Physical tics and regression: a case study from the Summer School

Something special happened during the first session of our Summer School. It was on July 4 (2026). What happened there is based on a completely timeless principle.

There was a person in the chair with persistent, physical tics. Tics that had bothered them for so long that they had become part of their identity.

And tics—that’s something hypnosis can really help with. In children with Tourette’s syndrome , self-hypnosis can even have a significant effect[1].

And do you know what was so bizarre about this case? Before the session, those tics were constantly present. After a session lasting no more than half an hour? Bam. Virtually gone. Vanished.

Hundreds of people watched live and saw the transformation literally take place right before their eyes. The tension melted away, their breathing changed, and those tics were reduced to almost nothing.

How is that possible? How can you transform something you’ve been struggling with your whole life in just thirty minutes?

The answer immediately reveals the enormous difference between what I call “good therapy” and “bad therapy.” And believe me, once you understand how this works, you’ll never look at your own problems the same way again.

Watch the video:

The Failure of Talk Therapy

Let’s be completely honest. What do most therapists and psychologists do when you come to them with a problem? They start talking. A lot. A whole lot.

They speak to your conscious mind. To your rational mind. To that little voice in your head that analyzes, rationalizes, and puts things into perspective all day long. And yes, if you’re lucky, after a session or ten, you’ll gain a fantastic insight.

Then you exclaim: “Oh wow, now I finally understand why I do this! It’s because my mom used to always…” Wonderful. Congratulations on your insight. But does anything change? No. Nine times out of ten, that insight doesn’t solve a damn thing.

If you could solve a problem using your conscious mind and logic, wouldn’t you have done so long ago?

You’re not stupid. You want to get rid of that anxiety, that burnout, those tics, or that inferiority complex .

If simply “deciding to quit” worked, you’d be symptom-free by now. But it doesn’t work. Why not? Because your rational mind isn’t in control. Your subconscious programming is pulling the strings.

Subconscious Programming and What You Do

Everything we do, think, and feel stems from an unconscious program. Our brains are biologically programmed to operate as energy-efficiently as possible. If you had to consciously think about every action (“Should I move my left or right foot now? Should I swallow this sip of water or not?”), you’d run out of energy within an hour.

That’s why your brain automates everything. It creates programs. You might think that you’re consciously choosing to turn left or right, or that you’re consciously feeling that urge to snack, worry, or tremble.

But neuroscience has long proven it: a few seconds before you become aware of a choice, your subconscious has already made up its mind and communicated it[2].

Decision made. You, as the conscious mind, simply tag along and come up with a logical explanation afterward.

Poor therapy doesn’t touch this subconscious programming at all. It just skims the surface. The only way to bring about real, lasting change is to address that programming directly at its core. And there’s only one way to do that: through hypnosis.

What Really Happens During Hypnosis

This creates the space to communicate with the database where your software actually runs: the unconscious mind.

I would venture to say that any therapy that ever works—whether it’s cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, NLP, or whatever—is only successful because, at some point, a moment of hypnosis arises accidentally or spontaneously.

A moment when the client experiences an “epiphany”—a profound emotional shift in which rational thought is temporarily set aside and the subconscious program is reset.

If that happens, the pattern changes. If it doesn’t happen and you remain stuck in that rational mindset? Then nothing happens at all. Yes, you can try to teach yourself new behaviors through cognitive behavioral therapy by practicing endlessly.

But good luck with that: forming a simple new habit takes an average of 66 days of grueling, conscious effort[3]. And if the old, dysfunctional pattern runs deeper and began much earlier, it’s virtually impossible to break through it using reason alone.

Back to Age One and a Half: The Root of the Problem

During the session at the Summer School, the person in the chair said at one point, “I’ve had this my whole life.” For me, that’s the ultimate trigger.

My therapeutic alarm bells go off immediately. My brain says: Okay, boom, we’re going to do a regression. We’re going back to the very first time this program was written.

Do you know where we ended up? At the age of one and a half years old. One and a half!

Ask yourself: what do you consciously remember from when you were one and a half years old? That’s right, absolutely nothing. Most people barely remember anything from before the age of five. Your conscious mind has no active memories of that time.

But what about your subconscious? It has stored everything. Every emotion, every fear, every conclusion you drew as a vulnerable baby or toddler is embedded in your system. Back then, a program was initiated (in this case, expressed as severe tics) to cope with the situation at the time. Only now, decades later, that same program was still running. It’s like trying to run Windows XP on a brand-new computer. It crashes.

Using the specific protocol we employ at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands, we went back to that memory from a year and a half ago. We changed the situation right there on the spot.

We’ve created a new imprint. And because you change the root of the tree at the age of one and a half, everything that has grown since then automatically changes along with it. The entire domino effect of symptoms collapses. The result? Transformation within half an hour.

The Pitfall of “World-Famous” Therapists (and Why It’s Reprehensible)

I developed the protocol I use for this myself, based on Gil Boyne’s legendary book *Transforming Therapy *. Gil Boyne was an absolute master of hypnosis.

When I studied his work, I thought: Wow, this is genius. But I also saw a huge problem: it’s almost impossible to pass on to others.

Why not? Because back then, Boyne filled in an incredible amount for the client. He did so in a brilliant, intuitive way that hit the nail on the head, but he could only do that because he had decades of experience and was exceptionally attuned to the person in the chair. You can’t teach someone that in a few months. Not even in a few years.

I’ve seen videos from around the world of renowned, exorbitantly expensive hypnotherapists trying to copy Boyne. There’s now a woman who is perhaps the most famous hypnotherapist in the world right now. I’ve taken part of her training course and reviewed her teaching materials. And I’ll be completely honest with you: at my institute, she would fail her exam miserably.

I found the interventions I saw there to be downright reprehensible. Why? Because they put words in the client’s mouth and interpret their responses in a way that can cause enormous psychological harm.

Not necessarily regarding the client themselves, but rather regarding their relationship with their environment and family.

Let me give you an example of how not to do it. In one of her sessions, I saw a case involving a woman who, as a little girl, was chased by her father, who wanted to hit her. Terrible, of course. Severe trauma.

What we at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands aim to achieve in such a situation is to use hypnosis to move toward a sense of understanding and compassion. Not to excuse that father’s behavior—absolutely not; that behavior is unacceptable—but so that the client realizes: “Okay, my father was a broken man with his own tragic story. It wasn’t my fault.” You want to neutralize the emotional burden through compassion and forgiveness, so that the client is set free.

But what did this “world-famous” therapist do? She went all out with hypnosis, filling the mind with suggestions and programming it. She said things like: “Do you see how bad your father is? Do you realize now just how weak and cowardly he really is?”

When I heard that, I thought: Ugh. This is wrong. What you’re doing here is talking the client into a new, destructive program while they’re under hypnosis. You’re trying to make the client feel better by teaching them to look down on the perpetrator.

That’s exactly the same strategy a bully uses on the victim! First, you feel inferior to the other person, and the solution the therapist offers is: “Oh, just start feeling superior to the other person; go ahead and look down on him.”

That is a very toxic, harmful practice. It does not resolve the trauma. It merely shifts the pain to another destructive ego program. Here at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands, we categorically and unequivocally reject that.

The Power of a Meaningless Imprint

Since Gil Boyne’s technique was too complex to replicate safely, and the methods of other well-known therapists are often harmful, I set out to develop my own approach. I searched for the absolute essence. What does a child—whether they’re one and a half, five, or twelve years old—really want to feel in such a traumatic moment?

The answer is universally simple: the child wants to feel loved. To feel safe. To feel accepted. To feel that they are worth it.

What we’ve developed is a protocol in which we imprint that universal need, but without us, as therapists, adding our own interpretation to the content. It is, if such a term exists, a virtually “content-free and open-ended” protocol.

We guide the experience from the perspective of the parent or the situation itself, allowing the client’s own subconscious to perfectly fill in the gaps in the most healing way possible.

It takes us days during the training to explain the exact nuances and details of this to our students. It’s a matter of great precision, after all.

But if you do it right? Then you’ll see what happened last weekend. In a fraction of a second, someone reconnects with their subconscious experience, realizing deeply: it’s okay just as it is. I’m safe. And boom—the physical tics that resulted from that collapse like a house of cards.

Come experience it for yourself

This is why I’m so passionate about this field. After a live session like this at the Summer School, I lay it all out for the audience. I explain in broad terms what I did, why I did it, and what strategic choices I made.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, I can’t analyze every single detail; when I’m working with someone in person, I have to be 100% there for that person and can’t take notes at the same time, but I always share the main points.

Over the coming weeks in July and August, I’ll be continuing this live during the Summer School. In each session, I’ll dive deep with someone live. And believe me, I never know in advance what’s going to happen. That’s what makes it super exciting, bold, and incredibly educational.

If this has sparked your interest and you’re thinking, “Edwin, I’ve been stuck with a pattern, a fear, or a block for ages that I just can’t seem to shake,” then sign up. There are still spots available for the upcoming sessions in July and August. Who knows—maybe you’ll be sitting in my chair, and together we’ll break through your blockage live. It’s a unique opportunity to finally get rid of that old Windows XP software in your head.

Learn Hypnosis

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