What is Cognitive Hypnotherapy
Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a modern, effective approach to empowerment therapy, designed to help people to achieve their goals, unlock their healing powers and be in control of their own lives.
Let me explain a little about the three main principles that underpin this powerful and rewarding practice:
1st Principle: “Trance is an everyday occurrence”
Many people believe that hypnosis is a state that therapists ‘place’ their patients in. This is a myth. The hypnotised, or ‘trance’ state is, in fact, a state of consciousness that we all experience regularly, every day.
Have you ever found yourself drifting into a daydream during a dull meeting?
Do you ‘zone out’ while watching your favourite TV show?
Do you replay conversations in your head and become distracted by the memory of them?
2nd Principle: “All behaviour has a positive purpose”
Did you know that more than 90% of what you do is driven by unconscious thought? And because our unconscious mind always leads us away from pain and towards pleasure, in order to protect us, it stores only those information that it thinks are important and beneficial to us and our survival. I suppose this makes the mind is a survival calculator, designed to keep you safe and alive. That also means that our subconscious wants to protect us. Unfortunately it can make mistakes, especially when we are young because then it stores information rather child-like, irrationally or even incorrectly, and that can give us stress and a hard time. I.e. we can develop a phobia, disease caused by trauma and constant stress, our self compassion could be low or we feel stuck in life. All of these states are created by self-hypnosis, as we have hypnotised ourselves already to ie have that panic attack or the feeling to be stuck or to feel this constant stress that can cause disease.
Cognitive hypnotherapy can help to “de-hypnotise” you, so that you can control your emotions and achieve what you want to achieve, on your own terms. By guiding you through Cognitive Hypnotherapy, you will find yourself able to resist the trance state and remain ‘yourself’ in those situations, preventing the problems that can occur and enabling you to behave according to your own wishes.
3rd Principle: “Everyone is unique”
Many therapists like to label the problems and challenges that their patients face, and use that label to select a treatment. Cognitive hypnotherapists prefer to address the set of experiences that has led each individual patient to a particular issue. We do this by asking two key questions:
What’s that about?
How can I use it?
These questions allow us to tailor each session to the client’s particular way of thinking, and it enables us to customise treatment accordingly. We make use of techniques from a wide range of approaches, from CBT to Gestalt, NLP and positive Psychology. We then use Word-Weaving to complement the desired approach in order to ensure that you achieve your goals effectively and efficiently and to make it permanent.