Cognitive Hypnotherapy
What is Cognitive Hypnotherapy?
It is a modern approach to a powerful means of helping people.
It takes recent understandings of how the brain works, ideas from a form of communication psychology called Neuro-linguistic Programming, and a modern view of our natural trance state and weaves them in to an approach that can achieve amazing results in a short space of time.
What is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is a natural phenomenon – a trance state that occurs in a cyclical rhythm throughout the day. Ernest Rossi, an American psychologist studying the minds activities, found that if there is no pressure to do anything during the day, we remain in a conscious state for 90 minutes, and then move into a trance state for 20 minutes in a repetitive pattern. He called this process “ultradian rhythm” and found it applied to everyone who was pressure free and allowed to do what they want. He also found that it applied to animals. His theory is that we are pressurised by modern life to stay in the conscious state and to miss out on the benefits and healing power of the trance state.
When we access our unconscious mind, we also access our imagination – that part of the brain that is like day dreaming, that is creative and “free”. As children we use both parts of our mind, in a naturally balanced way (you may remember day dreaming a lot when you were a child! Or having a vivid imagination) but modern living prizes the conscious, or analytical brain, and thus children have been encouraged to focus on academic subjects more than the arts, and day dreaming is certainly not championed! Our analytical minds are developed at the expense of our creativity and intuition, thus one becomes dominant, the other weak or ineffective. This imbalance can be rectified in the same way as in the physical body – exercise or engage the weak part in activity to increase its strength, whilst helping the strong part to “let go”, and allow the other to work.
The value of the unconscious mind.
Our brains act as reducing valves or filtering systems of the outside world. Unconsciously we can process somewhere in the region of 2,000,000 bits of information from our senses per second, whilst research by George A Miller demonstrated that consciously we can be aware of only 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information (i.e. any number between 5 and 9)at any one moment. Those people who involve themselves in the physical arts, such as martial arts, dance or sport may have experienced the state of “flow” or trance that they can experience, when no longer thinking about what they are doing, but just doing. It is a magical experience. If any of you have seen people free basing (at the beginning of the film Casino Royale when Daniel Craig gives chase across a building site) you will be witnessing someone in flow, tapping into their unconscious minds so that their awareness is greater than 5-9 bits of information per second!
So how can knowing this help me?
Firstly to understand trance is natural. “Hypnosis” is not about swinging watches or showmen helping closet extroverts to cluck like chickens J Secondly to appreciate that the unconscious mind is a vast resource, that can be tapped in to, in order to find solutions to our problems, to broaden our horizons to find insights, changes in our perceptions and shed light in to those dark recesses that are causing us to feel disempowered or stressed.
Ok, so how does it work?
People ask for help for all sorts of things. Just like the inaccurate ideas about swinging watches, there is a false idea that hypnotherapy deals mainly with smokers or weight loss. This is not so. The issues that are presented are as rich and varied as the people themselves. There is another misconception, common to virtually everyone, which is that no one else suffers from this or is as bad as me! Again this is not so. The underlying themes for many people are a loss of confidence, stress and anxiety. However, how these things manifest themselves (as symptoms) is again unique to each individual, as we all lead different lives and have developed different coping strategies. So, for example if a smoker would like to stop smoking, the approach taken with Cognitive Hypnotherapy, is to see the problem in terms of an unwanted behavior that may have started as a coping mechanism, to fit in, to be seen as cool, etc. Whatever the cause, it may still be a current need or it may now be out of date. If it is still a coping mechanism, then it is necessary to find a useful and positive alternative for the person, rather than just taking their crutch away from them and leave them floundering (and liable to start smoking again). If it isn’t a coping mechanism, but just a habit, then it is likely that progress with this person will be quicker as we are simply looking at habit breaking.
What can I expect from a session?
People come to a session with their interpretation of what they think is the problem. Usually it is what we call the surface structure of the problem, i.e. the effects, as opposed to the cause.
If I take a case, and I’ll call her “Freda” for anonymity purposes. Freda came to me with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder); she couldn’t leave her house without checking she’d turned the gas off twenty or more times. People have all sorts of coping strategies, often which they’ll live with until it impacts on something or someone else. She’d lived with this for a couple of years, but it had got worse, i.e. she was checking the gas so many times that she was being late for work. So her presenting issue was her behavior, but what we needed to resolve in order to have not only long term success but personal growth and empowerment was an increased ability to deal with the cause. (Again, I’ll reiterate the importance of this method. There are ways of stopping a habit or behavior, but if the cause is not dealt with, it will find another outlet) This lady was intelligent, highly resourceful and functioned well in all other aspects of her life, so needed very little support to overcome this blip – the effect of which was enormous – as this kind of thing begins to eat away at our sense of self worth.
So, my approach is to listen to a client’s requirement from their session, this will incorporate what they believe their problem to be, and also, what their solution state looks like. What will life be like without the problem, and what’s stopping them from getting it? These insights often provide a greater degree of enlightenment than expected. Releasing these “a-ha” or light bulb moments for people provides a huge amount of relief, and can often be enough. However the approach taken by the Quest Institute provides its Cognitive Hypnotherapists with the ability to see problems in terms of structure, context and process and offers a broad and comprehensive means of tackling any or all parts of the problem with a number of techniques and interventions from visual mental rehearsal to pattern interrupts to reframing and many more. The effect of which is to guide the client to a greater sense of awareness and understanding of themselves and to utilize their strengths more effectively in both resolving their issue and manifesting their solution.
What do I treat?
Cognitive Hypnotherapy can help with a wide range of issues – from things you may expect, like smoking, weight loss and phobias, to things you may not, like performance issues, exam nerves, sleeplessness, digestive disorders and skin conditions. The flexibility of this approach means that most people with problems can be helped.
There are many people in this field that make all sorts of claims and guarantees. What I promise is to use the best techniques available to me, to help you make the changes you want, and treat you professionally, ethically and competently.
My areas of specific interest include:
Times of transition and stressful events – interviews, new job, redundancy, retirement, marriage, divorce, separation, loss of a loved one, menopause, parenthood, exams, performance nerves
Regularity of Treatment?
Everyone is different. An acute condition, i.e. one with a sudden onset due to an unexpected change in life (like moving house, separation, exam nerves) usually requires less support than a chronic condition – a habit or addiction that the client has had for many years. My experience is that generally the first category needs approximately 2-3 sessions. Whereas the latter, albeit they can usually experience excellent changes within 2-3 sessions, tend to require maintenance through an adjustment period, particularly where their environment is unsupportive of the changes they are making. Quite often there is an integration of Cognitive Hypnotherapy, Life Coaching and Stress Management in these situations, and support can be reduced to a monthly visit. On average between 6-10 sessions.
A personal treatment programme is discussed and tailored to their initial complaint, so that a client is aware of what may be involved and what to expect from the outset.
I find that many clients continue to come for “MOTs”, even after their symptoms are relieved, not only because they prefer never to feel the way they did again, but because they enjoy the benefits of taking greater control of their lives and the influence they can have on their future.
