Arlington Connection

Brock Harris says Joanna Cameron saved his life. When he lived in Arlington 10 years ago his neighbors were heavy smokers, as he was. One day, he noticed they weren’t smoking any more. “How did you manage to stop?” he asked. “Joanna Cameron,” they said.

Brock had struggled with quitting smoking for years. He thought he had quit many times, and each time, he’d go out with a friend and have just one, and then he’d have another, and soon he was smoking again. He had already tried every therapy available for smoking cessation. He had tried patches, the Phoenix Method. All of it. He called Cameron. In one 45-minute session of hypnosis, he was able to put smoking behind him.

Cameron is on a mission to hypnotize. She was one of the first female hypnotists in the business when she started 16 years ago. She started studying hypnotherapy because of a coincidence: she was seated next to a hypnotist on a long flight and started talking about her daughter, who had test anxiety and lack of focus. The hypnotist suggested she try hypnotherapy; her daughter had a session, and Cameron saw the results. She is now moving into new ventures aimed at making hypnosis — for entertainment and therapy — more established as an alternative way to deal with phobias, addiction, anxiety, and an unreliable golf score. “Someday”, she said, “people will look back on our current ‘pill obsession’ where we put 8-year-olds on Xanax and Valium because they are anxious, and wonder: why did we do that when we could have just used hypnotherapy? Why we were so ignorant of the power of the brain? The trend is towards mindfulness and focus on positive results: and that’s all hypnosis is … really.”

Cameron is British by birth. She lives on the dividing line between McLean and Arlington. Her father was a shipbuilder, her mother, who died when Cameron was 24, of breast cancer, was an actress. Cameron was studying to be a doctor at St. Andrews University and was petitioning to do her Ph.D. in neuroscience when one professor pointed out she was a woman, and graduate placements in neuroscience were coveted and had to go to men because they were less likely to “go off and have a family.” Cameron moved from her small village in Hampshire, England, to the U.S., studied, became a ski bum, went back to care for her dying mother, returned to the U.S., where she started a student travel business, married, and had a daughter. But she never lost her interest in neuroscience.

Cameron studied under the hypnotist Pat Collins. She now teaches others how to hypnotize, and says, based on Youtube hits and name recognition around the world, she is: “the most famous female hypnotist in the world.” It was not easy. Many people continue to view hypnosis as just one step removed from the occult. But as she gained experience, she gained a following. She was based in Germany during the Iraq War and soldiers would come through after a tour of duty, many were wounded or suffering from PTSD. She would have a sign-up sheet at the military base and soldiers would sign up: she dealt with PTSD, smoking, depression — everything. She employs a desensitization technique to make the recovering soldiers stop seeing images that haunt them. She also teaches them to laugh, using stage antics done by people who are in a trance.

One curious, somewhat skeptical friend, after an experimental session with Cameron, wondered if she were really hypnotized; maybe she had just played along? Weeks later, she started watching a smoking cessation video by Cameron to see her YouTube portfolio. As Cameron counted backwards from five in her standard lead-up to the trance, the skeptic, wide awake at 10 in the morning, fell into a sound sleep for 60 seconds. “Yes!” shouted Cameron. “That’s exactly what it’s all about! You learn to self-hypnotize. To relax. To imagine your future in a positive way while feeling nothing but confidence and peace.”

Cameron recently returned from a stint in Australia training 10 hypnotherapist candidates in stage hypnosis. Many of those whom she trains are looking for more confidence. She helps people let go of limiting beliefs. She says she has the best life in the world, with travel, staying in resorts when she entertains, and working with people who have given up hope of moving beyond a problem. She can get arachnophobes to comfortably touch a spider. Cameron says she loves to inspire people — especially young women. Cameron often starts off on the first night of a conference with a comedy show using her skills. She then does eight individual sessions, getting people to recreate their lives and literally “trance themselves” into a place where they can set up a better outcome subconsciously. She reminds her clients how they felt at the age of 7 or 8, before suffering that first loss of confidence. Her hope is to restore that feeling of power and optimism. “The core of my beliefs,” Cameron said, “is that people who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full are missing the point: the glass is refillable.”

She likes to call herself the “Monty Python of Hypnotists” because of her silly British humor schtick. That is one of the reasons she stood before Simon Cowell last January in an audition for Britain’s Got Talent. She went through the somewhat devastating experience of being knee-capped by Cowell and his colleagues to bring the attention of the world to an oft misunderstood “science” of mind transformation. She wants to help legitimize a way of healing which she has found so enabling for so many, and to make people laugh, which is one of the things that gets her up in the morning.

Cameron is excited about a new gig, called Hypnojam, which takes her regularly to Nashville to rehearse with singer-songwriter Gabriel Redding — who has opened for Jason Mraz, Joan Jett, Boys Like Girls and Lady Antebellum, and plays over 30 instruments by ear. HypnoJam is a trance and dance audience participation show. Redding will musically accompany Trance Lady's hypnotic action on stage. Cameron says she has always wanted to hypnotize to music and when she and Redding perform together, she expects it to be very “Cirque du Soleil.”

“The Trance Lady” has produced over 100 Youtube videos on hypnosis, some of them self-help videos, some of them just fun recordings of a show she has done with wounded warriors. Some of her more interesting moments include: helping doctors perform surgery on a woman who was badly burned and needed a skin graft but could not have anesthesia because of an allergy. She hypnotized the woman using a CD that played her voice during the long operation. The patient never felt the pain, other than the pressure of the actual grafting. For other clients, she simply assists in an emotional release: a person can achieve much more once they have dismissed the self-limiting thought process or a habit of poor self-esteem.

Brock Harris said he saw Cameron as a kind of life coach. He had a stressful job in a family business and she would notice right away when he was stressed: she would anticipate issues, ask him how many times a week he was going to happy hour instead of the gym, then walk him through how to stop that. “It’s because of her that I have the life I have today,” he said. “I would never have been able to meet and have such a great relationship with my wife, or focus on my work in such a positive way. It sounds so simple, but by focusing on what is good, and learning how to breathe deeply, I can keep my Type A personality in balance. You have no idea how liberated I feel.” Did he ever have any doubts about hypnosis or whether it was really what changed him? “No,” Brock said, “because I see it working every day.”

To learn more, visit www.joannacameron.com.