Why I work the Way I do
After twenty years as a film director, directing mostly television commercials, I decided to retrain and become a therapist. After kicking arse for twenty years I just wanted something gentler and more nurturing for the soul. I have always had a strong intuition and a sense of what drives people and so I deep-dived into a new career twelve years ago.
I haven't totally let go of directing, I have a twenty-two year old son who is a creative force and I just directed my first video clip for him. I am also developing a feature film.
I became a therapist because I have always been fascinated by what sits underneath the surface of people. Why we repeat patterns we know are not good for us. Why we can understand something perfectly well and still be unable to change it. Why one person moves through an experience relatively untouched while another carries it in their body for years.
I am interested in the gap between what we consciously know and what we actually feel, do and believe — because that is often where the real work of therapy begins.Over the years, I have trained in a wide range of therapeutic approaches, including hypnotherapy, EMDR, psychotherapy, NLP, parts therapy, somatic work, breathwork and nervous system regulation.
Together, they allow me to work with a person from different angles: with conscious thought and belief, with unconscious patterns, with unresolved experiences from the past, and with the physical responses held in the body.I use hypnotherapy because so much of human behaviour is automatic.
We can consciously want to change and still find ourselves repeating the same response. EMDR can be particularly powerful when an experience from the past continues to feel active in the present. Parts therapy helps make sense of internal conflict — the experience of one part of you wanting to move forward while another pulls you back towards something familiar.
Somatic work and breathwork bring the body into the process, which matters because anxiety, stress and trauma are not only experienced through thought. They can show up in breathing, muscle tension, hypervigilance, shutdown and a persistent sense that something is not quite safe.
My approach is to understand how the problem works for the individual person and build the therapy around that. Two people may arrive with anxiety, low confidence, a phobia or an unwanted habit, yet the pattern underneath can be completely different. For one person, the work may involve an old experience that has never quite resolved. For another, it may be a deeply embedded belief, an automatic nervous system response or a learned pattern that has been reinforced over many years. Often, several things are working together.
This is what I enjoy most about therapy: understanding the particular architecture of a problem and finding the right way into it. The work is collaborative, curious and tailored to the person in front of me. We may work with the mind, the body, the past, the present or the unconscious patterns that keep repeating — using the approaches that best fit what is actually going on.
I truly enjoy witnessing change and am constantly in awe of the humans I work with and how deep and hard they will dig for that change.
Diana Joy
Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist, Balmain, Sydney
0414 486 707