I drafted this from my hotel at the conference while still working on the welcome remarks I would give to fellow attendees. Moving back and forth between the two, I found myself returning to the question of what ISSTD actually is and how an organization like this continues to exist across time. ISSTD is not […]
Dear Colleagues, I have been thinking a great deal about what it means to serve as President of an international organization while coming from a worldview shaped within the United States, and primarily from positions of privilege within this country. That positional reality shapes what I see easily and what I have to work harder […]
Dear ISSTD Community, January often brings a natural slowing, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Many traditions describe winter as a season for consolidation rather than expansion, a time when growth happens quietly beneath the surface before becoming visible later on. Not everything that looks still is inactive, and not everything […]
D. Michael Coy – 2025 PresidentLearning from the Past, Looking to the Future Dear ISSTD Community, Welcome to the December 2025 edition of ISSTD News, which you are reading in early January! This month, as is the case every year, I am, as outgoing President, accompanied here by incoming President Abigail Percifield and outgoing Immediate […]
Dear ISSTD Community, Welcome to the November 2025 edition of ISSTD News, which you are reading in early December! This will be my final ‘solo’ letter to you as ISSTD president. Next month, I will be accompanied here by incoming President Abigail Percifield and outgoing Immediate Past President Peter Maves for our respective reflections on […]
Dear ISSTD Community, Welcome to the October 2025 edition of ISSTD News, which you are reading in early November! This month’s update will be brief. I am currently writing from sunny – and windy – Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, where ISSTD just concluded its regional conference. I want to extend my most heartfelt thanks to […]
Dear ISSTD Community, Welcome to the September 2025 edition of ISSTD News, which you are reading in early October! Hypnosis has been on my mind a lot over the past weeks, due in equal parts to my attendance at ISSTD’s 2025 Chicago Regional Conference (one day of which was dedicated to hypnotic phenomena in the […]
Dear ISSTD Community, Welcome to the August 2025 edition of ISSTD News, which you are reading in early-September! I initially planned to reflect upon the preceding month, but then I realized that September is ISSTD’s Student and Emerging Professional (SEP) Month. So, rather than look to the past in this letter, I have decided to […]
Dear ISSTD Community, It’s hard to believe that, as of July, we are over the peak and now on the downslope of 2025. In my first letter this year, I shared that I was “feeling my way into some sort of happy medium between thinking and acting, doing and sitting.” I’ve found myself pondering over […]
Dear ISSTD Community, What a month it’s been! Owing to that, this is going to a shorter message than you’ve been accustomed to seeing from me. I mentioned last month that one of the antidotes to the sense of isolation that might be evoked by the heightened stress and strain of life these days is […]
