Jessica Betancourt is an RTT trained hypnotherapist and Certified Transformational Life Coach specializing in addiction transformation with an emphasis for Alcohol Use Disorder. After having gotten clear that her own drinking habits had become problematic, she successfully re-trained her brain using meditation, hypnosis, spiritual practices and subconscious reprogramming to heal her relationship with alcohol. She now works helping others to do the same with their addictive tendencies, which may have also included but are certainly not limited to: smoking, food, cocaine, marijuana, and sugar. She is a mom of 4 and lives in her adopted country of Spain with her Spanish husband and she dies an ego death every day.
Jessica Betancourt, Hypnotherapist | Addiction Coach
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Hi Brainz Reader! My name is Jessica, and I am a certified Holistic Health Coach and Hypnotherapist and I work with people to reinvent their unhelpful habitual patterns around drinking and smoking. I moved from my native California to my husband's homeland of Spain in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, and we have a full life here raising our 4 kids and starting an eco-farm. I have always loved all modalities of the healing arts and finding fulfillment and freedom in creating projects and experiences that help others feel liberated, inspired, and capable. My degrees of higher education are from The California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, in Fine Arts, and my current work in helping people heal from addictive patterns and their related distress is a blend of reframing old stories and belief systems using Somatics, Hypnotherapy, Emotional Healing and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I am also currently studying Ancestral Healing and Essene and South American Shamanism and finding deeper ways to connect with Spirit and the journey of life.
What inspired you to start Bless'ed Vida Alternative Therapies, and how has your journey been so far?
I started my journey initially as a Holistic Health Coach working with people to resolve anxiety and depression disorders. I was also someone who drank a bottle of red wine consistently every night and I was beginning to feel some cognitive dissonance around this as I never asked my clients about their drinking. However, I was awakening to how my habits were causing my own issues of anxiety and depression. I felt hypocritical. I was also beginning my journey of becoming certified as a Hypnotherapist at that time and as I leaned into learning those healing techniques, I began awakening to my personal alcohol use as being problematic.
And in learning how to both minimize my alcohol consumption and shift my identity to being someone who no longer has any priority for drinking, I noticed dramatic shifts in my well-being which inspired me to create programs and systems that would allow others to do the same. It was at this point that I niched my practice into working with individuals to heal the Root Cause of their addictive tendencies, specifically with alcohol and tobacco as these were my vices and from this, The Mindful Drinking Movement was born.
Can you describe the main goals and mission of Bless'ed Vida Alternative Therapies?
The mission of my business is to support you in achieving your highest potential of holistic health. There is a tendency to focus solely on the body or the mind, but in reality, for us to feel balanced and whole, we need to focus on the various types of health and develop a greater awareness of how our system functions as a whole and we need to tend to not only the health of our physical and cognitive selves but the emotional and spiritual as well.
What products or services do you offer through Bless'ed Vida Alternative Therapies?
I offer a group program called, What do Wino – 6 weeks to transform the way that you think about the way that you drink so that you can live freely without being hyper-focused on alcohol.
What do Wino teaches you how to uncover the real reason that you have habituated drinking patterns such as: over-drinking socially, ending the day with alcohol regularly or having a drink to transition from work to relax mode, drinking when you are stressed or angry or bored, drinking to celebrate (anything), etc.
Most people, if asked about why they drink regularly or have a tendency to over-consume, would answer along the lines of, "I like it." "It's fun." "It's how I relax." But these are more like rationalizations or justifications if you think about it. The real reason a person develops addictive patterns with alcohol has more to do with his or her self-limiting beliefs that are acting upon them from below the surface of their conscious awareness and when they bring those beliefs into light, they can actively change them. Because when your beliefs change, your behavior changes and the result is that you have a different perspective and experience of life.
I also work with people individually for single, deep hypnotherapy sessions to personally support them in addressing and re-framing their self-limiting beliefs that are behind a particular behavior and also in longer treatment sessions (2 months +) to help heal a longstanding, dysfunctional relationship with alcohol and create a new identity that doesn't revolve around drinking.
Can you share any success stories or positive feedback you've received from your clients?
What I hear back from my clients is that they are happy that they went through a therapeutic process with me. Now they have some ritualized and regular days of not drinking throughout the week and are able to minimize their drinking socially or on weekends. They report that they feel less anxious overall and feel less controlled by alcohol. A lot of their success has to do with learning how to perceive themselves differently, that they are no longer a person who needs to escape life, that they can manage their stress and responsibilities with healthier habits, and that their past does not have to determine who they get to be now and into the future.
People have also expressed surprise in my programs in learning that their drinking was not what they thought it was about, that the real reason that they were drinking so much is because they thought that they had to hide or to self-soothe. But those inclinations belong to a younger version of themselves. We work on healing and embracing those aspects of their identity and when that happens, they can much more readily let go of certain drinking behaviors that are attached to those parts.
I love seeing a client come through to the other side of something that they have been carrying for a long time and feeling that they get some relief from detaching and revising old stories. This happens often and it is a beautiful thing to witness.
What future plans or upcoming projects do you have for Blessed Vida that you're excited about?
Well, I am glad you asked. In addition to my online therapeutic services, my plans for the coming year are to open a brick-and-mortar – a medicinal drinks and movement cafe. What that will look like is a place for people to gather and dance, sing, hear music, do yoga, etc. in a studio/ cafe space that also stays open late and serves kombucha, tonics, mocktails, fresh juice elixirs, and the like. It is like a Dry Bar but I am not exactly inclined to call it that. It is a space for community, health, and socializing – a hybrid of a studio and a cafe.
I also think a lot about learning more and becoming certified in ancestral healing and organizing larger retreats or rituals where people can come and work communally to heal ancestral trauma and wounds.
Tell us about your greatest career success so far.
For me, success is determined by how well I serve my clients and the clarity of my intentions. I want to live in a world where the attention and focus that we collectively put on alcohol is funneled into more beneficial purposes. Things like, expressing one's talent, being more available for others, being of service, having big dreams and plans and then having the energy to see them through and bring them to life. One of the biggest downsides to drinking all the time is how much time and effort goes into drinking, being drunk, and having to wait it out to feel better and regain homeostasis. That is not even to mention all of the collateral damage that happens along with it.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
Honestly, I get very agitated about all of the marketing and messaging by coaches for coaches about how to make more money doing less. It taints the integrity of the coaching industry. I would love to see just as much effort put into ''How to more effectively serve your clients." A big draw for people to become coaches is how much money you can make but that makes the industry feel so transactional.
Coaching should always be about how to best serve clients in helping them create their desired reality while staying in alignment with one's own scope of practice and learned skill set. Money is the result of that, not the goal.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
My entire business pivoted when I awakened to the reality that I was someone who was living with an Alcohol Use Disorder and did not even know it. I was able to change my habits and as a result, my entire life, by using hypnosis and energy healing, meditation, and Neuro-linguistic Programming techniques. It has been a remarkable shift that I am so grateful for. Learning to separate myself from the alcohol matrix has made me feel like I need to help other people who want the same.
It gives me a sense of purpose and I love working with clients to heal from alcohol obsession because I know so intimately what it feels like to be controlled by a substance even though my personal situation was not that severe if you were on the outside looking in. It is kind of like I have said in much of my content, People who have never been addicted to alcohol will not understand, and people who are addicted to alcohol might not even know it.
When you can accept the truth of something, that is when you can change it. That is what happened to me.
If you are interested in lessening the role of alcohol in your life, please grab a free copy of The Mindful Drinking starter guide right here.
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