Lisa Ferentz, renowned trauma specialist and educator, offers an immersive two-evening training on how to use clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, and focusing to guide trauma survivors in giving language and meaning to non-verbal experience — transforming the dissociative patterns that keep them stuck into pathways for safe emotional release, regulation, and integration.

Throughout both evenings, participants will:

• Experience guided imagery and focusing exercises first-hand — understanding what clients feel in these states
• Watch clinical concepts come alive through detailed case examples and demonstration
• Receive concrete scripts and tools that can be used immediately in practice
• Learn how to adapt techniques for clients across the spectrum — from those just beginning to explore inner work to those ready for deeper trauma processing
• Explore their own relationship to trance, imagery, and somatic awareness — deepening therapeutic presence

The American Psychological and British Psychological Societies recognise clinical hypnosis as an established adjunct for trauma, anxiety, and emotional regulation. Lisa’s integration of trauma theory, neuroscience, and Ericksonian clinical hypnosis offers something rare: a training that is both intellectually rigorous and immediately applicable. Her warmth, clarity, and respect for the complexity of this work make her an exceptional guide for therapists at any stage of their career.

When Insight Doesn’t Translate to Healing

She feels deeply — sensations, images, fragments of emotion — but words won’t come. She knows something has happened inside her, yet she can’t explain it. The body remembers, but language fails.

For psychodynamic and integrative therapists seeking clinically grounded, evidence-based ways to bring the body into the work, this training offers a structured approach to helping clients move from sensation to story, from felt experience to narrative understanding.

Therapists recognise this moment: when the client is flooded with imagery or bodily memory but cannot yet articulate it, when emotion is alive but remains unintegrated. The client is present in her body, but her mind has not yet found words for what it knows.

Clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, and focusing offer therapists a way forward — evidence-based methods for helping clients access non-verbal, sensory memory and transform dissociative protection into integration. (Recognised by the American Psychological and British Psychological Societies, clinical hypnosis is an established adjunct for trauma, anxiety, and emotional regulation.)

In this training, these approaches aren’t introduced as a new modality to learn from scratch, but as enhancements that can be woven seamlessly into the verbal and relational approaches you already use — whether psychodynamic, integrative, or trauma-focused.

Why This Training? Why Now?

Trauma doesn’t speak in sentences. It speaks in sensations, images, and the body’s quiet (or loud) refusal to stay present.

The task of therapy is to translate those implicit experiences into language — to help clients attach words, context, and meaning to the body’s communications. When therapists learn to honour those sensations and guide clients toward articulation, something profound becomes possible. Sensation gives way to story. Fragmented imagery finds voice. Integration replaces confusion.

This training offers both conceptual clarity and hands-on practice, moving from foundational concepts to advanced clinical applications. Through rigorous theory backed by scientific research and clinical examples, it provides the tools, confidence, and clinical framework to guide clients there — safely, skilfully, and with deep respect for their resilience.

From Sensation to Story

Throughout both evenings, participants will explore how clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, and focusing can become bridges from the body’s implicit knowing to explicit understanding, helping clients transform imagery and sensation into language and insight. They’ll learn to recognise how trance states naturally emerge in trauma work — not as induced phenomena but as protective adaptations — and how to guide clients safely from non-verbal awareness toward narrative integration without rupturing trust or regulation.

Participants will also:

• Practise using imagery and felt sense techniques to help clients locate emotional experience in the body rather than the story
• Observe how subtle shifts in tone, rhythm, and pacing can deepen or lighten a trance safely
• Learn how to adapt these interventions for a wide range of clients — from those who fear “going inward” to those prone to dissociative retreat
• Work with scripts and language patterns that emphasise empowerment and choice, aligning trance work with trauma-informed care
• Strengthen their own somatic awareness and therapeutic attunement — recognising when their bodies become instruments of regulation

Lisa’s integration of trauma theory, neuroscience, and Ericksonian clinical hypnosis offers a framework that not only teaches technique but restores the therapist’s confidence in experiential work. Her approach is grounded, evidence-based, and humane — bridging the intellectual and the intuitive so that therapists can meet clients where healing actually happens: in the body.

When Clients Are Already in Trance

“I ask her what she’s feeling, and she just… disappears. Her eyes glaze over. She’s somewhere else. And I have no idea how to bring her back without making it worse.”

Therapists working with trauma survivors encounter this moment constantly: the moment when language fails, when the client’s nervous system takes over, when all the carefully built rapport dissolves into a blank stare or a frozen silence.

You know the wound isn’t in the words. Trauma doesn’t reside in the brain’s language centres — it lives in the body, in imagery, in visceral sensation. Yet many of us were trained primarily in verbal and cognitive methods, leaving us under-resourced when clients need to access the very places where healing must occur.

Clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, and focusing invite clients to access those non-verbal states safely and intentionally. Rather than replacing traditional frameworks, these methods enrich and extend them — refinements that help therapists bridge insight and feeling, cognition and sensation.

Lisa teaches participants to recognise when a client’s natural trance state has surfaced, how to join it without intrusion, and how to lead the way back to presence. You’ll learn to identify productive versus destructive trance states, set the stage for safety, and use pacing, tone, and imagery to promote regulation and integration.

Clinical Illustration: From Disconnection to Felt Experience

“When I ask her what she’s feeling, she pauses. Her eyes lower, and her breath disappears. Then she says softly, ‘I don’t know.’”

Lisa describes a familiar scene: a client who can feel deeply but struggles to find words for what she experiences. Rather than pressing for words, Lisa invites her to notice the place in her body that feels most numb. The client imagines a heavy grey fog. Lisa gently asks her to stay with the image — to see its edges, to breathe into it, to notice any shift. Gradually, the fog thins; behind it, warmth, then tears. “It feels like grief,” the client whispers.

Through this blend of focusing and imagery, emotion emerges safely. The trance isn’t imposed; it arises naturally from attunement and permission. Over time, the client begins to sense feelings before naming them — the words now alive with meaning.

Evening One – Turning Inward Safely

The first evening builds the theoretical and experiential foundations of right-brain work. Participants explore how mindfulness, visualisation, guided imagery, focusing, and clinical hypnosis each access implicit memory differently — and why trauma survivors are already masters of trance. Lisa demonstrates how to redirect that capacity from protection toward connection.

Topics include:

• Distinguishing mindfulness, visualisation, guided imagery, focusing, and hypnosis
• Recognising productive versus destructive trance states
• Clinical concerns when working with highly dissociative clients or fragmented parts
• The six-step Focusing process for accessing “felt sense”
• Beginner strategies for clients who feel skittish or unsafe about inner work
• Assessing readiness and building trust through word choice, pacing, and contextual cues

You’ll experience brief focusing and imagery exercises to appreciate, from the inside out, what clients encounter when they turn inward.

Evening Two – The Art of Ericksonian Clinical Hypnosis

Building on that foundation, the second evening moves into the clinical artistry of Ericksonian hypnosis — a naturalistic, permissive approach ideally suited to trauma survivors. Lisa demonstrates how to set the stage for positive trance states, join with the client’s language and imagery, and tailor inductions for empowerment, grounding, and repair.

Topics include:

• Assessing hypnotisability and adapting to individual responsiveness
• Recognising indicators of trance and adjusting depth safely
• Utilisation, pacing, linking, and interspersal techniques
• Creating induction scripts for self-compassion and regulation
• Guiding clients out of trance mindfully and integrating new awareness
• Applying these tools across therapeutic models (psychodynamic, IFS, EMDR, CBT)

Each technique is designed to fit naturally within your existing therapeutic framework, allowing you to integrate them fluidly into your own style of practice. Participants will witness demonstrations and practise tone, rhythm, and imagery modulation to appreciate how subtle shifts deepen or lighten trance states.

From Dissociation to Directed Awareness

Clinical hypnosis and imagery, when practised with attunement, are not escapes from reality — they are ways of translating the body’s language into conscious awareness. By inviting clients to experience sensation, symbol, and memory safely, therapists help the implicit become explicit, allowing mind and body to communicate again.

Participants will learn to:

• Rebuild interoceptive awareness
• Use imagery and metaphor to reframe distress
• Create sensory grounding cues that stabilise the nervous system
• Encourage clients to approach, not avoid, inner experience with self-compassion

Ethics and Containment

Because trance states can access vulnerable material, Lisa devotes time to the ethical compass of experiential work — maintaining dual awareness, obtaining full consent, recognising when to pause, and debriefing afterwards. Participants leave with a framework that balances creativity with containment and ensures both therapist and client remain safely anchored.

What You’ll Learn

• By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
  Distinguish mindfulness, guided imagery, visualisation, focusing, and clinical hypnosis, and articulate their mechanisms
  Identify productive versus destructive trance states and assess readiness cues
  Implement Gendlin’s six-step Focusing process to access felt sense
  Apply Ericksonian utilisation and linking techniques to deepen safe trance
  Develop induction scripts that promote grounding, empowerment, and self-regulation
  Integrate right-brain modalities ethically into existing therapeutic frameworks
  Facilitate post-trance integration for clients with dissociation or numbing

Who Should Attend

Ideal for psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists working with trauma, dissociation, or complex PTSD — especially those who find clients “stuck in their heads” and wish to integrate somatic and experiential tools while deepening their existing theoretical approach.

About Lisa Ferentz

Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C, DAPA, is an internationally recognised trauma specialist, author, and founder of The Ferentz Institute. With four decades of clinical experience, she is known for translating complex concepts into accessible, immediately usable strategies. Her teaching style is warm, experiential, and deeply respectful of both clients and clinicians.

You’ll leave not with a new model to master, but with refined, evidence-based techniques that deepen the work you already do with clients.

© nscience UK, 2025 / 26