Flip Your Lid E7- Liz Burkholder: Hypnotherapy

ABOUT LIZ

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Liz Burkholder is an integrative nurse practitioner, hypnotherapist, and trauma specialist. She is also a childhood trauma survivor herself. Her mission is to help others actually heal from trauma and reclaim their lives. Trauma Focused Hypnotherapy is one of the main therapies she uses with her clients. Liz is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Mind-Body Medicine from Saybrook University.

What Flipped Liz’s Lid? Early Childhood Trauma. Liz and her family were abandoned by her father when she was only five years old. Then when her mother remarried, her alcoholic step-father was sexually abusive.

These wounds caused Liz to disconnect from her very self and her emotions. Before suffering trauma she was an energetic, outgoing child who loved to sing and talk to friends— to the point of getting in trouble at school. After being sexually abused around age 7, she lost her voice almost completely. The only time she spoke was when rage forced her to speak at home.

She hadn’t shared her experience with anyone and so people were confused by her withdrawal and acting out. As a teen, she expressed her pain by running away, shoplifting, and other harmful behaviors. She was suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders. This led her to feel alone and flawed.



When she was 17, Liz was arrested for grand larceny and was sent to a juvenile detention facility for a 12-week boot camp, which looking back, Liz sees as a miracle. She had been arrested several times before and because of her social anxiety, had dropped out of high school. At the training school, she was forced to return to school and discovered a book by Peter McWilliams titled, You Can’t Afford The Luxury Of A Negative Thought. This book explained how our thoughts become our beliefs, which become our behaviors, which become our life.

God intervened in Liz’s life through revelations around changing her mindset and thought patterns. After the training school, she looked for more self-help resources. Her learning led her on a self-healing journey that allowed her to reconnect with her joy and gratitude.

Kim comments on the significance of a five-year-old who can’t process trauma and didn’t have access to care. Liz shares that her teachers may have reached out to Liz’s mother who had no resources or capacity to understand

When Kim asked Liz who she was prior to losing her innocence, she shares that she was free, happy, and joyful. When that was taken from her, was when she began to rebel by stealing. Kim shares that it’s common for children to steal when they feel something has been taken away from them. Liz is a hypnotherapist that leads clients to go back and reconcile what was lost in their lives.

After Liz received her GED and an Associate’s degree in computer programming. She was also working in a department store where she discovered a liking for interacting with people through her sales experience. After working her way up in retail sales, she had shifted away from old friends and social connections and decided to go to nursing school at 27 years old.

Liz shares that she had a very hard time with trust, intimacy, and enjoying a healthy romantic relationship. She had spent some time in relationships with men who were similar to the men who had wounded her in childhood— unavailable and toxic. After processing some cumulative grief, Liz found herself ready for a healthy relationship. Once she was married and having children, she became a Nurse Practitioner and later pursued her Ph.D.

Liz did years of self-study and work and was able to identify patterns of feeling unworthy. She used affirmation, journaling, prayer, and later discovered hypnotherapy to clear out subconscious beliefs. She found hypnotherapy after prescribing medications to her conventional patients as a Nurse Practitioner and getting feedback about the way she listened to and talked with her mental health patients. 

As a Christian, she was hesitant herself and faced some resistance from her family around hypnotherapy, but when she finally went into training, she realized she needed the therapy for herself. Once she began using the therapy with her patients, she saw dramatic improvements in symptoms and many were even able to decrease or come off medications.

We have a fearful reaction to things we don’t understand. Liz and Kim want Christ-followers to understand that there is a difference between staged hypnosis and clinical hypnotherapy. Liz explains that there are similarities to highway hypnosis or trance states that come about when we are engrossed in a book or movie that allow the simultaneous activity of the conscious and subconscious. 

Liz tells us a story about a patient that came to her at the end of her rope. She was completely depressed and didn’t want to live. She had tried everything else, but in hypnotherapy with Liz, she uncovered and processed being raped at nine years old and her wrong beliefs about the abuse being her fault and being unworthy of goodness in life. By giving voice to her inner child and physically processing her negative stored emotion, the patient was freed from the chains of depression.

Kim shares how explains a type of trauma therapy she’s been doing for 15 years called P.E.E.R.; Primitive Emotional Energy Release. Sometimes patients struggle with the physical action of expressing repressed emotions, but when they finally let the rage and anger out, they find healing. We are taught that expressing our rage in our lives is normal, but not in the therapeutic setting, which a hurdle to get over in the clinical setting. There is trust between the practitioner and the patient in order to go into ventral vagal and revisit the hidden points of trauma.

Liz agrees that it’s sometimes difficult, but of great importance to get past barriers to trust. In the beginning, she uses ego strengthening to help patients overcome the survival instinct to protect themselves. That looks like going into the relaxed, meditative state and recalibrate the nervous system. She finds ways to pull in their inner strength and wisdom to ready themselves for hypnotherapy. Liz believes that not everyone needs or is ready for hypnotherapy. Her clients need to be ready to do the deeper work and Liz is ready to meet them where they are. 

Liz’s faith is part of everything she does and she is intentional about tapping into her own spiritual resources. She asks her patients if they want to incorporate their personal spiritual beliefs in a way that honors their unique perspectives. It’s important for patients to feel connected to something beyond themselves. She doesn’t worry too much about the terminology because she knows that the point is to connect to something beyond themselves. Kim asserts how important it is to be a safe partitioner by not dictating one spiritual culture for all patients who show up in her office.

Kim and Liz discuss similarities and differences between EMDR and hypnotherapy. Kim explains that EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing and that the bilateral stimulation can be very soothing, but she found that she and some of her patients find it to be a bit boring. The two agree that it’s important to recognize that there are many modalities of therapy and that not all are suitable for all people.

In closing, Kim puts Liz in the hot seat— be sure to listen to the full episode for her responses. You will especially want to hear what Liz would want her high school teachers to know about her today!



While we’re on the topic of early childhood trauma…

Check out Kim’s book!

 

But Your Mother Loves You is the witty and candid tale of how a renowned psychotherapist moved from “not good enough” to “the right person” despite childhood neglect and a toxic relationship with her mother.

Everyone knows at least one person who demonstrates toxic love, someone who consistently jabs a straw in others and sucks the life right out of them. Without an in-depth understanding of how to navigate these relationships, most people continue to emotionally regress and remain paralyzed in familiar, pain-soaked patterns. But Your Mother Loves You helps readers overcome this cycle of toxicity.

Kim Honeycutt shares the real-life experience of how a shame-based, self-destructive little girl grew up to be a recovered alcoholic, entered the world of psychology as a professional, and created her own strategies to address and conquer toxicity.

This story, both witty and practical, is told through the lens of personal life experience and expert psychological strategies combined with Godly intervention. Readers learn how to either walk away from or walk with a toxic loved one without losing themselves. Covered in both vulnerability and clinical information, But Your Mother Loves You provides a step-by-step approach on how to stop toxic love and the subsequent self-abuse.