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...