only child - that's a real label - and I wasn't anymore. I had to share my dad with somebody. He's dead, but I still had to share. I went through this process almost like a child when the second child is born, having a bit of a tantrum: he's my dad. I had to learn to share. And I did meet my half-sister, who is wonderful and a delight - I couldn't have somebody better in my life.

But then her world was turned upside down, because she didn't know either. She started saying to me, "I don't know where to turn. I'm not who I thought I was. My identity has been blown completely out of the water. What do I do?" So here was another journey I needed to go on. Another healing journey. How do you integrate that? How do you deal with it? And with the number of DNA tests out there now, with people doing this to find out where they come from, it is a huge issue. I hear stories everywhere I turn - I found out. I hadn't been told. I found out.

Guy Macpherson
Zetta, we have to wind down. You are really incredible - such an inspiration. The books - The Trauma Effect, Exploring and Resolving Inherited Trauma, as well as The Healing Metaphor. Your story is amazing. We'd love to have you back. How do people learn more about you and what you're doing?

Zetta Thomelin
I have a website, which is my name, zettathomelin.com, and my books are available through bookshops and through Amazon, so you can find out more about me there.

Guy Macpherson
We'll have all this linked up on the show notes page. Zetta, loved meeting you. Thank you so much.

Zetta Thomelin
Thank you. I've really enjoyed talking to you, Guy.