PTSD

How it shows up

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can follow any event that felt genuinely threatening or out of your control — an accident, an assault, a natural disaster, combat, or witnessing something harrowing. Symptoms can start right away or show up months or years later, and generally fall into a few patterns:

• Reliving the event through flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive memories
• Avoiding places, people, or situations that bring it back, which can lead to isolation
• Arousal — trouble sleeping, irritability, being easily startled, a racing heart
• Cognitive and emotional effects like guilt, blame, or feeling estranged from others

PTSD can affect children as well as adults, and people who’ve experienced repeated trauma or abuse are at greater risk. It’s a real, diagnosable condition — not something to just push through alone.

How hypnotherapy helps

Hypnotherapy is meant to work alongside the care recommended by your doctor or mental health provider, not replace it. The aim is to help unlock and revisit “blocked” emotion tied to the trauma from a different, less overwhelming perspective, using cognitive or analytical hypnotherapy techniques that work with the unconscious mind. Pattie combines this with CBT-based hypnotherapy to help interrupt negative thought loops and build clearer, calmer thought patterns.

This is careful, gradual work. It depends on your readiness to revisit difficult material safely and your genuine desire to work through it — hypnotherapy isn’t magic, and there’s no guaranteed timeline.

What a session looks like

Every new client starts with a free 20-minute consultation. Sessions with Pattie are $150 and available at her Scottsdale office or remotely by Zoom.

Common questions

Does hypnotherapy replace my current treatment? No — it’s meant to work alongside care from your doctor or therapist, not instead of it.

Will I have to relive the trauma in detail? Sessions are guided carefully and at a pace you’re comfortable with — this isn’t about forcing you to relive anything before you’re ready.

Can children be affected by PTSD too? Yes. It can show up in children as delayed development in areas like speech or motor skills, and it’s worth mentioning a child’s history during a consultation.