Jim Goulding 1929-2002

Jim talked about Napoleon Hill, Edgar Casey and Wallace Wattles and on such topics as thoughts becoming things; creating your own reality with your own thoughts; reprogramming your mind with hypnosis and re-writing your old scripts that played inside your head – concepts that many people had never heard of let alone understood at that time.

I can’t help but wonder about the movie “The Secret” and whether Jim would have been a part of it, because he so believed that you could project forward in your own life your own ideals and desires and create your own reality with your own thoughts. It might not have been called manifesting or the law of attraction back then, but they are the buzz words of today. I recently travelled half way across the world to Hawaii to listen to an inspirational speaker for a week and found myself saying “hey, this is what Jim taught me 20 years ago!”.

Max Luscher & Jim Goulding

If you were lucky to be a part of the inner sanctum, two or three of us would be behind the closed door coughing and choking on the smoke as it billowed out of the open window, Jim never thinking for a moment of  the political incorrectness of this situation, but there we were and happy to be so, because Jim always had something of value to say, he had such charisma.

"His Clients Got Well"

When it came to his clinical work, much of which he shared with students, he was keen to share his successes but he really cared for people and he encouraged all students to use Psychotherapy and Hypnotherapy in very special ways. Jim would say “remember this is not a job, this is not a career, this is a vocation”.

Jim shared a case study with us of a gentleman who suffered with severe depression, he’d seen him for a few sessions and felt he had made some headway; he then received a phone call to tell him that the gentleman had committed suicide. Jim was deeply upset and all of the gentleman’s family came to see Jim for a family meeting. It appears that the client had been given the news that he was in financial ruin and this was the final blow and the gentleman had not been able to face his family and had then taken his life. During the meeting with the client’s wife and adolescent children, they all said that  they could have “worked things out”, they could have sold the big house, the could have come out of their private schools, nothing would have mattered if they had been able to have their father home with them.

From this time on whenever Jim treated a deeply depressed client, he would insist on having a family session to ensure to the best of his ability that this would never happen again.

Jim taught his students so many things and he valued what they could bring to the profession and he encouraged the many individuals he taught to be the best that they could be in their vocation as clinical hypnotherapists. His passing deeply impacted the hypnotherapy profession and even more so, those who called him a friend.