Credentials

Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, American Council of Hypnotist Examiners. Certified Master Trainer with the International Association of Counselors and Therapists, and IACT Educator of the Year, 2016. Career Partner with the Newton Institute. Trained coast to coast with Gil Boyne, Ormond McGill, Michael Newton, Dolores Cannon, David Quigley, Paul Aurand and George Bien. And underneath all of it, a second generation hypnotherapist carrying his father's work forward.

Where It Began

A Legacy That Began at Home

Mark Johnson, Second Generation Hypnotherapist My father was a medical doctor in Charleston, South Carolina, a general practitioner who studied clinical hypnosis with Dave Elman and Milton Erickson themselves. He began delivering babies using hypnosis for pain control in the 1950s, more than 1,500 of them over his career. When my students learn the Elman induction in my classes today, they are learning it from me, and I learned it from the man Elman taught.

Some of my earliest memories are of my parents' Saturday night parties. My mother would let my brother and me sit quietly in the corner of the living room while my dad hypnotized the neighbors. As a teenager I refused to let him hypnotize me, convinced he would use it as a truth serum to find out what I had been up to. That is how normal this work was in our house: I was not afraid it would not work. I was afraid it would.

The Long Way Around

Twelve Years of Music,
Twelve Years of Code

I did not go straight into hypnosis. Music called first, and I answered it fully: studies at Berklee College of Music, then a Master of Music degree at North Texas in Denton, where, fittingly, I used hypnosis to manage my own test anxiety. I spent twelve years teaching keyboard and piano classes, and then a second career pulled at me, and I spent the next twelve as a software programmer, including four years writing code for match.com.

At the time, those felt like detours. They were the training. A dozen years of teaching taught me how to break a complex skill into steps a person can actually learn, and how to sit patiently with someone while they struggle toward it. A dozen years of programming taught me how systems behave, and the subconscious mind is the most powerful system there is. So much of what we do every day runs on programs we never consciously chose. I had spent twenty four years, without realizing it, preparing to work at exactly that level.

The Turn

2003, the Year
Everything Changed

In 2003 my mother passed away, and her loss set something in motion that I could not ignore. I threw myself into the study of hypnosis, every book and recording I could find, and then went and did it properly: my first hypnotherapy certification, a formal 500 hour program, in 2004. The timing had its own sense of humor. My IT company was running layoffs and gave us ten weeks of paid notice, so while my colleagues went to job interviews, I quietly spent those weeks in nine day a month intensive training blocks.

My father was still alive for six more years, and following in his footsteps gave us a bond in that season of life I would not trade for anything. I built my practice the way I now teach my students to build theirs: as a weekend warrior, seeing clients on evenings and weekends while the corporate job paid the bills, until 2010, when the last layoff came and I realized I did not need the safety net anymore. I left corporate life and never looked back.

The Craft

Trained by the Masters,
Then Handed the Chalk

After my initial certification I kept going, because in this field the education never really ends. In 2007 I traveled to Chicago to study Life Between Lives regression directly under Michael Newton, eventually becoming an instructor and lead trainer for his institute. In 2008 I began studying with Dolores Cannon in Arkansas, returning every year for five years for her advanced classes, and in 2014 I studied with David Quigley. Along the way my studies took me coast to coast with Gil Boyne, Ormond McGill, Paul Aurand and George Bien, and the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners awarded me the Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist designation.

I completed my teacher training in 2011 and began teaching my own classes in 2012, certifying students through the International Association of Counselors and Therapists. In 2016, IACT presented me the Educator of the Year Award, in recognition of excellence in communication and outstanding performance. Then March 2020 arrived with in person classes scheduled in Dallas and Atlanta, and lockdowns coming fast. My students asked one question: can we try it online? I merged the two classes, took the whole training onto Zoom, and discovered what my students have been proving ever since, that a live, interactive, supervised class online teaches every bit as deeply as the room did. The training has been live online ever since, and it is better for it.

  • Second Generation Hypnotherapist
  • Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, ACHE
  • Certified Master Trainer, IACT
  • IACT Educator of the Year, 2016
  • Career Partner, the Newton Institute

The Work Now

From a Country Home
in East Texas

These days I run the training and see clients from our home on four and a half acres in East Texas, where the commute is a walk past the chickens. The classroom reaches further than it ever did when I was on airplanes: students join live from across the country and around the world, and I still teach every class myself, the same way my father taught me this work matters, one real person at a time.

More than twenty years in, I am still learning every single day from the minds that sit in my chair. That is the honest secret of this profession, and it is the first thing I hand my students.

Hypnotherapy Training

5 Star Google Review

I was looking for a hypnotherapy class and referred to Mark by a board member of Michael Newton Institute. We had a 1:1 session. Mark was very nice and friendly. I was impressed with his life story and how he ended up to be a hypnotherapist. I got motivated since I also had come from engineering world to hypnosis world. During his class, I found him a very experienced and reliable person. Everyone in our class learned a lot and enjoyed very much. Mark is not only a professional hypnotherapist, but also has served the society by training many hypnotherapists. I like his consistent support of his students by providing resources and advice when needed. I hope this testimony help people who want to work with him as prospective student or as client.

Navid·Albuquerque

The Next Step

Curious Where Your Story Goes?

Whether you are exploring the hypnotherapy certification training or wondering what a private session could do for you, the next step is the same relaxed conversation. About 20 minutes, every question answered, no pressure and no obligation.

Schedule Your Discovery Call

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

It depends entirely on what you intend to do with it, and I would rather say that plainly than sell you something. If you are going to see clients, then yes, and the tuition tends to come back inside your first twenty paying sessions or fewer. If you want the certificate for the wall, or to add a line to a coaching page you are not really going to use, then no amount of tuition is worth it and I will say so on the call.

The other half of the question is which training is worth it, and there I would judge any program, mine included, on three things. How many hours are live with the person teaching, how many times you will guide a real human being with someone experienced watching you, and what happens after the last class day.

A course that is mostly recordings and no supervised practice produces people holding a certificate who have never actually run a session, and that is where the disappointment comes from. Ask any program those three questions, not just this one.

Some are, including this one, though the word does not mean here what it means at a university.

There is no government body that accredits hypnotherapy schools the way one accredits a college, because hypnosis is a self regulated field, so accreditation in this profession comes from the professional associations rather than the state. This course is accredited by the International Association of Counselors and Therapists, I hold IACT accreditation myself as a Certified Master Trainer, and your first year of IACT certification and membership is included in your tuition.

The practical test of any online course is not whether the word accredited appears somewhere on the website. It is which body stands behind the training, how many hours it actually runs, and whether anyone experienced ever watched you guide a real person. Ask a school those three things and the answer gets clear very quickly.

You will guide someone into trance on your very first day, and that settles this fear faster than anything I could say. Most students arrive carrying it, so we take it head on. You will learn the Dave Elman induction, a technique that has been working for over a hundred years and takes five or six minutes to guide someone into a deep, relaxed state. Then comes the moment I love watching. In your very first practice trade you will guide your partner to close their eyes and tell them their eyelids are locked shut, sealed, and to try to open them. They try. They cannot. Something shifts in both of you right then. That is not a mystical gift showing up, it is a structured skill working exactly the way it is built to, and you did it on your first day.

Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it takes one afternoon, and that still surprises me after all these years. I worked with a woman on confidence and boundaries for three sessions, then did not hear from her for a year, until I ran into her at a market. She told me that on the evening of the third session her controlling partner came over looking for a fight, and instead of shrinking the way she always had, she simply stood there and spoke calmly. He was so thrown that he took her house key off his keyring, set it on the table, and left. She never needed a fourth session. Working with the subconscious directly is not slow work.

Schedule a Discovery Call A relaxed 20 minute conversation about your goals. No pressure, no obligation to enroll.

Hypnosis Training Insights

  • Hypnotherapy training insights and class updates
  • Answers to commonly asked training questions
  • Invitations to live online Q&A events
  • Early notice when enrollment opens
Send me the free self hypnosis recording