One of the deep deficiencies I have in my life is my yearning for my dad. Although my parents are happily married and they've been that way their whole marriage, a big chunk of my growing up was with my dad in Korea working to provide for the rest of us living in the United States.

Since later elementary school years I'd get to be with my dad twice a year during breaks (he was a professor so he also had summer and winter breaks). I remember my elementary school teachers would count down the days until I saw my dad again with me. And on that day I'd run out of the classroom to go to the school parking lot and there my dad would be! I broke down in tears while hugging him as hard as I could.

My dad is an OG hypnotherapist and he brought the entire practice of hypnosis into the land of Korea. This was a pretty radical thing to do for a professor, so his university kept on giving him crap about doing this "hypnosis" thing. But my dad's passion far too big to be contained under a tenured position, so he left his academic career to become a full time hypnotherapist.

After I graduated from high school my mom went back to Korea to be reunited with her husband. After years of raising us they were finally able to sleep in the same bed 365 days a year. And on top of that a new thing happened: my mom became the business administrator for my dad's hypnotherapy practice now that she was there to be with him all the time.

During college I went back to Korea during some breaks, but in 2008 I took a semester off because I was having a particularly horrible time in Ithaca, New York. And during this time since my parents were practically living at the practice, I didn't really have the option to just lounge around at home by myself. I would start "working" at the practice the same way Chinese kids "work" at their parents' restaurants in TV shows. Little did I know I was preparing for my future as a life coach.

This sounds pretty good, to be able to be with your dad all the time after all that time being apart from him. That part was definitely nice, but every nice thing comes with a price: I really hated dealing with the people who were interested in hypnotherapy with my dad. First, I have to be on the phone with them doing intakes and needing to explain it's not a guaranteed process, your results may vary, you're paying for his time not the efficacy, and et cetera. Then I see the clients IRL when they come... And while most of them walk away a completely different person there are a few of them who never got to experience hypnosis at all because they weren't hypnotically suggestible.

And those people are the ones who raise a LOT of hell.

Some of them yell. Some of them throw stuff. Some of them claim to come back with a more powerful family member to raise hell. Some of them write nasty reviews online. One of them even punched my dad (!!!) and I had to intervene. Watching all of this stuff, it really wasn't easy for me because I was having a pretty hard time with my life by default. Seeing my dad make his living in this difficult way shifted something inside of my unconscious.

Fast forward like, 15 years later. I have my own life coaching practice now that I got freshly certified as a life coach. Yay! Sounds good, and I get to decide how I run this business. I made an unconscious pact with myself: I'm never going to work in a way that subjects me to a practice that could work. I'm going to do coaching that WORKS, period. No dependency on hypnotic suggestibility. Just pure cognitive coaching work that works as long as you have a brain.

Well so much for my wishes. I quickly learned that the life coaching methodology I certified in (called The Model) really didn't work in the way I learned it for clients with deep / complex trauma. Even the certification program taught us, don't work with trauma unless you're "trauma informed".

Now, in all honesty, this isn't really a problem. Doctors have specialties. Dentists have specific things they do, like an orthodontist wouldn't take care of implants or do root canals. I could have easily referred clients with trauma to people who specialize in trauma care, but given my predisposition for something that just WORKS...

I recalled that I was taught to work with trauma after being "trauma informed", so I started looking for a new program that would help me understand what that meant. A few months later I signed up for my second coaching certification program. Surely, with The Model to take care of the cognitive side of things AND using this new certification to take care of trauma... I would be able to work with everybody.

Would that be the case? There's plenty more stories to tell about that...

— Billy