When Psychotherapy Gets Stuck: How Hypnotherapy Can Open New Doors to Healing

My experience collaborating with hypnotherapist Taras Machula

As psychotherapists, we sometimes encounter clients who remain stuck despite our best efforts.

Psychotherapy can be extraordinarily helpful. Through approaches such as CBT, existential therapy, reality therapy, postmodern approaches, and many others, clients can develop greater self-awareness, process difficult experiences, change unhelpful patterns, and build more satisfying lives.

Yet there are times when something seems to remain out of reach.

A client may understand intellectually why they react in a particular way, recognize where a pattern originated, and genuinely want to change—yet still find themselves repeating the same patterns. They may have talked extensively about their trauma and understand it very well, but the emotional pain remains. Or therapy may simply seem to reach a point where both client and therapist feel that they have explored everything they know how to explore, but meaningful change remains elusive.

I have encountered these situations in my own practice, and for a long time I wondered what else might be possible.

Discovering another therapeutic avenue

A little over a year ago, I began referring some of these clients to hypnotherapist Taras Machula.

What initially interested me was the possibility of giving clients access to a different way of exploring their inner experience. What has kept me interested is what I have observed in the clients who returned to psychotherapy after working with him.

In every case so far, clients have returned with meaningful insights, a renewed sense of hope, and a greater ability to move forward. They have often described changes in their overall well-being within a relatively short period of time—sometimes sooner than I would have anticipated based on my previous clinical experience.

Most importantly, the hypnotherapy experience has often helped us become unstuck.

Insights that had not emerged during psychotherapy became available for exploration. Conversations that had previously gone in circles acquired new meaning. Clients became more motivated to make changes between sessions. Our psychotherapy sessions became more focused and productive, and the therapeutic process gained new momentum.

For me, this has been one of the most interesting aspects of our collaboration: hypnotherapy has not replaced psychotherapy. It has complemented it.

But this is not the kind of hypnotherapy you may be imagining

When people hear the word hypnotherapy, they may think of conventional hypnotic techniques designed to introduce particular suggestions, change habits, or "reprogram" the mind.

Taras's approach is quite different.

One of the things that initially struck me about his work is that he does not approach a session with a predetermined agenda. He does not necessarily know beforehand what will emerge during a session or what direction the experience will take.

Rather than attempting to tell the client's mind what it should think, believe, remember, or change, his role is primarily that of a guide and facilitator.

The intention is to help clients enter an expanded state of awareness in which they can explore their own inner world and access information, insights, and answers that may not be readily available to their conscious mind.

Taras himself describes his approach as one in which he acts as a guide rather than someone who provides the answers, with the subconscious serving as a pathway to what he calls the client's "Higher Self."

This distinction is important.

The premise is not "I know what is wrong with you, and I am going to reprogram you."

It is much closer to:

"There may be information within you that you have not yet been able to access. I will help create the conditions in which you can explore it for yourself."

For clients who have already spent considerable time trying to understand themselves intellectually, this can offer a very different kind of experience.

An alternative to psychedelic exploration

There is another aspect of Taras’s work that I find particularly interesting. Today, there is growing interest in psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca among people seeking profound experiences, greater self-understanding, healing, or access to deeper aspects of consciousness. While research into psychedelic-assisted approaches is developing and has shown promising therapeutic possibilities in some settings, these substances can also produce challenging physical and psychological effects, and their risks can vary depending on the individual, the substance, the dose, medications, and the setting in which they are used.

From my perspective, one of the most appealing aspects of Taras’s approach is that it provides a way to explore profound inner experiences without relying on psychedelics.

For clients who are interested in exploring consciousness but are hesitant to use substances such as ayahuasca or other psychedelics, hypnotherapy can offer a non-drug pathway into deeper self-exploration.

Clients do not need to ingest a psychoactive substance in order to enter an altered or expanded state of awareness and explore what may emerge from within. Instead, the process takes place through hypnotherapy, guided exploration, and the methods Taras has developed through his work.

For people who are curious about deeper states of consciousness but prefer a non-pharmacological approach, this can provide another avenue for exploration.

When the answers come from within

One of the most fascinating things I have observed is that clients sometimes emerge from a hypnotherapy session with an understanding of themselves that they had not been able to reach through conscious reflection alone.

They may discover a new perspective on a recurring relationship pattern, understand an emotional reaction differently, connect previously unrelated experiences, or arrive at an answer to a question that has been troubling them for a long time.

I do not see my role as determining whether every such experience should be interpreted literally. Rather, I am interested in what the experience means to the client and how it can be integrated into their ongoing therapeutic work.

Sometimes an insight does not need to be "proven" in order to be psychologically meaningful.

If a client comes back from a hypnotherapy session with a new understanding of themselves, greater compassion toward themselves, and a sense of possibility where there was previously hopelessness, that experience can become valuable material for psychotherapy.

An additional dimension: energy healing

Another distinctive aspect of Taras's work is that he incorporates energy-healing practices into some of his sessions.

Among the techniques he uses is Trans-Scalar Healing, an approach described by Howard Batie in Trans-Scalar Healing: Holistic Healing For Self, Others and Gaia. Batie describes the method as incorporating breathwork, focused concentration, visualization, and expanded states of conscious awareness as part of an energy-healing practice.

Energy healing is not part of conventional psychotherapy, and it is important to distinguish spiritual and energy-healing frameworks from established psychological treatment models. My interest in this aspect of Taras's work comes from observing how clients experience it, rather than from making claims about mechanisms that have not been established scientifically.

For most clients, however, the experience appears to be deeply meaningful.

Several have described feeling an unusual sense of care, connection, peace, or emotional relief. Some have said that they felt as though they were finally able to let go of something they had been carrying for a long time.

As a psychotherapist, I find it particularly interesting when such an experience subsequently helps the client engage differently with psychotherapy and with their life outside the therapy room.

What I have observed in my clients

Based on the clients I have referred to Taras so far, some of the changes I have observed or heard them report include:

• greater hope about their recovery and their future;

• increased acceptance of their current circumstances;

• meaningful new insights into longstanding emotional or behavioural patterns;

• a greater sense of self-understanding;

• increased motivation to make changes between psychotherapy sessions;

• greater engagement in the therapeutic process;

• stronger momentum when psychotherapy had previously stalled;

• more productive and focused psychotherapy sessions;

• positive changes in their overall sense of well-being occurring relatively quickly; and

• a renewed sense that healing and change are possible.

Of course, every client is different, and no therapeutic approach works in exactly the same way for everyone. My observations are based on my experience with the clients I have referred and should not be understood as a guarantee of particular outcomes.

Psychotherapy and hypnotherapy: complementary rather than competing approaches

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned from this collaboration is that psychotherapy and hypnotherapy do not have to compete with one another.

They can serve different functions.

Psychotherapy can provide a safe and structured space in which clients can understand their experiences, develop psychological insight, process emotions, learn new skills, change behaviours, and integrate what they have learned into everyday life.

Hypnotherapy, particularly in the form practiced by Taras, can provide another avenue for exploration—one that may allow clients to access experiences and insights in a very different way.

When the two approaches are appropriately integrated, something interesting can happen: an insight obtained during hypnotherapy can become the starting point for deeper psychotherapeutic exploration and behavioural change.

That has been my experience.

Since beginning this collaboration, I have found my work with these clients to be more effective, more interesting, and more fulfilling. Most importantly, I have seen clients who had previously felt stuck regain hope and begin moving forward again.

For a psychotherapist, that can be an extraordinarily rewarding thing to witness.

Exploring Taras's approach

If you are interested in learning more about Taras Machula's approach, I encourage you to explore his work directly rather than relying solely on my description of it.

Taras Machula's website: Taras Machula – Hypnotherapy Services

His website provides information about his hypnotherapy practice, spiritual regression work, and his approach to working with the subconscious.

You can also explore his YouTube channels, where he discusses hypnotherapy, consciousness, healing, spiritual regression, and related topics:

English: Spiritual Wi-Fi YouTube channel

Ukrainian: Taras Machula's Ukrainian YouTube channel

I believe that, as therapists, remaining open to complementary approaches can enrich our work—not by abandoning what we already know, but by continuing to explore what else might help the people who place their trust in us.

Sometimes, helping a client move forward requires us to look beyond the methods we have traditionally used.

And sometimes, the most valuable discovery is simply finding another door through which the client can begin to heal.