As a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, I'm always curious about different healing modalities. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Lucy Yaldezian, a hypnotherapist in the Bay Area. She shared energy psychology techniques like EFT tapping, Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT), and hypnotherapy —especially for specific fears, phobias, smoking, and even fertility issues.

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Three Powerful Modalities for Addressing Fear

1. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) Tapping

Created by Gary Craig, Emotional Freedom Technique—commonly called tapping—combines acupressure points with focused intention. You tap specific meridian points on your body while bringing attention to the fear or limiting belief you're addressing. The beauty is its simplicity: you don't need a practitioner to use it.

For smoking cessation, EFT has shown remarkable results. Lucy shares the case of a man nearly 80 years old with a lifelong smoking habit. After just one session, his son reported his father didn't want to smoke anymore. When his dad reached for his usual morning cigarette the next day, it tasted stale. One session shifted a craving that had lived in his body for decades.

2. Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT)

Developed by Tapas Fleming, a licensed acupuncturist in Southern California, TAT is a cousin of EFT and falls under the umbrella of energy psychology. The technique involves holding a specific pose—fingers positioned around meridian entry points near the nose, with the other hand on the back of your head—while focusing on the issue.

Hundreds of practitioners worldwide report remarkable results. Lucy notes that many of her clients describe TAT as feeling like praying. When asked how TAT works, Fleming herself laughs and replies: "What makes grass grow?"—acknowledging that some mysteries work precisely because we stop trying to control them.

3. Hypnotherapy: Direct Suggestion and Interactive Work

Hypnotherapy offers two distinct approaches. Direct suggestion provides your mind with a different picture. Lucy uses a powerful image: imagine your fear as a painting on a museum wall. As you walk by, it disappears from view. Your fear passes. This embodies a cornerstone principle: what the mind sees, the body follows.

Interactive hypnotherapy goes deeper through dialogue. Your imagination creates the whole experience. Lucy guides clients to visit their "house of healing," walking down a hallway of many doors. In all her years, there's never been a time when someone walked down that hallway and didn't find the right door.

Quit Smoking: A Convergence of Techniques

Beyond hypnotherapy alone, combining EFT offers a powerful one-two punch for smoking cessation. Lucy's approach demonstrates this integration: she asks clients to refrain from smoking as long as possible on session day, then have them bring their cigarettes. Once in the session, they smell the cigarette, place it in their mouth, then she teaches tapping.

The shift is immediate. A client might say, "Before tapping, the craving was a level 9. This cigarette was right where I wanted it." After one round of tapping: "This tastes stale. Did I bring an old package?" The cigarette hasn't changed—the person's nervous system has.

Acupuncture reinforces this shift by addressing the underlying energetic blockages and stress patterns that fuel addiction.

The Unexpected Connection Between Mind-Body Work and Fertility

Lucy's journey into fertility work began with two women—one married 7 years, one married 11 years. Both had given up on having children. As Lucy worked with each woman on family issues, something extraordinary happened: within two weeks, both got pregnant.

This aligns with Dr. Alice Domar's groundbreaking research, which showed that women in a 10-week mind-body program had a 55% pregnancy rate within one year, compared to just 20% in control groups. When you release emotional blocks, the body remembers what it's meant to do.

Lucy recounts one case: a woman with "unexplained infertility" accessed through hypnotherapy that her mother had died, and she couldn't imagine bringing a baby into the world without her mother there. One session. Once she recognized this connection, she could transform it.

Another client came haunted by a marriage situation from years before. Tapping helped but didn't fully resolve it. Deeper work revealed the real block: her father had cheated repeatedly on her mother. As an adult, her unconscious mind held the belief: my husband will do that too. She'd never consciously made that connection, yet her nervous system was running that program. Once identified, the pattern could shift.

The Art of Language and the Subconscious Mind

Here's something crucial: "Vocabulary is important. The subconscious mind recognizes words," as Lucy emphasizes. Words matter profoundly.

When working with smoking cessation, Lucy never says "quit smoking." Why? Because when the subconscious hears "quit," it responds: I'm not a quitter. Instead, she says: "You are becoming a non-smoker. You are stopping smoking." Same outcome, radically different language.

The same applies to weight management. We say "losing weight" as good and "gaining weight" as bad. But centuries ago, gaining weight meant prosperity and health. Losing weight meant poverty or sickness. Our language still carries this ancestral programming.

So Lucy reframes it: "You are shedding weight. You are shedding pounds. You are gaining the body you want and deserve." When you speak in language the subconscious understands, it stops fighting you.

Why This Matters

I worked with psychiatrists often, but we never explored modalities like this for issues like infertility, chronic anxiety, or trauma. Being in San Francisco reminds me that there are so many pathways to healing.

Sometimes the answer isn't in the body alone—it's in the stories, beliefs, and emotions we're carrying. Sometimes, all we need is to recognize what's been hidden in the background, and suddenly everything shifts.