There’s definitely resources online that could answer this waayyy better than I ever could, but I’ll do my best. When we go about our lives, especially when we’re younger, we filter in everything around us to make sense of the world, and this in turn creates our identities. This process doesn’t work super well though. Shitty parents, friends, experiences, whatever can drastically alter how we view the world and how we view ourselves. This is the trick: we go through our lives being “hypnotized” by events that happened to us that we don’t even realize influence us. So for example, because I (and all of us here probably) have had really shitty experiences with my stutter, I learned to be ashamed of it, scared of it, and allow my stutter to be a part of who I am. The goal of hypnotherapy is to find the things that have influenced us in such deep, unconscious ways, that us day-to-day don’t even realize are there.