As a 13-year-old student in England, Vanessa Lindgren played “very bad tricks” on her schoolmates by hypnotizing them in the middle of class.

She was untrained, but having a lot of fun – until she was threatened with expulsion. Fast forward a few years and Lindgren’s passion for the practice had become undeniable. In 1994, she went to school to become a trained hypnotherapist.

“I wanted to know how the body and brain worked,” she said.

Hypnotherapists do not receive medical degrees. But Lindgren conducts her hypnotherapy treatment out of Dr. Martha Calihan’s Leesburg office. Calihan is board-certified in holistic medicine. A plethora of herbs line the wall in the waiting room of the Integrative Family Medicine Center, which also employs Dr. Felix Ma and Beth Eckhaus, a certified holistic health counselor.

Lindgren works with clients suffering with ailments from arachnophobia to obesity. Most of her clients want to quit smoking, lose weight or deal with anxiety.

Common myths about hypnotherapy are that the client is asleep or that the therapist forces them to behave in a certain way. Instead, during therapy, Lindgren tries to change a client’s perception of a certain event. People will not go against their own moral code, she said.

“All I do is guide,” she said. “Your mind knows what’s going on.”

Before the session, she writes a script for how she wants it to go. She doesn’t lead clients on or place ideas in their heads about memories that never happened, she said. Her goal is to go straight to the subconscious to get to the root of the problem, she said.

Lindgren equates the human brain with a computer. Everything a person has heard, seen, smelled and felt is filed into his or her internal “hard drive.” If something is awry, Lindgren goes into that “file” of the brain and reorganizes the client’s perception of it before putting it back.

“The brain can do a lot with suppressing pain,” she said.

This is why Lindgren attests that hypnotherapists see some of the most desperate medical cases – because people are unsure of the root of the problem.

Still, Lindgren often suggests that her clients receive hypnotherapy in conjunction with a medical doctor’s care. Some ailments, such as depression, cannot be cured through hypnotherapy, she said. Insurance does not cover hypnotherapy, which costs from $120 to $150 per session.

Each session is taped for free so the client can listen to it several times a week and not have to repeat the therapy. While this hurts her business, Lindgren said she wouldn’t be doing her job if someone had to return to time after time for the same problem. Instead, she hopes her clients would want to return to therapy to work on another issue of their choice.

Business is good because people are becoming more accepting of hypnotherapy, she said. Sometimes Lindgren gets multiple calls a week, and other times she gets 20 to 30 calls.

She has seen skeptics who have been surprised when the treatment works for them.

“The illusion that it’s a spooky voodoo thing, it’s absolute nonsense,” she said.

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