He once performed hypnotherapy on a couple of Oprah Winfrey’s staff to get her to talk about his profession in a positive light.
Joe Stotts, a hypnotherapist from Pratt, has spent 30 years helping people overcome a variety of personality and health issues including pain, addiction to smoking, weight loss, personal problems, phobias and more using hypnosis as his tool.
He doesn’t do stage shows, he doesn’t do groups (only a 30 percent success rate) and if people don’t want to get rid of their problem they don’t need to go see him until they are ready to quit, Stotts said.
He does 75 percent of the work and the patient does 25 percent. Bobbi, a patient with fibromyalgia, said the treatments work well with a good attitude.
Most patients only need one treatment, Stotts said.
He is quick to point out that he isn’t responsible for his success. He gives all the credit to God. He also cares very much about his clients.
“I don’t believe it’s me,” Stotts said. “If someone is thinking about suicide, I’ll be clueless what to say but it works. So I give my credit to God.”
He describes what he does as balancing the problem. In the end it doesn’t weigh on them like it used to.
“I get rid of the negative and replace it with positive,” Stotts said.
Everyone has problems and the level that he can help them depends on how they see themselves, Stotts said.
A man with full-blown AIDS had just a couple of months to live but he wanted to die a non-smoker. A month after his session with Stotts the man’s mother went to him and told him her son had died a non-smoker, Stotts said.
Stotts learned the hard way about making assumptions. A model came to him and wanted his help to lose just one pound. Stotts said she didn’t need to lose weight and the model landed in the middle of him. He learned a very valuable lesson, one pound can be just as important as 100 pounds to the client. It all depends on the individual and he learned a valuable lesson about making judgements.
What might seem silly to him may be very important to the person. The problem often has something to do with self-esteem.
From the beginning of his career, he learned that the mind controls everything in the body. When people say they can’t do something they feed themselves in a negative manner. But when they think positive, the mind is powerful and can help heal the body.
