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The Northern Light • October 1 - 7, 2020
Health & Wellness Local choices in health, healing & fitness.
Local hypnotherapist starts practice during pandemic By Ian Haupt Evelyne Hendricks lives to help others. After 20 years preparing families for adoption and 25 years counseling couples through marriage, she is now helping people manifest change through hypnotherapy. Hendricks has lived in Blaine for 25 years. She graduated from Western Washington University’s mental health program in 1986, then studied couples counseling in San Francisco, and continued her studies at the Portland Family Therapy Institute before moving to Blaine. Upon moving to Whatcom County, Hendricks and her husband started their own small, pri-
vate marriage counseling practice. She said they love and resource the work of John and Julie Gottman of The Gottman Institute, which uses a research-based approach to helping make relationships successful, and use other works like The Internal Family Systems Model, an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz. Helping couples through a difficult time in their relationship is certainly hard, but, Hendricks said, it’s satisfying when you know you have helped. “I think most people really want to achieve a sound marriage or partnership, and it really requires some very specific tools to achieve
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that,” she said. “And I think that’s what my husband and I feel like we’ve done.” Hendricks said marriage counseling is more psychoeducation than therapy. It’s teaching people the tools to make a partnership successful and what they can do to achieve that success. What are the tools to a successful partnership? According to Hendricks: Building admiration and respect in the partnership, honoring differences and creating a map of intimate knowledge about your partner. While marriage counseling, Hendricks worked in White Rock, B.C., for 20 years as a social worker for the Government of Canada’s Ministry of Children and Family Development where she counseled families, children, individuals and couples in the midst of adoptions. She said she evaluated families’ strengths and areas of growth so
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that they could be successful in parenting children through adoption. “So if you ever want to adopt, I’m a very good resource,” she said. Hendricks became interested in hypnotherapy when a friend, Sue Dunstone, told her how much she enjoyed Bellingham Technical College’s hypnotherapy program. Hendricks said she was looking for a new challenge. “My goal really was to find something different and interesting; a way to facilitate rapid transformation for people who are stuck repeating unhealthy patterns,” she said. “And that’s what hypnotherapy does – it’s a way to get to the change much more quickly.” Hypnotherapy is an exploration in what’s called cognitive behavioral therapy, she said, which is communicating with your brain to make changes in your life and in yourself.
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s Evelyne Hendricks.
Hendricks received her hypnotherapy certificate from Bellingham Technical College in June 2020, after starting in the fall. The program, based on research by Roy Hunter, required students to get 300 hours of one-to-one contact with clients over the course of a year. Hendricks said due to Covid-19 she has conducted her therapy sessions on Zoom or over the phone, which she said has been a learning curve for everyone, but was able to graduate and begin taking on clients after receiving a license from the state of Washington. Now, she holds all her therapy sessions, which last from an hour to an hour and half, over the phone, but once the pandemic is over she has plans to reopen her in-person practice location with the name Rapid Transformation Hypnotherapy. Hendricks said the myths about hypnosis – losing con-
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