WMH 12: The Power of Hypnotherapy in Mental Health

This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Episode 12 with Tammie Roitman which you can watch and listen to here:

Katie Waechter: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Watching Mental Health, and this is going to be a really cool spiritual episode. We're going to dive into mental health and hypnotherapy and we're going to talk with a really amazing person who I had the chance to meet I think a couple years ago and she has stuck in my mind ever since. And her name is Tammy s Roytman. She's a certified clinical hypnotherapist. After 16 years of frustration watching large systems fail to help children and adults needing help with their problems using conventional approaches, Tammy decided that it was time for something different and to find an intervention that would compliment and enhance the conventional mental health treatments and educational methods before becoming a certified clinical hypnotherapist.

Tammie was a school psychologist for 16 years with Clark County School District. I'm sure she's seen a lot and she worked heavily with students and young adults with mental health and behavioral health disorders. Among her other amazing accomplishments, she co-wrote the school district's A DHD Protocol and set the standard for CCSD evaluations in interventions of students with A DHD in this city. On this very special episode of Watching Mental Health, I am honored to bring on Tammy and to talk more about hypnotherapy mental health and how we can all do something a little bit different to make a difference. Hi Tammy. Thank you so much for being here.

Tammie Roitman: Hi, thank you so much. I mean, I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. I'm really excited and I love what you do and I'm glad that you can bring it out into the community. I think we all need to share what we can in the community for people to help themselves.

Katie: Absolutely. And I've been seeing you doing that just that for a long time. I know you have your own show and you've been doing really amazing work in the community. So without further ado, just tell me more about who you are in your own words.

Tammie: Who I am. That's a good question. Do any of us know who and what we really are? We get glimpses of who I think I am is a being on this planet that has a certain purpose. And I believe that my purpose is to help people clear their inner conflicts and start living a peaceful, easy life. We were all intended to have that we did when we were born up until about three or four years old until we started to believe what other people had to say about us and we started to create ourselves in the way that somebody else was interpreting and perceiving us. And then I think we went through life just doing whatever we could to hold onto the false sense of self.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. That childhood innocence and fun, it seems like we all grow up and we lose it and that's such a valuable part of us and that's so important. So why does talking about this stuff, why does doing this work matter to you? Why do you want to help others?

Tammie: I feel like we have two major missions in life. One is to be kind and loving to ourselves and be in service because we have to come first. Even though people have said, well, it's selfish to put yourself first, but it's selfish not to put yourself first. It's selfish to you and how is everybody more important than you are? And plus you really can't help anybody unless you've helped yourself first. And I think that if we believe in God or some people call it a universal source or an energy, then we have to believe that we're in service to it and it knows what it's doing, how it's doing, when it's doing, and why it's doing it. And we have to learn to get out of its way and allow it to do its work. So in that we're all connected, there is no difference between me or you or even my chair or anything that's energy.

We're all energy and therefore we're all kind of responsible for the inner flow, not just with the people that we know, but with the universal whole as well. We are a people that live on an earth and in our collaboration of the earth, we're messing it up. And a lot of that is because how we feel about ourselves within is what gets projected outside. And we know this very well when we're kids because if someone is playing with superheroes out in the backyard or having a tea party with their stuffed animals, nobody will ever convince them that the superheroes out there and the tea and the cookies aren't there either. We lose sight of that. I think that's who and what we truly are. I don't to be an adult. I'm a responsible child. In other words, I'll take care of my responsibilities and I'm still going to play like I'm five.

Katie: I love that. I have often, every time around my birthday I get this fear that I'm losing my childhood. And so I really like that you say that you're forever a child. I feel like that's so important to be in some ways, to always hold on to that childhood like fun and ability to imagine and to do great things in this world without fear of judgment or other people putting you down. It's a beautiful thing to see, I think in kids

Tammie: And I mean who cares what anybody else thinks, what you think is the most important part. And I've gotten many amazing gifts from my parents and one of the more amazing gifts that I got from them is to be an adult from the time I was born up until I decided I was going to be a child when I had my own son.

Katie: Yes, very cool. Well, that sounds like you have had quite a journey, so that'd be great to get into. But let's start a little bit more with your work, your more traditional work. When you were working with CCSD, you're working a lot with kids, so tell me more about how that was and why you decided after 16 years to make a change and to do something different.

Tammie: Well, I got to be a school psychologist interestingly because I wanted to be a clinical psychologist and things kind of just changed as life does. And someone said, Hey, what about school psychology? And I'm like, what's that? And they said, you're a psychologist in the school district. And I thought in private practice you can only see so many people, but in the school you have access to thousands of them. And so after I graduated and I did a lot of internships before I graduated, even in my undergrad, I think I was the longest intern in juvenile detention psych department, which I still laugh with some people about that. And then I got experiences with Mojave Mental Health. So really I got to tailor my program the way that I wanted it. And juvenile delinquency was kind of my focus at that point. And my professional paper even looked at school failure and its contributions to juvenile delinquency.

But throughout my life, the more important people that entered my life ended up being the higher ups in the school. I mean, I was kicked out of schools, I was angry, but always a principal or somebody kind of took an interest in me. So that was one big reason why I also wanted to go into the school district. So when I went in, I basically said, listen, if you put me at an upscale school, just pull my application right now. I want to be in the schools where people kind of grew up more like I grew up and a lot of people don't know that I grew up with parents that were addicts and didn't want to take care of their kids and their kids became vulnerable to lots of abuses and stuff like that, which was to me an amazing gift because of what I do. I understand everybody that kind of comes into my office and where we don't often see the stepping stones of our lives until we're kind of in. So I felt like I had a lot to offer kids that were coming from more struggling type of families like my own. And I walked into the school district and I said, I'm going to change a bureaucracy that doesn't want to change. And everybody said, they're going to run you out of here before you do that. And I said, well, we'll see about that.

So I was kind of going into the area of juvenile delinquency and a lot of the problems that they had and then kind just started to transition into psychiatric severe behaviors, mental health. We were the first school district that had a threat assessment team after Columbine. So I went and worked in that department. I was already working on the crisis team. We got to create the suicide protocol, which now I understand is statewide. I was able to bring an intervention program to that that I created that looked at kids that were kind of making threats and to be able to pull a systems of care together. Being a school psychologist, I understand the importance of bringing a team together, working on the same page, not just for the kid but also for the family. And so after that I kind of established myself. I always had a two to three school assignment and was always brought into the most severe mental health and psychiatric and behavioral cases in the district.

And so I begged and pled for 10 years to have a mental health team and the right people went up top and unfortunately the psych department didn't feel like the school district should actually be doing things like that. But we have the kids more times than not. And at that point there weren't a lot of things being done in terms of mental health and psychiatric issues. I was training nurses, I was training psychologists, I was training counselors. I was training school staff on how to manage behaviors and get away from a diagnosis. The diagnosis is a word that absolutely means nothing, and you can't take the person one-on-one based on a diagnosis, but you can with different types of behaviors. And that's all it is, is it's a behavioral manifestation of something. So the right people went up and I think they were tired of listening to me and basically I had just gotten into a PhD program that I really didn't want to be in either.

And they gave me the opportunity to create the mental health transition team, which transitioned kids from psychiatric hospitalization back into the school, whether it was local or out of state. And I was able to use my friends in the community who most people don't want to work with CCSD, they're difficult to work with. And I said, listen, you know me. You know what I bring to the table. I work hard for kids and families. I make myself available 24 hours. I need you to come out as a team player to this. And they did. And so it became that when a kid went to a psychiatric hospitalization, the school provided them with certain type of information. And when the kid was released, some information, I didn't think the school district needed all the information, but there were certain things I did think they needed. And I did a lot of parent focusing groups with Nevada PEP to get information that parents were going to be comfortable with as well.

So out of that, the school had to do a transition plan for the kid back because every kid deserves the same opportunities to be successful in school where they spend most of their time as everybody else. After that, I decided that I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish because out of that came a lot of the mental health services you see now in the school district with social workers at schools and counselors stepping up to the plate and even school psychologists doing more and more of that, which is really amazing. And I was going to leave the school district and they begged me to kind of stay and they created a position for me and I did it for about a half a year and I said, I'm done because you asked me to stay and I did all this work to recreate one of the special schools.

And the administrator you put there wasn't interested. And I basically said at that point, I'm tired of diagnosis. The medications help sometimes, but sometimes they don't. And what empowers somebody to go within themselves where we have all the information about ourselves and make the changes that we want to make to live the life we want to make. And I did about a year and a half worth of research on all sorts of different modalities, and I've been in a meditation since I was very young. It's something that I just have always done throughout my life. And so hypnotherapy seemed exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I love it. It's my passion. I think I'm good at it. And so I opened up a hypnotherapy practice and interestingly, I see people that have been in talk therapy and different modalities for many, many years with almost no progress forward, come and just move their life in directions they never even thought were possible.

Katie: Wow, what a career, first off. I mean, that's amazing. These are all services that we desperately need in the schools. And so just you being that person that it feels like you're that person that opened the door that said, this is what needs to be. These are the basics. These things need to happen, and you are able to push your way through and get it done, which I think is so cool. I do,

Tammie: Yeah. I pushed and pushed. I mean, I would walk into meetings. I had some district wide positions, so I had access to the higher ups, and I literally would walk into meetings and sit. The first thing out of my mouth is when am I getting my mental health team?

Katie: I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, I think only because of your tenacity and grit, did that even happen. We needed someone like you to come in and push in order to get any sort of change. And I think that we still need those people still so many issues with CCSD. They seem to forever be not people's favorite district, but it's a climb. It's an uphill battle I think all the time.

Tammie: Yeah, I think to be fair to CCSD and their staff, I think everybody's doing the best that they can. These are challenging times, especially with kids. And there's a lot of things that go on with teenagers or young kids now that didn't go on in the past. And there's a lot of family dynamics as well. One thing when I was a school psychologist that kind of bugged me is that the families were not being intervened with, but it's a family. A lot of these families are struggling to be able to pay the rent or have food. And even when I take a child on in my private practice, I'm taking on the family and I'm going to go the extra mile for that. And I think those things are kind of forgotten when working with kids at school that they're coming schools, they're one chance school for me.

I mean, I was a good student, but I was a pain for a lot of people because I was angry and school bored me on top of it all because I moved to Las Vegas from Chicago and academically I was four years above. So things they were doing starting school here in high school, I had already done that in end of middle elementary school into middle school. So I think they're doing the best that they can. Staff is not trained a lot of the times in these types of things. And I think there needs to be more training. Plus if you look at being a human anyways, everybody is, let's say a mirror of ourselves and everybody there is there to offer us something. Well, sometimes you don't want to see the mirror in a kid. Sometimes the mirror becomes a little difficult, so they push your buttons and instead of being able to settle down and calm down and look at it in a different way, you react emotionally because that's human nature.

Katie: Yeah, that's true. And it seems like since you moved from the district into a private practice setting that you do have a little bit more flexibility to be able to work with the family and to do these extra steps that is so important.

Tammie: Oh yeah. And I did that with Clark County School District. I mean, I used to say half of Las Vegas has my cell number because even when I had a kid in Clark County School district, the parents and the kid, whether I was doing counseling as a related service or trying to help in an intervention way, they always could reach out to my cell phone and call me if they have questions. I still have people that call me that need help, and I'm more than happy to guide them through the process or help any way I possibly can.

Katie: Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. I think that's really kind that shows your heart. And so let's talk a little bit more about your private practice. What is hypnotherapy for those who are brand new and who only maybe heard of it from the TVs and maybe don't know exactly what it is?

Tammie: Yeah, there's a lot of misconceptions about what hypnotherapy is. To me, the word hypnosis means to go within ourselves. And once we go inside of ourselves, we can get away from this thing called the thinking mind that causes lots of problems that often is times isn't even looking at things the way that they are. And so what I do is I don't want anybody to think that anything's being done to them because nobody can do anything to you. You have to allow yourself to trust yourself to let go, to trust the person guiding you. So it's basically, I use progressively relaxation so that they know when they're letting go, they're actually doing it, and we're accessing what people call the subconscious mind. It sounds woo, but really think about it like a little tape recorder that records every tiny second of our life. And in that some things are recorded over and over.

So coping skills, people don't see fears or angers or even addiction or anxiety as coping skills, but they are because they're helpful, just like a coping skill of being peaceful or using a breathing technique. Anything that's useful to me is a coping skill. And so the higher mind is kind of the place that keeps us protected, that keeps us saying, Hey, you're still alive. And so let's say something happens when we're younger and we start to get anxiety because maybe one of our parents show that type of coping skill and we pick up on it or appear. It can be a lot of places, but at the end of the situation, we're fine. We're still alive. Well, the higher mind says, wow, in that situation you were fine. So now here's the other situation. If I give you this much and you are this fine now I'm going to give you this much.

And so the pattern starts. So when you're guided within yourself and you can get away from the thinking mind, you can see not necessarily back because the problem isn't back there. The only thing back there is an incomplete situation that you keep moving to the now. The problem is the now. And so we can work at the subconscious level and kind of say, listen, you're safe. Now you're peaceful and you're still doing this, but you're not even realizing that you're doing it. You're kind of falling into it. And so you can make changes, very powerful changes at that level. And then you can move them into the here and the now. And people say some things change and you have to don't know how they change. They just do. And some things are moved more to the awareness because it's something you keep falling into without the awareness that you're in it.

Katie: Wow, that's so interesting. You mentioned anxiety. It feels like depression. It would be similar. What about addiction? It feels like all of this can be helpful in those areas.

Tammie: To me, hypnotherapy can be used in any area because it means accessing yourself. You have every bit of knowledge about yourself. It's all there. You just have to settle yourself down enough to access it to make the changes. And I constantly give homework. And I know people say, oh, homework. I say, do it or don't do it, I don't care. That's up to you. But it's usually a breathing technique. One of the things that almost everybody, no matter what they're coming for, are having trouble sleeping. They notice that sleep starts to increase amazingly well with it. And that's some of it. The homework that I'm doing with them at nighttime when they're going to sleep is giving them certain types of breathing techniques.

Katie: That's so cool because it seems like you're guiding them in one way, in a spiritual way, but you have this background of mental health and psychology treatments and all of these traditional methods. And so it's different because you're combining, I think these two different, A lot of people struggle to bring them together, but I think that's a piece that we're missing is bringing those more traditional approach to that spiritual and really recognizing and going within yourself approach.

Tammie: To be quite honest, I was probably a very confrontational student for a lot of the professors. I had some professors that said, don't take my class again. And I had some professors saying, it's so exciting. I have to think for a week. What's going to kind of come out of your mouth? And I've taken so many psychology classes and there's so many psychologists, and there's so many theorists, but those are people's opinions as well. I think the true gifts that I have been given of my own life experiences that I have worked through and said, even my mother passed away a couple of years ago, and I said to her, it's time to let go. Stop tormenting yourself. You have given me the most incredible gifts that I could ever ask for because I know what it's like for everybody to come into my office.

I mean, do I know what it's like exactly for them? No. But do I know what it's like to have anxiety, depression, anger? Do I know what it's like to hate yourself so much? You want to get rid of yourself? Do I know what it's like to contemplate wanting to take yourself off the planet? Do I know what it's like to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abused? I do, and these are tremendous gifts for me. The only thing that I only have insight into addiction through a child's eyes and watching my parents, because parents are the most amazing gift you can get. They teach you what you do and you don't want. And after what I saw for so many years, that was not a direction that I wanted to go into.

Katie: Wow, what a powerful statement. They teach you what you do and don't want. And that's true. They, they're our first teachers in the world and they're often our longest teachers. And that's so powerful to think about and just what you bring to the table. And I do feel like your spirit and your energy is different, and that's powerful. Do you think that anyone can be a hypnotherapist or is it someone who really does have to go through a lot of the work themselves?

Tammie: Well, I think whether you're a hypnotherapist or any type of therapist, you got to do your own work first. I mean, I'm not going to tell you that anybody could or couldn't. That's a judgment. And I try not to judge. If it's who you are, you're going to know it. And for me, I see myself more like I help people clear the shelf of the subconscious of the internal conflicts there are that there is nothing really outside of ourselves. We can put it out there, but eventually we have to go back in and change those. And I think then I shift people up to take their place in the world so that we can have a more peaceful world that we live in. That's what I think I really do do. I think all hypnotherapist do that. I don't know. I really focus on what I'm doing and stay away from the rest of it. Everybody has their amazing gifts that they bring to the world, and we all do it differently. So to say, anybody could, if it's their journey, then they can, but they may have another journey that's a better fit for them.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you've seen a lot of, I think, mental health challenges, just diagnoses, right? You've seen the gambit out of what you've seen in the transitions that you've made. This is a question that I like to ask most of my guests around this area, which is do you think that a mental health challenge or a diagnosis is something that someone can overcome or something that someone needs to learn to live with and to continuously get treatment for? Or is it something in the middle?

Tammie: I believe that everybody can overcome and create their life the way that they want to make it. I think diagnosis is very unempowering, and I don't know how many clients that I've had that have heard me say, I don't really care what the diagnosis is. That doesn't help me and it doesn't help you. You're as a being of what we are. We're so incredibly powerful. We forget that power, but these are stepping stones in life. So even if you don't understand why you're having anxiety or depression or PTSD or addiction or you name it, even schizophrenia, there is a purpose later on that you'll see why you experience that. Life is a set of experiences. The problem that we have as a human being is we take the experiences with us and draw 'em to the next experience. Instead of saying, this was the experience, this is the knowledge, the insight, and the wisdom that I gained from the experience. I complete that experience. And now I move on to the next one.

Katie: Yeah, most definitely. And you're right. I mean, that is a struggle for most humans is we hold onto it. We hold onto that trauma from our childhood. And I think that that's such a hip trendy word right now, is this trauma and going in that way. But it's so much more than trauma. It's all of our experiences, and it's who we are.

Tammie: It's who and what we are, and we're having that experience to do our work. And by the way, I've worked with quite a few psychiatrists and we have successfully got people off of their medication never to be used again.

Katie: I love it. And you did it in a healthy way, and I think that that's amazing. I would love to keep talking medication. But we are coming to an end of this episode, and I just really appreciate your time and just diving deep a little bit for me on the CCSD side. And I just really love your perspective there. But I'd love to have you come back. We should talk more on hypnotherapy, on treatments. There's a big stigma around if you should or shouldn't use medication, and I just love to keep getting your knowledge and your insights on that. So thank you so much for being here with me today.

Tammie: Thank you so much for the invite, and I'd be more than happy anytime to come on and have this experience with you again. And I think one more thing is that people should be comfortable with whatever road they choose. If it's medication, if it's talk therapy, if it's hypnotherapy, if it's another type of treatment, as long as you believe it's going to work, I promise you it will.

Katie: Oh, that's beautiful. And I think, yes, that's so important. I advocate for access. And if that's access to medication, if that's access to therapy, if that's access to hypnotherapy or other less traditional methods, I think it's so important that we learn about them. We know what's available, what's out there, and then that'll help us make these better informed decisions for what's best for us individually.

Tammie: Absolutely. And only we can make those decisions. Nobody should make 'em for us.

Katie: Yeah. What a great way to end the show. Thank you so much again for being here. I'll definitely have you on again, and I just appreciate your time.

Tammie: Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Katie: All right. And join us every first and third Wednesday at 3:00 PM Pacific Time Live. But then also catch up with all of my episodes on my website @katierosewachter.com and we will see you next time.