Friday 23 August 2019


Hypnotherapist Susan Hepburn: Look into my thighs

Susan Hepburn. Photograph by Neil Drabble
Susan Hepburn: 'It's all about re-programming the brain, planting thoughts deep into the subconscious when people are at their most receptive' 

Lily Allen dropped three dress sizes after being 'put under' by the celebrity hypnotherapist Susan Hepburn. But could the terminally negative Judy Rumbold lighten up with her help quite so easily? Now, on the count of three…

Susan Hepburn describes her hypnotherapy work as being like that of a deft-fingered needlewoman. 'I pick up all the dropped stitches and loose ends and knit together a whole garment'. Given the intermittently frayed, hole-strewn and sometimes ragged-edged mental state of her largely celebrity clientele, her needles are rarely still.

Her most recent piece of stitchwork was the darning job she did on Lily Allen, whose unravelment became alarmingly public when she tearfully described herself on her MySpace blog as 'fat, ugly and shitter than Winehouse'. After a few sessions with Hepburn, who claims to have a 98 per cent success rate, she slimmed from a size 14 to a size 8. Allen's exclamatory endorsement appears on the front of Hepburn's Lose Weight Without Dieting DVD: 'After the hypnotism I wanted to go to the gym every day!'

I am tempted to ask why she didn't take the opportunity, while Allen was 'under', to also tackle the estuary vowels and unhealthy addiction to prom frocks, but that would not be entering into the spirit of the whole hypnotherapy thing, which is all about being open and receptive, not closed, bitchy and cynical.

For the resolute hypno-sceptic, the first eye-opener is that Susan Hepburn doesn't appear to be a loon. As far as I can see, there is no pendulous watch-chain, spangly waistcoat or look-into-my-eyes hamminess about her. As you enter her Harley Street office, there is a reassuring absence of shrines to Ganesh and astrology charts. She has a brisk manner and is dressed in sharp, businesslike black. If she'd sat me down and told me we were going to discuss investment portfolios, it would have seemed entirely appropriate.

What is slightly weird, though, is the dense forest of soft furnishings: three enormous squashy Mastermind-style chairs, a swivel one and a scruffy old leatherette recliner that looks like it ejected itself from a Pan Am flight sometime during the mid-1960s. She says that group hypnotherapy sessions are common - weight loss, alcoholism and smoking being the top three. But there's nothing she can't tackle. She once had a banana-phobe who wouldn't enter Hepburn's office until she had scanned the room for scary bendy yellow things. She regularly treats sportsmen stricken with confidence failure or a sudden and inexplicable fear of balls and/or fists. The people who habitually send heartfelt notes of thanks are flying-phobics and people who are terrified of driving tests. 'It means a lot to them, because I give them their freedom. That's why they're so grateful.'

But how does it work? In the case of Lily Allen, the treatment would have involved Hepburn repeating sentences such as, 'You will do everything in your power to become your target weight', and, 'You will remember to drink lots of water.' Follow-up care for weight loss includes keeping a food diary and practising self-hypnosis - otherwise known as giving yourself a good talking-to and laying off the biscuits. Can it really be that simple? For anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, kick a habit or resolve a deep-seated trauma, the long route to healing is almost always fraught with pain.

But Hepburn, a straight-talking northerner with a soft Barnsley accent, can't be doing with any fannying around. Constantly raking over the past and seeing her patients leave as sobbing wrecks - not her style. There is, she says, a quicker, more straightforward way. 'It's all about re-programming the brain, planting thoughts deep into the subconscious when people are at their most receptive.' Or, if we're going to be mean about all those fragile, quick-fix seeking celebs, at their most desperate.

Disappointingly, I have no debilitating addictions to offer up, but will a bothersome personality flaw do? Give me a more positive outlook on life, I ask her. Take away the destructive negativity that blights my life and I will be more than happy to endorse her sessions at £275 a time.

But first the talking bit. She prides herself on being blunt, and speaks in a voice that is, yes, hypnotic in its low, even, sonorousness ('When I'm out with friends they say, "Can you please be quiet? You're making us fall asleep"'). I endeavour to remain awake while she's telling me all about the inquisitiveness, drive and self-belief that her parents encouraged while she was growing up in Yorkshire. She was a swot; her twin sister wasn't. After leaving school there followed stints in accountancy, nursing and eventually psychotherapy, through which she arrived at hypnotherapy. She started off with a small consultancy in the North before moving to London, and building up a client list that saw her flying out to the Japan World Cup, and doing trans-global hypnotherapy over the phone. She is clearly thrilled with her celebrity following. Sarah Ferguson is a good friend, she says, but stops short of admitting she treats her. Hepburn is married with a son, whose picture sits on her desk, and to whom she is clearly devoted. He is a model and actor in Los Angeles, and she has helped him through all the major episodes of his life. 'He sends me messages saying, "Thanks, Mum, the hypnotherapy's working!"'

But enough about her. We talk about me, and she has about her the sort of warm approachability and big-sister charm that encourages wholesale purging of every last personal detail. With talking-therapy skills this good, I wonder why she bothers with the hypnosis. But then, it is the novelty element that has made bestsellers of her DVDs, won her an invitation to appear on Oprah and led to other television offers from America. People seem wildly drawn to the idea of being put 'under' and having all that bad habit stuff dealt with - she calls it 'deleting files' - while they are, to all intents and purposes, away from their desks.

And so I am led to the leatherette chair, covered with a blanket whose fibres are surely crawling with most of fashionable London's DNA, and invited to relax, switch off and empty my mind. But that's easier said than done when there are so many distractions. For a start, she flicks a switch and the chair starts to vibrate vigorously. The last time I experienced this much turbulence I was on a troubled easyJet flight in thick fog over the French Alps. I said a prayer then, and I'm saying one now. Please God, don't let me dribble, fart or otherwise grossly embarrass myself in front of this woman.

Now she is telling me to breathe deeply and imagine a triangular-shaped window in my forehead. Just go with it, I urge myself. Needlessly intrusive and pedantic thoughts keep barging in. Why triangular, I am thinking. Why not huge, square and German-made, like on last night's Grand Designs? And why is she speaking in a peculiar automaton voice when, just minutes earlier, she sounded completely normal? 'Now imagine all the negativity leaving your head. Picture the sun coming in and surrounding you in a protective circle of light'.

How will I know when I'm 'under', is what anyone being hypnotised really wants to know. When will I start to gabble unintelligibly about a former incarnation as an under-privileged Victorian maidservant? And most importantly, will I remember any of it when I wake up?

It's all over quite quickly. Hepburn turns the chair off, telling me that I will experience a pleasant sensation of weightlessness. I do indeed feel as if I am floating, which is possibly less to do with the hypnosis, and more about massive post-vibratory relief. I tell her I felt fully, disappointingly present and awake throughout. This is, she says, a common reaction, but rest assured - my brain has been re-programmed and those positive thoughts have been planted. Perhaps I need more sessions, or haven't provided sufficiently fertile ground for sowing, because three weeks on I have yet to witness even the first signs of a perky green shoot poking up through the mud.

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