back to shed (and school and work)

plus the story of how I became a hypnotherapist... yes really!

I’ve spent the last days of summer clearing out the garden shed behind our London house. It was built from one of those mail-order flat pack kits, posted from Germany, the summer after Frank was born. For many years after that I used it as an office. In those years the shed was my haven, my lady cave, the place where I retreated to work and read and think. I’ve tapped out more words in this little white box than I can count, some of them actually published and paid for too.

My relationship with the shed changed last fall, after the boys and I hurriedly moved out of the house to a flat and then — even more hurriedly— moved back into the house. In the bleak, confusing time just before and after last Christmas, my bright, white shed became somewhere different. It regressed to its most basic state, eventually becoming kind of shed I’d never wanted it to be — a storage bin with windows and doors. A hived off dumping ground in the back corner of our postage-stamp city garden. I felt badly about it, but at the time I had a long list of stuff to feel terrible about. Working things out with the shed was down the list. I mean WAY.

In the new year, Solly went through a “working out” phase (he is the single most ‘phasey’ kid I’ve ever known, a monomaniac with the enthusiasm of a varsity cheerleader and the attention span of a fly… obviously I have no idea where he got that tendency from *coughs*). In a fit of borrowed optimism I cleared a corner of the shed and installed an old weight bench, hauled out the medicine balls and foam mat I’d bought him for Christmas. Unsurprisingly like most “home gyms,” the sad little dusty storage-gym hybrid space received minimal use and soon became a source of creeping guilt and eventually, dread. The winter staggered on, eventually the spring damp crept in and with it the spiders' nests. I chucked the bikes out there. Then a bust printer. Then a bag of old clothes intended for the charity shop. Then my hopes. My dreams. My ambitions and financial security. My health and general sense of purpose. The ability to sleep through the night. Some days I’d just open the door and scream, ‘FAAAAAAACKING HELL! WHAT AM I MEANT TO DO?!’ then slam the door shut. The wood expanded in the damp warm weather. The door barely latched. The shed was stuffed to the beams with crap.

I avoided looking at the shed during this period but I couldn’t ignore the sense longing I felt. I missed my shed so badly. I wanted my refuge back. But underlying this desire was a deep sense of conflict. There was a reason for this.

In the final, unravelling years of my marriage, the shed was where I hid. I don’t mean literally hid — everyone knew I was there — but figuratively. Physically, mentally and emotionally. It was the place I went to disappear from myself into work. I even slept there once or twice (badly, because it’s uninsulated and our house backs onto a railway line). I spent far too much time in the shed in those days. I told myself I loved it but in truth I also felt trapped. Later, once it was just me and the boys back in the house, I set up my desk in the sitting room. I filled the shed with old crap like most people do. I told myself it was better — a new beginning. I told myself I was safe now. I told myself there was nothing to retreat from anymore, no need to hide. I told myself I was home home.

For months after that, no one including me, set foot in the shed. My former safe harbour, became a source of silent brooding discontent. The kids didn’t notice it anymore but I did. By the time summer rolled around I could look at the shed again, even if I no longer set foot in it. I’d sit drinking my morning coffee in the kitchen and gaze out at the shed with it's chipped green paint, the half rotted trellis with jasmine. I’d peer at its grimy darkened windows with narrowed eyes and sigh.

Oh Shed. What am I going to do with you?

Slowly, slowly I came to the grudging realisation I missed my shed. I pined for it like a star-crossed lover and a motherless child. I needed my own space to work in again and work properly. I needed my own four walls. My roof. My floor. My music. I needed to work in a place where there wasn’t a child watching yet another episode of Sam and Cat.

Any writer who is lucky enough to have occupied a writing shed can tell you there is something truly magical about it. A shed is not just a room of one’s own but something much better: A work space detached from but near to the house where you live. A building of one’s own. It is such an immense privilege to have a shed. I knew this and yet I was leaving my mine to fester. My privilege, my haven, was being colonised by spiders and chaos. The shed had become yet another mess I had to clean up.

Then something else occurred. Something exciting. Something that finally gave me the ass-kick I needed to clean up and return to the shed. It began last winter when an old friend bought me a couple of sessions with his London hypnotherapist — the legendary Tim Smale. I wasn’t sleeping at the time and said friend insisted a couple of sessions with Tim would sort me out.

I was deeply sceptical. I don’t believe in quick fixes as a rule. I’ve done loads of talk therapy over the years, it’s helped me through more than one life crisis, and I really would have preferred a good shrink. But psychotherapy is expensive and time consuming — at the time, both were luxuries I could not afford.

So I did a couple of sessions with Tim. They were easy and surprisingly unlike therapy. For one thing I was able to do them remotely (he has an office in central London but I was too anxious to get on the tube). They consisted of a 45-odd minute Zoom chat (the tone was practical and issue-oriented, almost like talking to a mate, with none of the dire long-haul solemnity of The Couch), after which Tim recorded and sent me a personalised 20 minute audio file via WhatsApp which he encouraged me to listen to at night in bed as I was falling to sleep.

I followed his instructions and found — to my immense surprise — within a few nights I was dropping off to sleep quickly and sleeping more soundly and deeply than I had in months. My life was still a mess, but I felt steadier and calmer during the day. Slowly but surely, I began to cope. I felt more like myself.

What was on the magic audio file? Nothing fancy. Nothing weird. When I finally listened to it all the way through out of sheer curiosity I found it was basically it was a guided meditation/relaxation exercise with some positive affirmations toward the end. But — and this is crucial — it was also a guided meditation tailored to my specific needs and goals. I understood it was made for me alone. It was a meditation based on the foundation of my established rapport with Tim as therapist. It helped.

After feeling the positive effects of hypnotherapy I became fascinated with the history and practice itself, which is ancient and pre-dates modern psychology. Eventually on a whim, I signed up for training course with the London-based UK College of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. I enrolled at a time when I could scarcely afford the tuition, let alone the time. I thought I was just curious and doing the course ‘for research,’ which is the ostensible reason a writer does anything risky or new. ‘Research’ is the writer’s form of denial. I’ve known alcoholic writers who finally agreed to rehab on the grounds that it was ‘just for research.’

Anyway, I did the course and the rest is self-evident. I’m now a writer and trained hypnotherapist. Yes. Me. Leah McLaren. A professional mesmerist. WTliteralF? Odd. I know.

But it also makes practical sense. As writers, our interests often lead us down rabbit holes, through labyrinths of pure distraction. Like Solly, we go through phases, passions, and usually they pass. In retrospect I understand it’s no coincidence I enrolled in the hypno course at a time when I was also suddenly in need of a more stable, predictable source of income. (Authors make money in peaks and troughs.) My circumstances had suddenly changed over night. There was a shortfall. A gap. Somehow I needed to fill it. So I kept pressing on.

Eventually I cleaned out the shed. I began writing there again — and this week I took my first two hypnotherapy clients. I’m new to the practice but so far, under Tim’s guidance, I’m finding it both gratifying and fun. Fingers crossed there will be more.

Needless to say I believe in the therapeutic benefits hypnosis — I wouldn’t be attempting to make it a facet of my job and professional identity otherwise. But when I say "believe” I don’t mean to imply there’s any magic involved.

For centuries the practice has been widely misunderstood, lumped in with non-fact-based new age woo. But I’m not manipulating energy fields and there are no crystals involved. I have nothing against hippie wellness stuff, by the way. If “woo” is that’s your thing, my feeling is: knock yourself out. However “woo” is not my bag. I’m trained as a journalist, which means I’m an irreligious, newsroom-trained fiend for evidence and truth. And my hypnotherapy-practice is very much in line with that.

For many people (me included) hypnotherapy simply works. There’s a great deal of hard scientific research to back this up — evidence I won’t bore you with right now but am happy provide by email on request. As with anything to do with the human psyche or psychology (including the talk therapy, the great panacea of our age) the mechanics of precisely how and why hypnosis works are difficult to isolate or definitively prove. It involves guiding the patient into a state of deep relaxation (or trance) during which thinking patterns (or neural networks) can be guided in a more positive, productive and healthy direction according to the client’s goals and needs. It works on the unconscious mind — that mysterious ad powerful part of the psyche we often ignore.

Much like talk therapy, hypnosis is a proven treatment for generalised anxiety, for disrupted sleep, for over-thinking, over-eating, for impulse control and regulation in general. It’s enormously beneficial for focus and concentration and for alleviating stress. My passion for it is both informed by and directly linked to my primary work as a writer, which at its best moments, stems from the unconscious — the psyche’s creative centre.

In the age of ‘wellness,’ (as in virtually every age), hypnosis has been wildly misbranded, misunderstood and in some cases, brutally and comically misused (think travelling road shows and dancing chickens on stage at your high school assembly). As part of my little practice I hope to rectify that. And yes, yes… of course I’m planning to write book, with a trusted mentor and co-author, none other than the legendary Tim Smale, who in addition to changing my life for the better has now become a co-creator and friend.

So on reflection, I suppose maybe everything really is research?

One thing I do know is that I will always be a writer first and a hypnotherapist second. But the two passions go hand in hand. I’m new to this, and I’m excited. I’ll let you know how it goes. For now I’m just overjoyed to be back in my shed, which now doubles as a treatment room. Come visit.

I’m taking in person appointments now, building up a little client list, so get in touch if you interested. I will be seeing clients in person and remotely via Zoom.

If you want to know more just get in touch by replying to this email or reach out directly at leahkmclaren@gmail.com . I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.