The person across from you.
In brief: Skye Winfrey is an ACHE-certified Clinical Hypnotherapist (CCHt) with an MA in Psychology and over 300 hours of supervised clinical training through the Hypnotherapy Training Institute. She has worked in the helping professions since 2013. DeepWave Hypnotherapy is her Berkeley, California practice, serving clients virtually nationwide.
ABOUT THE PRACTITIONER
CREDENTIALS, IN PLAIN TERMS →
I · THE WORK
What I do.
I am a clinical hypnotherapist. My work addresses the pattern that survives everything else — at its source.
"She knows what she is doing, but is also a true partner to you in your sessions… I am feeling more grounded, less anxious, and more hopeful."
GOOGLE REVIEW · 2025
The people who come to this practice have usually done substantial work on themselves — therapy, coaching, disciplined effort — and it has carried them far. What remains is the pattern that survived all of it: the one they can describe precisely and have not been able to change. My work addresses that pattern at its source.
Source is a precise term here. It means the level at which the kinds of thoughts you think are generated. Where feelings, moods, and attitudes arise before you have chosen them. Where the body sets its baseline — tense and quick-hearted at rest, or loose and steady. Where you are drawn toward some things and away from others without deliberation. And where the deepest framing operates: how the world seems to you, how other people seem, how you seem to yourself.
Whether the world feels fundamentally safe, and whether you feel at ease being who you are, were never conclusions you reasoned your way into. They are settings. Settings can be changed — and changing them is the discipline I practice.
II · HOW I CAME TO THIS WORK
At sixteen, sitting across from a wonderful psychotherapist, in a moment of frustration with myself, I told her plainly:
III.
"I know why I do what I do.
I'm clear on what led me to be this way,
and I know how I want to be instead —
I even know what I need to do to change things...
and in spite of all that,
talking about it hasn't been enough to change anything."
All my work was born from that moment. Graduate training in psychology, decades of my own diligent inner work, a search through every serious transformational modality I could find — each taught the same lesson from a different direction. Understanding is a good first step. It is not sufficient. Change happens experientially, because the pattern was encoded that way in the first place, at the subconscious level. I built my career around repatterning thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and perceptions at the level where those patterns are sourced.
Professionally, the path ran through addiction treatment, where I worked as a counselor and where the distance between wanting to change and changing your life is a daily, unignorable fact. From 2015, my own EFT-based practice, helping people de-program their emotional triggers — work that remains part of how I practice today. Alongside it, a decade of advanced transformational training in communication, leadership, and project development. Hypnotherapy came in 2023: not a replacement for any of it, but an expansion into an adjacent discipline of equal power that reaches the same territory from a different angle.
It arrived as a culmination of the best of everything I had experienced or trained in.
at 16
2015
2023
III · NO MINIMUM STANDARD
What "certified" actually means in this field.
The useful question isn't whether someone is certified. It's by whom, and to what standard.
Most people assume a certified hypnotherapist has met a standard, the way a licensed psychologist or MFT has. The assumption is reasonable, and in this field it is wrong. Hypnotherapy is a nonlicensed profession and it is unregulated in California and across the United States. Anyone may practice, and a certificate can be issued by any school, organization, or individual — a weekend course can print one. The credential by itself tells you very little.
THE EXCEPTIONS THAT MEAN SOMETHING
— The American Council of Hypnotist Examiners sets minimum training standards and approves the schools that meet them
— 200 hours of training for certification
— 100 additional hours for the Clinical Hypnotherapist credential
— The Hypnotherapy Training Institute trains to those standards — internationally regarded for the rigor of its live, supervised instruction
There are real exceptions, and they are worth knowing about. The American Council of Hypnotist Examiners sets minimum training standards and approves the schools that meet them, and the Hypnotherapy Training Institute trains to those standards — internationally regarded for the rigor of its live, supervised instruction. I chose that path deliberately: I completed HTI's highest certification level, more than 300 hours of live, supervised, in-person training, and I hold ACHE certification as a Clinical Hypnotherapist. I am also a certified regression specialist, trained under Randal Churchill, widely regarded as the field's leading authority in regression hypnotherapy.
I could have practiced with far less. I didn't. If you are comparing practitioners, compare training. This practice was built to withstand the comparison.
IV · CREDENTIALS, IN PLAIN TERMS
Typeset the way they were earned.
Each line below is explained in plain meaning — no acronym is asked to carry the argument on its own.
i ACHE-Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist
CCHt #525-080 — certified by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners
the credential
ii MA in Psychology
With doctoral-level coursework
the foundation
iii 300+ hours, live and supervised
Hypnotherapy Training Institute — its highest certification level
the training
iv Certified Regression Specialist
Trained under Randal Churchill, the field's leading authority in regression hypnotherapy
the specialty
v A decade of advanced training
Communication, leadership, and project development
the range
IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS SINCE 2013 · 3,000+ SESSION HOURS · 350+ CLIENTS · 5.0 ACROSS 80+ REVIEWS
VI.
V · WORKING PRINCIPLES
What I hold to.
i
The transformation belongs to the client.
I supply the training, the map, and the state; the person in the chair supplies the change. My field is not short on ego — I hold the opposite as a working principle, and my clients finish our work knowing exactly whose achievement their results were.
ii
Change begins in the imagination — and I mean that clinically.
The research literature calls the instrument guided imagery. In session, it means learning to represent the outcome you intend, vividly and precisely, before the automatic mind is asked to adopt it. Schopenhauer observed that we take the limits of our own vision for the limits of the world. What most people take to be limitations of circumstance turn out to be self-limitations and confining narratives — and when those lift, real-world breakthroughs tend to follow.
iii
People supply their own solutions.
I believe people are doing their best, and that you already have within you what you need to work out what you're trying to achieve. Much of the time it is a matter of quieting the overactive mind enough to give yourself room to make the changes — and the hypnotic state is the technology by which that finally becomes possible.
iv
Rigor without ordeal.
The work is exacting, and it is not painful. The state itself is most often described as extraordinary peace — meditation with an agenda — and the change, when it comes, tends to come more easily than people expect. Clients often tell me the session is the hour they look forward to all week.
v
No magic wand exists.
And plainly: you should be wary of anyone who implies otherwise. What exists here is careful assessment, a recommendation sized to the minimum your situation requires, and a straight answer at every stage about whether the work is doing its job. Knowing where we are on your map is part of that, and it is why we set measurable objectives at the start rather than working by impression.
VI · HOW I PRACTICE
Session notes.
Four commitments, kept.
SIZED TO THE MINIMUM
Every recommendation is the smallest engagement your situation needs; the Discovery Consultation exists so that neither of us has to guess.
TRAUMA-INFORMED
Without exception. Safety and the right conditions come first. Depth is reached by preparation, never by overwhelm or force.
NEVER A SUBSTITUTE FOR LICENSED CARE
I don't diagnose or treat medical or mental-health conditions. Clients come with providers and without them; where coordination would serve you, I coordinate gladly.
YOUR CALL, ALWAYS
Whether to begin, how far to go, and when the work is complete are decisions that remain yours.
