How Hypnotherapy Helps Autistic People Unlearn Anxiety with Lawrence Bartley

What if anxiety isn’t a lifelong label but a learned pattern your body can release? That question sits at the heart of our conversation with hypnotherapist and autistic advocate Lawrence Bartley, who describes the moment his anxiety “melted” during a short hypnosis training—and why that shift felt more physical than psychological. We unpack why autistic anxiety often runs louder: relentless sensory input, misunderstandings around social cues, and childhood moments the nervous system codes as threat. Instead of managing symptoms forever, Lawrence walks us through how processing repressed fear, shame, and grief can remove the fuel anxiety depends on.

We get practical about method and myths. Hypnosis isn’t mind control; it’s a state of focused attention where you remain in charge. Lawrence outlines a session that honors sensory needs: light somatic work to engage the body, then a gentle trance where suggestions speak the language of the unconscious—sight, sound, and felt sensation. He contrasts this with talk-only approaches that may validate but not always release. The test is in the body: easier breath, softened stomach, warmth in the shoulders, and the absence of that familiar pressure. We also address the big worry—does the relief last? Lawrence explains how processed emotions don’t return, while acknowledging that people may carry multiple anxieties needing separate work.

For immediate help, Lawrence shares a simple tool from NLP: notice how your anxiety moves in your body and then mentally reverse and reshape that motion using vivid sensory cues. Because emotions are sensory, changing the sensory code changes the feeling. Along the way, we challenge the belief that autistic anxiety is inevitable, replacing it with a grounded path to safety and self-trust. If the idea of calm as a learnable state resonates, come listen, try the technique, and consider new support that meets your nervous system where it lives.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Anxiety And A Disclaimer
• 1:06 Meet Lawrence: The Autistic Hypnotist
• 2:12 A Personal Breakthrough With Hypnosis
• 3:29 How Anxiety Felt In The Body
• 4:36 Misconceptions: “You Just Live With It”
• 6:17 Why Talk Therapy May Not Land
• 7:18 What Drives Autistic Anxiety
• 9:40 Repression, Early Roots, And Stories
• 12:01 Inside The 20-Minute Shift
• 13:18 Safety, Control, And Stage Myths
• 15:01 What A Respectful Session Looks Like
• 16:35 Does Anxiety Return After Release
• 17:45 Rebuilding Trust In The Nervous System
• 19:05 A Simple Tool: NLP Spinning
• 20:40 Belief, Healing, And Next Steps
• 22:19 Links, Resources, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Anxiety can feel overwhelming for anyone, but autistic individuals, it often runs deeper, louder, and harder to explain. So, what if relief wasn't about fixing yourself, but it's all about releasing when your nervous system has been holding on. And today's conversation explores an unconventional, deeply personal path to calm. So before we begin, a quick disclaimer, dear listeners. Just uh I want to share. Like Lawrence is a hypnoist, not a doctor, and everything shared today reflects his personal experience and the professional opinion. And it's definitely not a medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any medical or I'd say lifestyle changes, right? So hey dear listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine. I'm your host, Avik, and today I am joined by a lovely guest, Lawrence Bartley. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17

Thank you very much for having me. It's wonderful to be here, Avik.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21

Amazing, amazing. So, uh dear listeners, before we delve deep into our discussion today, I would quickly love to introduce you with Lawrence. So Lawrence is also known as the autistic hypnoist. So he is a hypnotherapist who specializes in helping autistic people reduce the anxiety informed by his own lived experience as an autistic person who overcame severe anxiety through hypnoise. So we are talking about hypnotherapy, autism, and anxiety. What actually helps, what doesn't, and how regulation can feel possible again. So why do we wait? Let's get started. Welcome to the show again.

SPEAKER_01: 2:07

Okay, great to be here. So, as you mentioned, my name is Lawrence Bartley. So my own personal story with anxiety is that back when I was 15, 16 in school, I just I mean, I always had a bit of anxiety, but during those seniors years it just spiked to an extreme level that stayed with me for several years. I did all the usual things, I tried meditation, I went to Reiki sessions, I tried therapy, but none of it really worked for me. I went to a hypnotist, well, I actually went to a hypnosis training, and during the hypnosis training, worked with a professional hypnotist, and the anxiety I could physically feel it release from my nervous system, melt out of my body, and then it just disappeared. All the situations that used to give me anxiety, like going into college, I used to have an incredible amount of tension inside my body, particularly in my stomach and my throat, my lot of anxiety induced headaches that just seemingly disappeared. And I could walk back in through that college hallways, and I just felt normal, just a sense of normal that had not been there before.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19

Exactly. So I mean uh before you became a practitioner, you were someone uh living with the anxiety for the years, like I mentioned before. So I'm very curious, like, how did anxiety actually show up in your body um and the daily life back then? So if you can share.

SPEAKER_01: 3:41

Yeah, so anxiety. I mean, everybody feels anxiety a little differently. But for me, it was always severe tension in my stomach, you know, tension in my chest, in my throat, anxiety-based headaches. You could wake up and just feel I sense a dread coming into my it's just into my body. It was just an awful lot of just really horrible negative sensations inside of my body that I felt. But then after the hypnotherapy session, the physical feelings started just just break apart and I could feel them all start to release. And after the hypnotherapy session was done, I actually felt this weird flood of just warmth just throughout my entire body. And then, like I said, all the places that used to go and give me anxiety, like being in college, just started to disappear.

SPEAKER_00: 4:35

Okay. So, like, um, and obviously, thank you so much for uh I mean naming that so clearly because it's very important because many autistic listeners recognize the symptoms, but not always the source, right? So that is also something which is I feel very important, and I thought I I I shall start with this. And when we talk about the autistic people, I believe, I mean autistic people and the anxiety. So I I believe that there are misconceptions also. Like one thing I hear often that autistic anxiety is something that you just have to leave with. Like, from your perspective, I mean, if you can share, like, what is the biggest misconception about anxiety in autistic people?

SPEAKER_01: 5:20

Well, I think you just mentioned it that you just have to live with it. I don't believe that anymore. I don't believe that anybody autistic or neurotypical has to live with anxiety anymore. I mean, if you think about it, babies when they're born, they don't have anxiety. Anxiety is something that just it get I believe it gets wired in, and I think that if you can learn anxiety, because I think it is something that your body ends up learning as a means to protect you, although not a very effective means. I believe that if your body can learn it, it can also unlearn it. So I believe that everybody who has anxiety can release that all those negative feelings that cause the anxiety to happen, all that bottled-down anger, fear, guilt, shame, because that's where anxiety comes from. All sorts of negative emotions that we've just been repressing inside of ourselves. And you release all those emotions, then the your bot your brain just doesn't need anxiety anymore. All that negative emotions have just been drained out of your system.

SPEAKER_00: 6:20

Okay. So, I mean, um, how does that belief affect the way people seek help or give up too early?

SPEAKER_01: 6:29

Well, if you don't believe you're gonna be healed, I know a lot of people who just well, they just sort of give up on themselves. Because if they don't see a a solution where they can get help, then they're not gonna start seeking other solutions. So I think it's incredibly important that people believe that there is actual hope for them, because um if you think something's impossible, you will make it impossible for yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 6:55

Got it. Understood. So that means obviously it reframes the anxiety from being a permanent trait to something changeable. So I mean also, uh let's talk about the traditional approaches. Uh I mean why those traditional approaches don't always land.

SPEAKER_01: 7:17

So the traditional approaches is usually cognitive behavioral therapy, which I did uh I was in therapy for several years, but it just never worked for me. I mean in my perspective, I don't think that Ash talking about feelings is not always useful to actually getting rid of feelings, to actually releasing them. Obviously, for some people, traditional therapy does help, obviously, or it would not be around. But I don't think it's as effective as something like hypnosis, which just goes straight into the emotions that cause the anxiety that were there in the first place. Because I mean there's a lot of people who've been in therapy for several years, and if well, if you're in therapy for several years, I'm afraid it's it's not actually working.

SPEAKER_00: 7:59

So Got it. Got it. And in your experience, what tends to sit underneath the anxiety for the uh autistic people? Like is it a kind of uh sensory overload, depression, emotional pressure, or something else?

SPEAKER_01: 8:20

Well, they all contribute. If you look at actually the statistics, it's about half of autistic people have some form of anxiety. Half of them. We compare that to neurotypical people, it's maybe 10%. Like that's it's a massive difference. And like you said, sensory overload. I as an autistic person, I I still have I can have sensory overload with certain situations. I can remember at one time my sister used to start playing saxophone, but for some reason it just triggered something in my brain, I couldn't stand it, and people could start complaining that it could not be that bad for me. And it's like, no, you don't get it, it really is that bad for me. So sensory overload, people not understanding them. There's also a social problem as well, because one of the traits of autistic people is we're not the best at picking up on social cues, unfortunately. And if you can't pick on social cues, both positive and negative social cues as well. If you can't pick up negative social cues, people can get angry at you. But if you also can't pick up on so on positive social cues the social cues that show that you are loved, that people love you, then you end up feeling like you're not actually loved, even if those cues are there but you can't see them, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 9:41

Makes sense. Makes sense. So, like um regarding repression, how does uh uh repression specially specifically build up over time in the nervous system? Anything if you can share?

SPEAKER_01: 9:56

Yeah, so pretty much what happens is that people throughout their lives they've got they get all sorts of negative experiences, but what happens with anxiety is particularly trained childhood, you take all those negative experiences and just start bottling them down. Anxiety is a whole bunch of emotions that need to be processed, but have just never been processed. I mean, I remember one client I worked with, he had social anxiety, and the cause of the social anxiety came back to when he was three years old. His parents took him to a beach, but they needed to get something from the car, so they both left to get the thing from the car. And he remembers being three years old on the beach all alone, his parents walking away, and he just felt alone. He felt abandoned. And it caused a social anxiety that I must always be liked, I must never be disliked, so that I can never experience that sense of abandonment again. Even though his parents they were back after 15 minutes, they just need to get something from the car, but his three-year-old brain couldn't understand that at the time. So all that fear and terror of feeling abandoned, it gets bottled down into the nervous system. And then if you have social anxiety, you think you can start to build up a sense of bitterness as well and anger because if you have social anxiety, you have needs, but the needs are not being fulfilled. Because if you say you have needs out loud, there's a risk that people will reject you. And social anxiety is all about I must never be rejected ever again. So there's also a whole bunch of anger that can get bottled down as well. And it just it all needs to be processed. And hypnosis is a tool that can help people process all of those bottled-down emotions so you can release them, so you can get rid of the anxiety and feel stable and normal and confident even.

SPEAKER_00: 11:50

That's true. That's definitely true. So, okay, and also you often say that hypnosis melted the anxiety out of your system. I mean, what actually changed for you? I mean, after that 20-minute session, if you can highlight that as well.

SPEAKER_01: 12:06

Yeah, it was only 20 minutes during the hypno-training, the instructor only gave us 20 minutes to do the entire session, and I felt the instructor first, she wanted me to feel the anxiety in my system to activate the part of my brain that had it. So it's only to feel the problem, to think of the problem. And I did, I thought of the problem, and this big, just horrible ball of tension just started to appear in my side of my body. But after the hypnosis was done, the tension imploded in on itself. I could feel something breaking apart and melting, and the tension got released, my body was able to relax, I could breathe easier. I could feel warmth around my shoulders just spraying throughout my entire body. I physically felt something change in that hypnosis session, which is why I ended up going back to more hypnosis sessions, becoming a hypnotherapist to help other autistic people get rid of their anxiety too.

SPEAKER_00: 13:03

So, I mean, obviously, that's really, really powerful, especially because you're describing calm as a physical state and not just a mindset. So yeah. Exactly. So let's get it practical. Like for someone who is autistic who feels that anxious but skeptical or nervous about the hypnotherapy, what would you want them to understand first?

SPEAKER_01: 13:29

The biggest reason people get nervous and anxious about doing hypnotherapy is they still think it's some sort of mind control. It's not. So, one thing about hypnotherapy is that you're always in control because a person cannot actually force you to do things against your will. I know that's which is a pretty big misconception, but it it all comes from Hollywood. So the first thing I would tell somebody who is worried about going to see a hypnotherapist is that you're the one in control. A lot of people have tried making people do things they didn't want to do under hypnosis, but it never worked. And some people think it's mind control because they see it on a stage show, well, a stage show as entertainment. And quite frankly, if you get enough people in a room, some people are just comfortable acting strange in front of other people, especially when you give them the excuse. Oh, it's not me acting weird, like I don't know, riding a giraffe or something, whatever stage of notice decide to have them do. Oh, it's not me, it's because I was hypnotized. Mm-hmm. So well, a big misconception is definitely the hypnosis of mind control. It's not. You can't control another person's mind. The only mind you can control is really your own. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 14:41

And w what does the safe and respectful hypnotherapy experience look like for the autistic clients?

SPEAKER_01: 14:48

So every hypnotist does it a little differently. What I like to do is I like to start people off with a whole bunch of neurological exercise. It gets the body involved. Usually it's just a sort of just tapping on certain parts of the body. If anybody's familiar with EFT emotional freedom technique, then they might recognize the tapping sequence as being EFT. And the reason I do that is because there's two real types of hypnosis. You can do it through overstimulation, which is sort of what people used to do in the ancient times when you had shamans beating drums and chanting and overwhelming people's senses so that they could give suggestions that went right past the into the unconscious mind, past the logical brain, because the conscious mind was overwhelmed by all the senses that it just couldn't think. So I start off every session by having people working their bodies. The next thing I do is I'll go into and do a more traditional hypnotherapy approach where I put the people into a hypnotic trance, where I guide them into it and start giving them all sorts of suggestions. That's the other type of hypnosis, which is over fatigue, where the body just sort of relaxes down, just becomes completely relaxed, and the conscious mind just starts listening, and all the hypnosis suggestions can go straight into the other person's unconscious mind, where they can choose to accept them if they're useful or get rid of them if they're not.

SPEAKER_00: 16:18

So, I mean, obviously, that emphasis on safety and concert matters a lot, but progress is really, I would say, linear. Right? So when anxiety resurfaces, or people doubt whether the calm will last, how do you help them stay grounded?

SPEAKER_01: 16:38

Well, one thing that people should realize is in that hypnotherapy, anxiety doesn't come back. So that's probably a pretty big claim to say, but once you process the emotion, there's nothing for anxiety to stand on anymore. So with nothing to anxiety to stand on, it doesn't come back. Now, sometimes it happens that people have multiple anxieties that can all feel the same way. It's possible for somebody who has social anxiety and general anxiety. Some people consider fears and phobias to anxiety, and you can definitely have multiple fears and PTSD, these the anxiety and steroids, and you can definitely have anxiety and PTSD at the same time. So it's possible that sometimes people have multiple anxieties, in which case I will give them other sessions. One thing that I do is I will give people free support sessions to help them overcome any further anxieties that they have.

SPEAKER_00: 17:28

So what helps someone trust their nervous system again after years of anxiety?

SPEAKER_01: 17:35

So something that helps people to trust their nervous system. I think what really helps would be uh releasing all the negative emotions. What it all comes back to, and I probably sound like a broken record releasing it, but that is at the end of the day, what it all comes back to is releasing just all that horrible dunk that has been stored up inside our minds, all the limiting beliefs, the I don't feel safe, I don't feel loved, I feel like I'm a horrible monster. Releasing those from our systems, starting to change those horrible those beliefs, releasing the fear, getting rid of the anger and the shame and the grief and the sadness and all those emotions. Once people can do that, they sort of go back to a sort of blank slate, probably not the best term, but it's a reset to what they were before all the horrible stuff happened. That normal reset that allows them to start trusting themselves again. Because I think people innately trust themselves. Like I mentioned before, babies don't have anxiety, but babies naturally trust themselves as well. That's the natural place for people to be in. That's the natural mindset for people to be in, about all the things holding us back from getting there is stuff that we acquired over life. Through just bad experiences. Maybe we had teachers who taught us, maybe we had parents who gave us the limiting beliefs instead. I once worked with a person for our money beliefs. She thought having money was a terrible thing because her mother taught her that rich people are evil. And well, if you believe that, then well, you're never going to be one of the rich people. But her belief it was something that she learned. It's not something that she was naturally born with. So getting rid of just all the stuff that you've acquired is how you trust your nervous system again.

SPEAKER_00: 19:27

So, I mean, for the autistic listener who feels trapped in constant anxiety right now, what will be the one small realization or the step that could help that could help them feel a bit more helpful today? What do you say?

SPEAKER_01: 19:45

Well, I would say is that anxiety is all down to feelings. And feelings come from our imagination. If you think about anxiety, it's not what's actually happening, it's what you imagine will happen. And if you can use imagination to Change the feelings, then you can change that anxiety too. And one way to do that is to when the anxiety strikes, anxiety is a body feeling. Every emotion we have is a body feeling. So when anxiety strikes, you point toward them to that body feeling. You notice which direction it's moving because all body feelings are energy. Energy is always moving. Whichever direction it's moving, you change that movement. You imagine change that movement. You think about how it feels to change that movement. You get all your senses involved because it our unconscious minds are all based on senses. They're not based on words, they're not based on logic. It all comes back to the senses. You change the senses, you change the imagination, you change the senses through change of the imagination, you change the feelings. So I imagine going in that feeling of anxiety going in a different direction, you can change the feeling of that anxiety. That's one of the things I found to be one of the most effective techniques out there. For those who want to Google that technique is called NLP spinning. In fact, I actually recently released a short little book on it, actually, called Nine Brain Hacks for an Anxiety Gets Too Much. It's something that I wrote and only released yesterday on my website, which is LawrencePartley.com. You can go there and read the book. It's a it's free. It's embedded on my website, or you can download it. It's just a Google document, about 23 pages long. Nine different things you can do for when anxiety gets too much.

SPEAKER_00: 21:24

Any suggestion you want to give to the listeners today?

SPEAKER_01: 21:28

Any suggestion? Is to believe that healing is possible and then find a way to heal. For me, hypnotherapy was the last method that I used. Some people might find traditional therapy helpful, I didn't. I know a lot of people don't, especially if they've been in it for years, but some people do. But if you have anxiety, anxiety can't leave. It really reduces the quality of your life, having that constant state of fear just whenever you leave your comfort zone or even being in your comfort zone, having all that anxiety come back. So to any listener, find a way to heal and start making the healing happen. Find a way to do it. Because anxiety, you can overcome it. I bless generally believe that everybody can overcome anxiety.

SPEAKER_00: 22:13

Got it. And if listeners want to connect with you, where can they connect?

SPEAKER_01: 22:19

Well, they can connect on me on my website, LawrenceBartley.com. There's a contact me page there. They can join my email newsletter. I call it the labyrinth newsletter, because I like to imagine it's going deep into a labyrinth and slaying all the monsters within ourselves. And they can connect with me on the social media X, formerly known as Twitter, the autistic hypnotist at lore underscore Bartley. Those are the main places where they can connect with me.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

Lovely. So dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links into the show notes for your easy reference. And here's before we move, I would love to say one thing that anxiety is not your identity, and calm is a learnable state. Even for the nervous systems that have lived in survival for the years. Right? So if this conversation resonated with you, dear listeners, take it as a kind of permission to explore support that honors how your mind and body actually work. You are not weak for needing help, you are a human. Right? So, with this hope, this is Mind Meets Machine with your host, Avik, and thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much.