David had been partway through a course of hyperbaric chamber sessions — a treatment he had chosen to support his health following an MS diagnosis — when panic arrived without warning. One session, he found himself unable to stay in the chamber. He had to get out. And once that had happened, the prospect of going back felt impossible.
When he came to see me, he described it as coming out of nowhere. But when I explained the stress bucket — how the nervous system accumulates pressure, and how a bucket that is already close to full needs very little to tip over — he paused. He remembered the night before that session: a difficult situation he had been dealing with, no sleep, arriving already depleted. The chamber hadn’t caused the panic. It had simply been where the panic landed. His brain, in a moment of extreme overwhelm, had connected the chamber with danger — and locked that connection in place.
This is how fear templates form. Not always from dramatic events, but from ordinary moments when the nervous system is stretched beyond its capacity. The brain’s job is to protect, and in that moment it did exactly that. The difficulty is that the protection continues long after the danger has passed, and begins to close off the very things a person needs.
For David, the stakes were high. This wasn’t a route he was avoiding or a journey he was declining. It was a treatment that mattered to him, for a condition he was managing as actively and positively as he could.
We worked together over four sessions. The early work focused on calming his nervous system overall — a breathing practice, an anchor technique using a safe place, and a hypnosis audio to support better sleep. Once his baseline had settled, we used the Rewind technique specifically on the panic memory in the chamber.
The Rewind is a hypnotherapy process that works with the way the brain stores fear. Under hypnosis, the person revisits the memory not by reliving it, but by observing it — watching it play out from a safe distance, then running it backwards, then forwards again at speed. This process, repeated several times in a deeply relaxed state, allows the brain to reprocess the memory and update its response to it. The event doesn’t disappear; it simply stops being experienced as a current threat. It becomes something that happened, rather than something still happening. There is no lengthy analysis, no need to talk through the detail repeatedly. The work happens at the level where the fear was stored.
David returned to the chamber.
What we also spent time on was something broader. MS and the shift into retirement had meant David had quietly stepped back from a lot of things he had previously enjoyed — activities, connections, a sense of purpose and contribution. Using solution-focused questions, we explored what gave him energy, what made a good day feel good. In solution-focused hypnotherapy this comes back to three things: positive action, positive interaction, and positive thinking — the building blocks of a well-regulated nervous system and a life that feels worth showing up for.
One thing that emerged was that a family member was going through a difficult time. David began making a point of meeting them regularly. What started as a one-off became a weekly arrangement — something he looked forward to, that gave as much as it asked of him.
Four sessions. A treatment resumed. And a quiet but real expansion in how he was choosing to live.