After this experience Leigh continued to read about herbs and natural remedies.

“I ended up doing beauty therapy,” she said.

“I thought it was a really nice thing after having to deal with people who’d had their legs blown off.

“It was nice to do something nice for people, that was good for them.”

Leigh said when she was doing the beauty therapy course she became aware that the skincare ingredients were quite nasty.

“So I did an aromatherapy course and started making my own and using them on people,” she said.

“I did massage and reflexology and just expanded my knowledge and repertoire.”

Leigh took some time off to raise her younger son, and decided to go back to university to study social work.

“I did a year and discovered there was no counselling aspect until after you’d finished your degree,” she said.

“I decided to train in hypnotherapy because I’d had to have some hypnotherapy myself and I thought it was fantastic – it really helped to change my life.”

Leigh said she wanted to counsel because she’d found many people’s physical ailments appeared to be emotional in origin. “A lot of people just needed to talk more than anything,” she said.

“I didn’t feel it was ethical to talk to them unless I had some kind of understanding of psychology.”

According to Leigh, hypnotherapy involved the client being in an altered state of consciousness with a heightened awareness.

“People are basically in control,” she said.

“I can’t hypnotise them unless they are willing.”

Leigh said a hypnotherapist was a person who did psychotherapy while a client was in a trance (hypnosis), while a hypnotist was a stage performer who in most cases worked unethically using brainwashing techniques.

“I use many techniques in a hypnotherapy session,” Leigh said.

Those techniques include neurolinguistic programming and parts therapy.

“If a person has been traumatised, a part of their subconscious splits off,” she said.

That part then works independently of the rest of the person’s consciousness, engaging in activities such as eating or smoking too much.

“It’s a habit you can’t control and the logical self doesn’t know why,” Leigh said.

“The subconscious deems it too traumatic to deal with and it represses the memory.”

Leigh said people would show signs such as obsessive compulsive disorders or addictions they could not explain.

“Their conscious mind has no way to understand the behaviour – they’ve forgotten to remember they’ve forgotten,” she said.

Leigh said she dealt with a lot of suggestion therapy where she did the talking, making positive suggestions.

“The hypnoanalysis is more in-depth, where I regress them back to childhood, where most repressed memories are stored,” she said.

“There’s nothing voodoo or occult or sinister about hypnotherapy – it’s just psychotherapy in trance.”

Leigh said under this kind of hypnotherapy, she put no suggestions in – people discover themselves and the memories they had forgotten about.

“It’s all done from a safe place,” she said.

“If there’s anything traumatic, I take them straight there.”

Leigh said in most cases, traumatic scenes were viewed as a movie, so the client was removed from any trauma.

Leigh plans to keep doing hypnotherapy in the future.

“I have a sincere desire to improve people’s wellbeing,” she said.

“What I’ve learned from natural therapies is that physical ailments are the final manifestation of people’s emotional and mental trauma and negative thinking or concepts of themselves.

“I feel that I better serve humanity by addressing the origin of the problem.”