Thursday intensive with Brent Maguire
(This is an all day intensive on Thursday May 14th, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM with a one hour break for lunch. Lunch is provided but not included in the intensive cost.)
Therapy* for Writers: Patterns, Avoidance, and the Power of Trance
Struggling to focus? Can’t finish that draft—or even start?
You’re not alone, and you’re definitely not broken. This immersive, science-informed workshop offers a writer-friendly approach to creative resistance, rooted in neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and therapeutic tools like self-
hypnosis.
Led by psychologist and author
Dr. Brent Maguire, you’ll explore how the writing mind gets stuck and how to gently, systematically get it moving again.
The Science Behind the Struggle
Your brain isn’t sabotaging you. It’s predicting your experience, based on past discomfort.
Procrastination, perfectionism, and creative avoidance often arise from recycled prediction loops, mental and physiological patterns that treat writing like a threat.
This workshop helps you interrupt those loops using network neuroscience (simply explained), and approaches gleaned from psychological science and practice.
What You’ll Learn and Practice
Through a mix of brief lectures, guided imagery, and practical exercises, you’ll explore how to recognize and reset the loops behind perfectionism and procrastination, use self-hypnosis to access flow states and emotional calm, understand how your default brain networks affect writing focus and fear, and create a personalized writing process that supports your nervous system.
*While this workshop draws from psychotherapy research and methods, no formal therapy will be delivered. Instead, it will provide a resource-rich, tool-focused experiential learning space for writers of all backgrounds.
Brent Maguire is a licensed psychologist and the author behind the Broken Minds thriller series—a sixbook saga that follows a clinical psychologist teaming with lawenforcement to untangle the most intricate crimes. He also writes non-fiction in psychology-themed works.
His professional work sits at the crossroads of psychology and storytelling. By exploring the mindbody connection through mindfulness, guided imagery, and hypnosis, Brent has witnessed firsthand how words can reshape perception, mood, and behavior.
For Brent, solid grammar and crisp style are the scaffolding of good writing, but the true engine lies in the habits that sustain it: motivation, procrastination management, and the ability to quiet negative selftalk and writing anxiety. He teaches writers how to weave evidencebased mindbody and
behavioral techniques into their daily routine, turning the creative process into a practice of selfmastery rather than a race to the finish line.