'Why I swapped my law career to become a hypnotherapist'

A family lawyer and partner at Norwich solicitors Clapham and Collinge, she had gone to her doctor after noticing a change in her breast.

“And they gave me the news I didn’t want to hear,” she says. “But I was one of the lucky ones, so I had treatment – I had surgery, I had a mastectomy and radiotherapy and about five months off work,” she says.

During that time Tammy re-evaluated her life and came to the conclusion that she would like to make some changes.

“Those five months changed everything," she says. "I started working out what my priorities in life were and one of them was am I really contributing to the world, am I actually helping people in the way that I could help people?

“And the other part is that I started applying some of my legal skills to my own health and wellness, so I started really investigating and researching a different kind of evidence, if you like, because I was researching how to be well and how to have optimum health and how to live the best life.

"Not just mindfully, but physically in body too, so the best nutrition, the best sleep, the best movement, exercise and what are the best things that you can do for your physical and mental health.”

Tammy found herself particularly interested in mindfulness, meditation and the power of the mind-body connection - the difference our thoughts can make to our physical health as well as our mental health.

“That’s the path that drew me towards hypnotherapy, because I was looking at the subconscious mind,” she says.

Hypnotherapy is used to try to treat conditions or change habits – boosting confidence and self-esteem or giving up smoking, for example.

Hypnotherapy involves being put into a deep state of relaxation in a safe space. Stock image. (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

During a session, the person receiving treatment is put into a deeply relaxed state, in a safe space.

While they are in that relaxed state the hypnotherapist will make suggestions related to what they want to achieve.

As Tammy points out, we’re quite often in this state as we go about our daily lives – in routine situations, such as in the supermarket or at work, where we can do one task, while thinking about another.

“We have the same ability of our minds to take on suggestions without being fully aware of them and in the right hands we can harness this ability that we all have,” says Tammy.

“It’s the power of our unconscious or subconscious minds, which I would go as far as describing as our hidden superpower.”

Tammy discovered the work of Marisa Peer, creator of a method of hypnotherapy called Rapid Transformational Therapy.

She started her training in 2020 and last year founded Tara Hills Therapy Centre.

“With traditional talking therapies, people can be in therapy for years and they’re still suffering the things they’re suffering,” says Tammy.

“Rapid Transformational Therapy is really different. The idea is that you get to what is causing the problem really quickly, using hypnotherapy techniques. Quite often people can’t see it for themselves and need guidance to work through it.

“During our training we learn about how the mind works and how to bring people into what they call a hypnotic trance and create that state of deep relaxation and then how to help people access it.”

Recently Tammy saw a man who had insomnia, but didn’t understand why.

“It was blighting his life,” says Tammy. “He was a senior professional and couldn’t stay awake during the day – it was making him ill. In hypnosis we went back to a memory of when he was two years old and in hospital, which he couldn’t access with his conscious mind.

“Within that deep trance state of relaxation, you can access that and then you can hear the noises that you would have heard as a child and you can feel the feelings and in your mind’s eye you can see the picture, like a memory.

“As a two-year-old he felt abandoned by his parents and he was also quite scared because he could hear the cries of the other children in the ward.

"Once he could understand that was the root cause of why he didn’t want to sleep, why he had this effective fear of letting himself go off to sleep, we could re-frame it and say you don’t need to feel like that anymore and we change it.

“It’s powerful stuff, which is why I’m so passionate about it – I want to bring it into the mainstream and I want it to be something that people understand and use and it becomes everyday and not so ‘out there’.”

Tammy also uses self-hypnosis to give herself a boost.

“Our minds respond to the words and the images that we tell it,” she says. “So, for example saying regularly to yourself I am enough, I’m more than enough or I’m confident.

"Let’s say I was going to give a speech somewhere – I would visualise myself giving that speech and being amazing and I’m giving my body the commands for how to behave. But the words that we use also trigger a physical response in our bodies, so you lessen the stress hormones and you create a calmness throughout the body. We‘re one mind-body connection.”

Tammy, 46, who lives at Upton near Acle, worked at Clapham and Collinge for 16 years.

Working in family law and divorce law built up her listening skills, making her career change not as big of a leap as it might first appear.

“I really enjoyed helping people and solving problems. It’s a really interesting career, because every day is different and you do get quite involved in your clients’ lives.

“It’s not such a big leap from listening to clients’ stories to then being a therapist, because I’m very used to really hearing what people are saying, not only the words, but reading between the lines.”

This week TV drama The Split, set in the world of London’s high end divorce circuit, returned to our screens.

Tammy says that while some series take plenty of artistic licence when they portray the legal profession, The Split is a pretty realistic depiction of what it’s like.

“I have to say its so well done, I was really impressed,” she says.

“I wasn’t expecting to like it – I don’t tend to like legal dramas because normally I sit there thinking that there are so many things that aren’t right, that would never happen, but they’ve written it so cleverly.

“You have to be the sort of person who can listen and still stay objective and I think that can be an issue with lawyers, and particularly family lawyers and divorce lawyers – it's so easy to get very involved and to take on the strong feelings of the client – and that actually doesn’t help your client because sometimes you need to tell them things that they don’t want to hear.

“It can be a stressful career and I think that’s portrayed really well in The Split. I think they show that really well how tense things can be, how stressful and how much pressure is on the lawyers.”

Tammy is a member of the Feel Good Norfolk hub and is joining our team of Monday wellbeing columnists – look out for her first column in the paper soon.

To find out more about hypnotherapy and RTT contact Tammy via tarahillstherapy.com