Advanced Hypnotherapy

What is Advanced Hypnotherapy and how does it work?

Modern Advanced Hypnotherapy is a pro-active process that can create positive change. It combines conversational style with a speedy form of psychotherapy. It is not passive, there is no spell and you keep control. It is a powerful and dynamic therapy because it allows you to actively ‘try on’ and ‘rehearse’ new beliefs and behaviours in a safe way, with heightened thought and feeling. In essence, you don’t just ‘talk it’, you ‘walk the talk too’. This convinces your subconscious that positive choices for change are for your benefit, so you are better conditioned to move forward successfully as you choose to embrace change.

Hypnosis is a process that combines relaxation with focussed attention. When you’re in hypnosis, your conscious mind is less active. This allows the subconscious to become more accessible. Your conscious mind is just quiet and resting, but still alert — I like to think of it as the guard in the sentry box at the palace. Very still, but very observant. You remain aware, just relaxed — so you know that you could just open your eyes and be your normal self instantly.

Classical Hypnotherapy mainly uses suggestion and guided imagery, whereas Advanced Hypnotherapy uses psychotherapeutic and conversational techniques in hypnosis. In this way, I act as a facilitator to guide you in your thoughts, to achieve a greater understanding of your issues and start to find new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

What is Psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is the treatment of emotional and behavioural issues by encouraging insight into problems in order to relieve symptoms and create a change in behaviour. Going through the therapy process changes people’s feelings about themselves and their situations, and they become happier, more self-confident, and more effective in their day-to-day living.

It is considered that there are three key approaches in human psychology:

• Behaviourist: Focuses on reinforcement of stimulus-response behaviour.
• Psychodynamic: Assumes subconscious irrational and instinctive forces that determine human thought and behaviour.
• Humanistic: Emphasises the study of the whole person not only from the viewpoint of an objective impartial observer, but seeks to empathetically understand what it’s like to be that person. It assumes a free will to make choices and to accept consequences for decisions made. The approach is optimistic and focuses on the human capacity to overcome adversity.

My methods are largely humanistic as I believe we all seek to better ourselves and our environment and, that we can all achieve personal growth and satisfaction in our lives as we learn to better understand and accept ourselves.

It is important to acknowledge however, the psychodynamic element in our subconscious needs and motivations; our use of defence and behaviours which may protect us, but which hold us back at the same time.

Using our self-awareness and free will, we can look more objectively within ourselves. This allows us to create the positive choices for change that we seek. In this way, we grow and move forward. We set ourselves free to become who we really want to be!

What is HypnoHealing?

An Advanced Hypnotherapy technique that reprograms the subconscious mind to alter the physical processes within the body.

Psycho-Neuro-Immunology (PNI) is a revolution that is to a great extent influencing the symptom-based culture of modern Western medicine. PNI is becoming increasingly endorsed by many forward thinking medical professionals, as research continues to show that illness is not just a physical process but a mental and emotional one also.

HypnoHealing embraces the idea that the mind and body can work together to re-create wellness and to direct healing to positively induce change in the body’s functioning. Science shows us that the body is continually renewing itself and that in fact, no cell in the body is older than 9 months…

To keep it simple, let’s take ‘a broken arm’ to illustrate this mind-body connection. You go to hospital. What does the doctor do? Does he mend it? No. He re-aligns it and sets it in plaster. The break is still there. It is the subconscious that finds the break as it incessantly checks through every cell, muscle and bone in the body. It recognises this break or ‘imbalance’ and switches on the program to heal the bone. The bone knits together and healing takes place. Once complete the subconscious switches off the program. Your mind successfully healed your body!

As we understand this, it is easier to see how through hypnosis the subconscious mind can be encouraged to concentrate extra healing effort on an affected area to recreate balance and improved health.

What is Hypno-CBT?

CBT is an evidence-based approach based on scientific principles that helps you to understand your problems and how these affect your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Therapy is based around the idea that our thoughts, physiology, and emotions are inextricably linked and that thinking, feeling and behaving are all inter-related. Therefore if any one of these factors changes, it will have an effect on the others. For example, if I think calm and relaxing thoughts (Cognition), my breathing and heart rate begin to slow (Physiology) and I feel more in control (Emotion) but if I begin to worry about something (Cognition), I become agitated (Behaviour) and I feel panicky (Emotion).

CBT is the most widely accepted mind therapy within the NHS albeit as a conscious talking therapy.

Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy or Hypno-CBT takes these ideas one step further. I work with you to identify your negative thoughts, feelings and actions using a combination of conscious and unconscious strategies. Then, by looking at the upside of these ideas in a positive framework and actively rehearsing self generated positive thoughts and beliefs at a deep level whilst in hypnosis, it becomes easier for you to accept and retain these positive beliefs.

Whilst in hypnosis, responses are monitored by you so that you can evaluate for yourself the positive impact of a change in your thoughts and beliefs.

In this way, you feel more encouraged and empowered to adopt and implement these positive changes into your real life situations.

What is NLP?

It is the science of how the brain codes learning and experience. This coding affects all communication and behaviour and how we learn and interpret the world around us.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, came about as a result of two Americans, Grinder and Bandler, who researched why some people were just competent in a given expertise whilst others excelled. Techniques in modelling excellence have helped many thousands of people in business, health, sport and personal development since the 1970s.

The ‘Neuro’ part of NLP acknowledges the fundamental idea that all behaviour stems from our neurological processes of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and feeling. We experience the world through our five senses, making sense of the information and then acting on it.

The ‘Linguistic’ part is indicative of how we use language and other non-verbal communication as a means to order our thoughts and behaviour and to communicate with others.

The ‘Programming’ refers to how we choose to organise our ideas, our sequences of repetitive behaviour and actions, to produce results.

Therefore, NLP helps us to understand the relationship between how we think (Neuro), how we communicate (Linguistic) and our patterns of behaviour (Programming).

NLP is an effective proven vehicle for accelerated human change, radically altering the ‘old way’ of lengthy psychotherapy. NLP works very much with a future focus, and what can be done right now to help us to be more successful by drawing on our own resources. We all have all we need — sometimes we just don’t know it yet.

NLP models how individuals structure their own unique experiences in life, often implementing models of excellence. This helps us to understand more clearly ‘where we’re at’ and ‘where we want to be’ and ‘what we need to do in order to bridge that gap’. These processes help you to set compelling goals, build motivation and change your life for the better.