Daniel M. Kaplan, LMFT – Hypnosis for Examinations & Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy and hypnosis are arts that can utilize, in collaboration with you, our mutually responsive relationship for facilitating intentional changes across multiple dimensions of your life. To this end, psychotherapy and hypnosis is goal directed, involving dynamic and individualized approaches that accept, acknowledge, and utilize individual strengths and frames of reference. Psychotherapy and hypnosis at their best can be both invigorating and deeply rewarding. Change work necessarily involves disrupting experiential patterns that are considered dysfunctional and building adaptive patterns that lead to your life satisfaction and joy.

If you are someone who experiences a wish, a dream, a change, but find it’s just beyond your reach, or that you need a little help getting there, together we can explore and move towards your desired goals. By moving beyond the grooves of your highly conditioned and largely habitual, unexamined thought processes and emotional reactivity you can transform your life into the one you want to live. Hypnosis is a tool that can help you get out your own way and access those deep skills and resources already part of your life, but which remain dormant in areas you find hard to access.

Methodology

Hypnosis

I utilize hypnosis, both in person and via telepresence, as part of an integrated treatment plan in the treatment of pain, personal performance enhancement, life transitional issues, and depression. I also utilize strategic, cognitive behavioral methodologies in a systemically conceptualized treatment plan designed to generate maximum solutions for the issues at hand. I work with individuals age 13+, couples and families.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

In addition to hypnosis, I also utilize a Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy approach and its methodologies . It involves becoming more intimate with one’s own experience through systematic self-observations for personal transformation. This is brought about by paying attention in highly specific ways to the entire landscape, inner and outer, of one’s experiences, including intense emotions. These transformations in view and understanding in turn have profound short and long-term effects on health and well-being, and lived experience.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows them, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

-The Buddha, in The Dhammapada

Services

Although I offer all the services below, my areas of special focus include developing an individualized treatment plan in helping aspiring professionals pass their licensing exams or for performance/sports enhancement. For licensing exams this includes an examination of patterns involved in the experience of frustration, examination of beliefs, concepts, and interactional patterns that might be altered to allow you access to the resources and skills that lie dormant within you. The use of hypnosis is as a tool to facilitate change in your experience, and behavioral experiments in real life to test the efficaciousness of the treatment being utilized.

Individual Therapy

I provide individual therapy using an eclectic, strategic and solution oriented approach with adolescents, young adults, adults, with problems of personal performance enhancement, management of chronic pain, and with a variety of other issues such as depression, life transitions etc. I utilize hypnosis, examination of beliefs and conceptual frameworks, relational considerations, behavioral experiments, and life dynamics.

Family Therapy

I provide family therapy. I see the entire family over issues that pertain seemingly to only one of its members, but which affects the entire family. Through an examination of how each member sees the "problem", we move towards a group effort at generating working solutions to the issues presented. Even when working with an individual, it may be helpful to have others in your support system be part of the transformational process.

Couples Therapy

I provide couples therapy. We work in a collaborative way to help the relationship grow and prosper. Often as an adjunct to working with an individual, it is helpful to involve your significant other to assist in the treatment of pain issues, depression, etc. Sometimes, the issue is the relationship itself, and working together, we can identify and transform difficulties into joys.

I also consult to families and organizations on how to achieve their family/organizational goals in such a way that individual goals and desires are honored and resolved, and family and organizational functioning is enhanced.

Hypnosis for Examinations

Hypnosis is a tool that can be utilized in many helpful ways. Many people facing the prospect of a licensing exam find hypnosis helpful, be that the Bar Exam, LCSW, MFT or PhD, nurses licensing exams, medical licensing exams or other licensing exams.

Hypnosis, used in a supportive and caring context, is a tool that can help you access the information you have worked so hard to study and learn, but can't get to when you need to, be it due to anxiety, performance worries, fear etc.

In this multiple-session package, I will work with you to ensure you can do the best you possibly are capable of, whether this is your first time taking the exam, or whether you have already taken the exam but come up short.

The fee for this multiple session package varies depending on the field and your financial situation, payable at the beginning of our work together.

Free Initial Consultation

I offer a free initial consultation of 30 minutes to determine the needs of the clients and to mutually assess whether we are a match for working together. Contact me to schedule a consultation.

Telehealth

I provide services via telepresence in these unprecedented times. Telepresence can be an effective way to help you reach your goals. Contact me to discuss your needs.

Biography

photograph of daniel kaplan smiling against a blue background

Daniel M. Kaplan, LMFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, consultant and teacher. He has worked with people and their issues since 1986. Important influences in his life are Milton H. Erickson, MD; John Tarrant, Roshi; Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi; and others.

Daniel grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and has had long interest in both eastern and western methods of facilitating life transformation. In addition to being an approved ReTeaming Coach, he is extensively trained in the various applications of Hypnosis , as well as in Solution Oriented Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Family Therapy.

He has been focusing his professional endeavors in the areas of helping professionals pass their licensing exams to enter the field of their choice, and in the area of personal performance enhancement, be that in Sports, in taking licensing exams, or in everyday issues of performance. Daniel is licensed in the State of California and is a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage, Family Therapists.

About Hypnosis

Is Hypnosis really a cure-all?

No. Hypnosis can work quickly, but requires more of you than just showing up. It is part of an overall treatment plan designed to change something, i.e. a behavior, experience (as of pain), ways of responding etc. It may take several sessions of hypnosis to train your mind in hypnosis so that you may continue to reap the benefits of treatment through self hypnosis.

Is it true you lose control or surrender your will during hypnosis?

The person in a hypnotic trance is always in control-just as you're free to keep reading or close your book at any time-and you won't do anything contrary to your values or morals. While a hypnotherapist serves as a guide or teacher, all hypnosis is ultimately self hypnosis.

I heard it is necessary to go into a very deep trance for it to be effective and that I won't remember anything once I reorient out of trance. Is this true?

Firstly, clinical evidence suggests that almost all people have the ability to experience a trance of some level or another, but that no one approach will work with everyone. Secondly, most clinical work is very effective when the patient experiences a light or medium trance. And lastly, unless it is clinically useful, most patients remember everything that happened during a trance-forming experience.

Is it true that anyone who can be hypnotized is weak minded or gullible?

The evidence seems to be just the opposite. The higher a person's intelligence, the greater the likelihood of being hypnotized. In contrast, people with serious cognitive deficits may be unable to concentrate well enough to follow instructions for entering a trance.

Testimonials

"Experienced as I am, when someone presents themselves to me with a problem related to fear and anxiety with respect to a licensing exam, I refer them to Dan. He has perfected techniques for dealing with these issues through hypnosis and related therapeutic interventions."

– John H. Frykman, M.Div., PhD., MFT; San Francisco, CA

“Dan Kaplan is a gentle soul who is smart and creative. The master of work arounds, he will find a way to overcome any obstacle.”

– Margaret Copi, MD, Psychiatrist

“Dan was my supervisor in a community mental heath program. I learned an enormous amount from him. I also like the fact that he is not a one size fits all therapist, but tailor’s his approach to the needs of the client.”

– Sanda Jo Spiegel, LCSW

“Daniel has extensive experience as a clinician in multiple settings, and decades of experience in his zen practice, both making a wise presence to be with.”

– Karen Sprinkel, Individual & Family Trauma Therapy

Hypnosis for Examinations & Psychotherapy - Daniel M. Kaplan, LMFT

By experiencing this drama we call psychotherapy or hypnosis, you will be able to change your life.