The Cognitive Hypnotherapy Review

When Rebecca and I set up the Quest Institute we believed that there was a niche for people from mainstream backgrounds who were interested in learning more about hypnotherapy, but were put off by the poor training standards, plethora of accrediting bodies, and the old fashioned 'swing a watch' idea of hypnosis. We felt there were enough people who believed that building the skill it takes to help someone change takes effort and time. The people we attracted, and the clients they attracted, proved us right

This blog represents another such leap of belief. We believe there’s a great interest among many therapists to move therapy forward; to translate what science is showing us about the brain into more effective ways of working with our clients and to make us all more effective human beings.

My goal is to make the practice of therapy more about the science of self-improvement. I believe there are many who share that goal, and not just those in the therapy professions. In this blog I’ll be sharing with you what I learn along the way, and hoping that you join me in the journey.

My intention is never to represent anything as being true, my yardstick is only that it's useful. Cognitive Hypnotherapy itself is not intended to be seen as 'the way to do things', merely as a flexible model that provides a way of thinking about how to do therapy, and within which you can fit anything that works from any other approach. Feel free to join in its evolution.

Adapted from an excerpt of Wordweaving volume 2: The Question is the Answer by Trevor Silvester.

Please note, I've made this post sticky so it always stays at the top of the blog, as it's one of the first questions that readers want answered. The most recent blogs will appear beneath.

When we're approached by someone interested in hypnotherapy training this is the question that we have to answer most often. And it's not surprising; the term clinical hypnotherapy is used by many hypnotherapy courses which teach very different syllabuses, and which operate from many different organising beliefs. We wanted people to be able to recognise what they're getting from our hypnotherapy course that they couldn't get from someone else's, and so we called our approach Cognitive Hypnotherapy, because it borrows many of its principles from Cognitive theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and uses a very different idea about the nature of hypnosis and trance than the traditional approaches that commonly fall within the labels of clinical hypnotherapy or clinical hypnosis. But, because Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a synthesis of many ideas, describing that difference isn't easy with just a brief phase.

I could say "Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a brief approach which uses a modern understanding of trance to enable the client to let go of what restricts them, and create what would empower them." But that doesn't help that much, it needs more detail. So if you're really interested in knowing what it is that makes this approach so different, read on...

Strange fact number 1: Scientists trained flat worms to curl up when exposed to light by electrocuting them every time the light was turned on. A pure Pavlovian, conditioned response. Even more unfortunate for the flat worms is their ability to regenerate themselves if cut in half . An amazing thing in itself; cut them in half and the head end grows a new tail and the tail end grows a new head. When the scientists did just that they found something bizarre; when exposed to light both versions of the worm responded according to the conditioning. How can this be? Common sense and contempory neuroscience both agree that memory is contained in the brain, so how can a newly grown brain come complete with memories?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an umbrella term that covers a number of different therapies that share common elements, such as Cognitive Therapy, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and Motivational Enhancement Therapy. Cognitive Hypnotherapy is another approach that fits under this umbrella, which is pleasing having heard the news that the Government is going to spend £170 million on making this approach more available to the public. At the same time our approach has several things that differentiate it from most other forms of CBT, which we think offer useful alternatives. Let’s begin with the similarities:

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy it’s taken as read that the way we imagine our future will influence the future we get.

When we visualise, the same parts of the visual cortex become active as when we’re processing something we’re seeing in front of us. Our eyes and our mind’s eye share the same equipment. One of the consequences of this is that the brain often can’t tell the difference between what we’re experiencing and what we’re imagining. This is why we can awake sweating and breathing heavily from a nightmare – the brain has kicked the body into its fight-or-flight response because you were being chased by the Easter Bunny (sorry, is that just me?).

The same applies when we imagine our future. We’re coming to appreciate more and more how important the brain’s ability to construct anticipated futures is. Every situation that arises for us causes the brain to work out probable outcomes based on our past experiences.

There was an interesting development to a previous blog entry about what I’m listening for when I’m working with a client. It came from a response to it on our members’ forum from Peter Salisbury, who said that when Richard Bandler (the co-founder of NLP) works with a client who has a problem, he has one phrase in his head, which is "How are they doing it"? On the face of it this doesn’t sound so different to what I said is in my head when I begin, “What’s this about?” But I found myself thinking a lot about this subtle difference because I realised how such a short phrase that had flowed so casually from my fingers while typing was actually saying something fundamental about the assumptions that underlie my approach, and, without wishing to speak for Dr Bandler, does the same for him.

For many years I’ve worked on the principle that something doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible – something I think I got from some research from Xerox into how we go about making buying decisions. I’ve found this to be very useful in therapy; the world we live in, and the life we live, is all based on our perceptions. Successful therapy doesn’t depend on us finding the truth about a person’s problem (if there is such a thing), just finding a plausible explanation that satisfies that person will enable them to make a positive change. I've been reading a lot about the psychology of decision making – how we make choices - because it strikes me that if we can understand how the brain becomes convinced of something, and work within that channel, then our interventions will become more potent. In my reading I’ve found that neuroscience has determined that the importance of logic tends to be overstated – we’re not logical creatures after all, we make a lot of our decisions intuitively. What researchers such as Gerd Gigerenzer are elucidating are the rules the unconscious uses to arrive at intuitions that can often out-perform careful cogitation – something that Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly explores in his book, Blink.

These rules and how we can use them in therapy are going to be the subject of a later blog; what I’m planning to describe today seem to me to be strongly related and were first identified half a century ago.

I’ve found that one of the hardest things people find when they begin working as a therapist is how to sort the information they gain from the client. In fact, even before then, how to hear what the client is telling them in a way that leads somewhere useful. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed, or to only hear what you expect to hear. In this blog I thought I'd go through what I keep in my mind as I'm helping a client unravel their problem.

Everyone knows of Bruce Lee as a kickass martial artist. As a child I was mesmerised by his skill and dreamed of running away to the Shaolin Temple that Kwai Chang Caine waited outside in the TV series Kung Fu. Sadly my Mum wouldn’t give me the bus fare.

Despite that inauspicious start I still have a deep admiration for Lee’s dedication to his craft – and increasingly to the side of him that many know nothing of; his Philosophy. Bruce Lee thought extensively about the deeper aspects of his craft and, as a therapist, I see deep similarities between some of his key principles and those of Cognitive Hypnotherapy. Try these as examples:

Miss X arrives in my office complaining that she never meets nice men. Investigation uncovers her fear of being hurt. How is it that with this fear she keeps ending up in abusive relationships?

Mr Y finds himself increasingly isolated socially because he smokes, yet we establish that his unconscious motivation to smoke began when he was 14 and wanted to belong to the ‘in crowd’. Why does the unconscious cause a behaviour that brings the opposite of its intention?

I have found this paradoxical pattern in many of my clients. Research has suggested that 90% of our daily behaviour is produced unconsciously. If that is the case why would the unconscious produce behaviour which ends up with the opposite of what it desires, and keep on doing it?

On those occasions when I’ve been on the Motorway alternating between 60mph and zero for no apparent reason, I’ve often wished I could be in a helicopter watching the traffic acting like one of those slinky springs that used to make their own crazy way down our stairs when I was a child. I find it amazing that a dab on the brakes that drops my speed by 3 mph can set off a chain reaction that causes cars five miles behind me to come to a complete halt 2 minutes later. This is called the Butterfly Effect, named by a brilliant meteorologist called Edward Lorenz.

Most of us have a sense of our own history, our successes, our failures, our ups and downs. Our memories form an intrinsic part of our self-identity; that elusive entity that helps to give us a feeling of coherence as we navigate through time. But how reliable is this sense of our past? Is who we think we are based on a system of memory that is more fluid and unstable than we are comfortable admitting?

Every now and again I come across a book that stops me in my tracks. Trances People Live was one, The User Illusion was another. A few months ago I was given a book by a graduate of ours as a present, which is the best thing people can ever get me (the name of a good book is the second). It’s called the Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, and, to be honest, as I read the blurb on the back it didn’t inspire me much, but I trusted Katy and so took it with me to a meeting I had, knowing that I’d have an hour to kill in the pub beforehand. The hour flew. In the end I was pulled out of the book by the arrival of a friend and it almost felt that I needed to be, so excited had I become by what I was reading.

I’m on a journey to find out why hypnotic suggestion works. So far the journey has taken about 12 years, and from it I’ve developed Wordweaving, but it’s only the story so far. What Lipton suggests in the first third of his book is a model that, when added to Wordeaving, connects suggestions from the words that are spoken, all the way down to their effect at a cellular level. Let me repeat that. At a cellular level. I’m talking about a model that describes hypnotherapy as a true means of mind/body communication. So I’m a little excited.

Please note, that, despite the best efforts of my mind to convince me otherwise, I recognise that nothing I say in this article is true. So if I slip up by inferring otherwise please forgive me, I’m doing my best not to be human.

As someone who isn’t a person with faith I often gaze with perplexity and astonishment at people who are. It must be a wonderful thing to be able to surrender to something greater than yourself, and to believe in the presence of that being without the need for any evidence. You’ll probably be aware of the battle currently being waged in the US, and more quietly but still strongly in the UK, between science and the theory of intelligent design - the concept that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. "I’m not about to dive into that argument, but reading about it recently made me realise that what may lie at the root of the differences between those people for whom faith is valid and those for whom it isn’t, also has a vital impact on the way we conduct therapy.

The dictionary describes a network as “a system of interlinking operations“. By that definition we are surrounded by them. Social networks, business networks, even the ecosystem which keeps us alive are examples. In fact, we ourselves can be described as a network, we are probably the most complex organic network we currently know of. Recent research by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi into the mathematical properties of networks has uncovered a universal law which could be of great significance to the field of therapy.

Read the full article here:
RegressionandBarabasi.pdf