I can be a control freak

Hypnotist and self-help guru Paul McKenna has made a living out of helping people control their emotions, but he reveals to Gabrielle Fagan how he’s been at the mercy of his own.

WORLD famous hypnotist and self-help guru Paul McKenna is in an emotional situation he can’t completely control, and he’s finding it “terrifying”.

This is quite an admission for a man who’s made millions teaching other people how to control their emotions in order to transform their lives and find everything from happiness to success.

Yet, out of the blue, it appears that McKenna, who has never married and is a self-confessed commitment phobe, has been derailed by that most powerful of emotions — love.

“Love has hunted me down like a wildebeest,” he says of the relationship with his new girlfriend, whom he won’t name but has dated for eight months.

“I’ve never felt happier in a relationship than I do now. Eight months is a bit of a record for me. I can never usually get beyond six months, that was my limit in the past.

“I’ve previously felt that I’m not built for relationships... so really caring about what someone thinks and how I feel about them is very scary and terrifying.”

This newly revealed vulnerability, and happiness, has come after a period of great challenges for the 50-year-old DJ-turned-hypnotist.

Because, McKenna, written off as a dyslexic nonachiever at school, might have gone on to become a multi-millionaire (his books are estimated to have sold more than any other non-fiction author in Britain), and he might have helped a host of celebrities, from Robbie Williams and David Beckham to Russell Brand, with their problems.

But two years ago he discovered wealth and fame couldn’t protect him from a period of intense emotional turmoil, which he struggled to weather.

“My father, Bill, died, which was devastating. Following that, several of my friends died in quick succession, then my dog died, which hit me much harder than I expected. I was extremely down, depressed and in a very dark place for quite a time,” he says during this interview.

“I had to claw myself back from the edge of the abyss and my friends were very worried about me. They kept saying, ’you’re not your normal, happy self, what’s wrong?’. All I could answer was, ‘There’s no point in anything’, and I literally believed that for a while.”

He turned to a Zen master who advised him to look within himself to unlock his deeply buried feelings.

And it all came back, in part, to unrequited love. “In my early 20s when I had my heart broken by a girl for the first time, I vowed I’d never let those emotions hurt me like that again,” explains McKenna.

“My friend made me realise that any time things got emotionally difficult for me my reaction was to suppress or repress my emotional messages.”

“While I am a ’control freak’, it’s not in a negative way. I’ve always realised you can’t control everything, but if you can control your thoughts to a degree, and your behaviour and feelings to a large extent then you will have reasonable control of your life and be happier. Thankfully I seem to have served my ’difficult’ time now and I’m happy, healthy and feeling in really good shape.”

¦ Freedom From Emotional Eating by Paul McKenna, with CD and DVD, published by Bantam Press, €14.99.