I do not diagnose or treat people or couples. Yet, I have helped several hundred couples improve their relationships, avoid a divorce, and in one case, have a peaceful separation. People ask me how I can do couple’s therapy without diagnosis or treatment. If you are wondering the same thing, read on as I explain how I do what I do.

I like to start defining what I mean by a couple: any two people who want to improve their relationship. I work with three types of couples:

1. Marital, even if they are not legally married. Any two consenting adults in a romantic/sexual type of relationship I define as a marital couple.
2. Business. Most “couples” in this category are business partners who are not seeing eye-to-eye, thus affecting the health of their business. Occasionally the “couple” is a boss/employee, or two parallel co-workers who are not getting along.
3. Family, very often siblings. Sibling rivalry can be a big problem even among adults.

About 70% of the...

You and I are not the only ones trying to lose weight. According to some studies, there are about 150 million American adults who are overweight, obese, or severely obese. Out of those, only 60 million of us are actively working on losing weight and remodeling the body, unfortunately not with much success.

People start diets and exercising, but eventually drop out of the program. The big question is: Why? Why do we drop out of the program?

There are some physical and some mental reasons why people drop out of their chosen method to adjust their bodies. One of the most potent motivators of human behavior is hunger. Hunger can cause a person to actually kill; in fact we kill animals, we kill plants to eat and satiate hunger.

Hunger is an extraordinarily powerful motivator of behavior. When we are hungry enough, long enough, we eat anything. We end up eating excess food when we are hungry because the logic of the body is “I've been going hungry for so long, I better eat up a lot...

Overcome emotional eating and only engage in mindful eating. Intuitive eating may not be the best choice at first because we are conditioned to eat unhealthy foods, instead of having clean nutrition. A healthy lifestyle includes appetite control; this will lead to permanent weight loss, weight adjustment and complete body reshaping. This is most important for health, and even for mental health. This is true mindfulness. This is how you overcome emotional eating and lose weight permanently.

There will be a shift in consciousness, coupled with a growth mindset, that will even help you reverse aging. At the core of men’s health and women’s health is effective nutrition, which makes you fit for life.

Yes, the mindset that leads to body recomposition required me to change my mind, adjust my mindset, and redesign my self-image. How do I control appetite? How do I overcome mindless emotional eating? How to stop emotional eating? Using hypnotherapy for weight loss. This is the...

Please answer the following questions sincerely. “Yes” or “No” suffices.

1. Have you ever felt a sense of emptiness, like a void within you that doesn't seem to go away no matter what you do?
2. Have you felt a nagging sense of helplessness or hopelessness? No hope for a better life?
3. How about a sense of despair, anxiety, or depression? Did you know where it came from?
4. What about a sense of poverty? No matter how much you have and accumulate, it never seems to be enough. Nothing feels quite satisfying and fulfilling?
5. What about an endless cycle of troubled relationships followed by a period of no relationship at all?
6. Oh, what about a profound sense that something is missing from your life, no matter what you have, do or achieve?

Have you felt any of the above? I know I have. I found that these apparently different problems have one common cause; solve the common cause and all the consequences that stem from this common root go away by themselves. 

Oh, and...

The first was a man who had been a multi-millionaire; he accumulated his wealth over a period of 25 years and suddenly made a business decision that resulted in losing absolutely everything he had within a span of six months. Curios, right? This man knew enough about business and business decisions to accumulate literally millions. Yet, quite suddenly, one very poor decision, according to him, led to the loss of everything.

The second is a woman who had been a smoker her whole life. She started feeling short of breath… her physician referred her to me to quit smoking. She came in for one session of hypnosis. The week after the session she told me on the phone that she was good, no more cravings, no more smoking for her. About six months after the session, she called me back and said...

We have all been hurt and betrayed in one way or another sometime in our lives. When we are hurt and betrayed there's a natural response or reaction that is quite involuntary: we close and cringe. This would be analogous to what happens when a person touches a very hot surface: there is an involuntary response that causes you to quickly move your hand away.

The nervous signal that causes us to snap our hands off the hot surface does not go up to the brain initially. We feel the pain later because the signal travels through a different nerve fiber to the brain, only then we become aware of what happened. The initial reaction is to move the hand, with no thought involved, and no awareness of the heat; the body does that to protect itself from tissue damage. It is this lack of initial awareness of potential damage to the hand that reflects the unconscious nature of reactions.

Just as in the hot surface example, emotionally we also quickly snap away from situations that are hurtful to...

A Radical Discovery, NOT for the fainthearted. 

I could explain in detail how I know what you are about to contemplate, but that would not be useful. The essence of what follows either ‘sounds true’ to you, or it does not. If this sounds true to you, stay with me, listen to what I discovered, how you can discover the same thing for yourself, and free yourself from the agony and anguish that you feel but cannot explain. On the other hand, if you cannot quite identify with what you have heard so far, no...

SOME THOUGHTS ON HYPNO-ANESTHESIA

Perhaps one of the most impressive demonstrations of the power of the mind is that of anesthesia. Hypnotists have traditionally pierced the cheeks, pinched to the point of bleeding, and immersed the hands of hypnotized people into freezing water for extended periods of time. These “experiments” have been carried out in laboratories, under controlled conditions, and by stage hypnotists alike, all apparently without eliciting much reaction from their subjects. Clearly, the view of actual blood dripping from a hypnotized person who is not screaming with pain must be impressive to those watching hypnosis shows.

The term “hypno-anesthesia” refers to the induction of anesthesia using hypnosis. Hypnosis is a mental state of connection between the conscious and unconscious portions of the mind. Finally, “anesthesia” comes from the Greek and can be translated as “absence of sensation”.

Medical anesthesia...

Analgesia: insensibility to pain without loss of consciousness.

Analgesics have been in style for more than a thousand years. Since ancient times, from plant extracts to today synthetic analgesics, these substances have been almost part of our families. We look at them as the easiest way to “patch” discomfort zones in our bodies, without wondering: are we shutting our bodies up?

Is our body trying to tell us something? Could we correct the discomfort from the source rather than becoming insensitive to it? Who said we don’t have this power within ourselves? To what degree do we need an external artificial substance to makes our minds work in our favor? Could it be because we are not so much connected with it?

These thoughts kept knocking at my door for a while after Flavio took my headache away with a 3 minute hypnosis session. I wished I had had an Advil or a Tylenol in my purse, as I was convinced that could do the “trick” faster. I would have taken...

A few years ago Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler made history with another great movie: Anger Management. In that movie Mr. Nicholson plays the part of an odd therapist who helps people with anger problems. He explains to his protagonist client played by Adam Sandler that anger is not just something you experience episodically, but an illness that one may or may not have. In fact the movie compares anger to diabetes.

There is no doubt that anger serves an evolutionary purpose by boosting strength through what has come to be known as the fight or flight response. In extreme situations of danger or injustice, anger can get one to act in adaptive ways that lead to survival.

The utility, or perhaps the unavoidability of this type of episodic anger is well recognized both in therapy and in the legal system. In the therapeutic context you may hear terms such as justified anger or situational anger. In the legal context there are instances where temporary insanity by virtue of...