I just wanted to share with you a little of how it is for me – this Making thing.

So, yesterday, I wrote that making something doesn’t mean that you have to get out all your paints and a great big canvas or craft A Great Poem.

When I get into that, I’m already outside the flow, outside the making, doing the ‘ummm,’ and ‘errr’ and ‘Is this Good Enough?’ that makes my chest tight and my stomach and shoulders tense – a place where nothing new can easily happen.

But here is a quick scribble I drew whilst sitting waiting for someone yesterday. And a few more doodles that I did in my notebook, just towards the end of the day.

A few moments, that’s all it was. My hand moving across the soft white page. I noticed the thoughts, ‘This is infantile, this is silly, I really should practise my drawing skills…’ and then I let them go.

The page, the pen, making marks, noticing with curiosity what wants to emerge.

A few moments. I felt calm and quiet – a little fizz of excitement somewhere in the bottom of my stomach beginning now too.

Something had happened.

Each day on my blog this week, I’m hosting a Carnival of Making. I’m sharing with you something that I’ve made and hearing about what you make too. I’m interested in what happens when we simply allow ourselves to make something – wothout it having to be Perfect or A Work Of Art. I’m interested in the process of Making something, finding our flow, Making as, well, simply being. Please join me and tell me about what you’re making. I’d love to hear from you.

No Comments »

There’s nothing quite like plunging your hands into a big gooey mess of dough and moving them around a bit.

Rye sourdough bread. Very messy fun.

I made a batch last night and, whilst I was bringing it together and getting flour all over the floor, it got me thinking and making connections in the way that making things always does.

I started to think just how good it is to make something new, to experiment with paint, with dough, with words and that it’s so helpful for me to remember to do it more.

It’s so easy for things to get narrowed down to what you see right in front of you. When you remember to shift into doing something different, there are amazing insights to be had. I often feel my entire body change, let go a little, making room for the ideas to flow in.

We do sometimes need a bit of a nudge to do something new though, don’t we? And so I was wondering…

What if we were to have a great big, juicy  Creative Love-In, right here on this blog?

What if we were to make some new things – experimenting, rolling up our sleeves, making a mess, making (erm, are we allowed?) mistakes, getting dirty, playing around?

It wouldn’t need to be a big extravagant canvas or a finished poem – although that would be fantastic. It could be something very small  – a pen-sketch, a scribble, a very delectable and innovative sandwich – and still be so important.

And just look at what Adele in Finland is making over here.

What if I were to keep telling you about what I make and you could tell me all about what you make, right here in the Comments? And we could keep it going for the next week or so…

Are you in?

No Comments »

This week I cleared out a tiny studio space at the top of our house. It’s the eyrie where I perched to write the last pages of my PhD, the summer that we had just moved into this house. I remember feeling hot and bothered up there and wishing I could be downstairs in the rest of my life again. Perhaps because of that, the space soon got overlooked in favour of the much bigger downstairs room where I work with clients or the kitchen table where I like to sit in the mornings. The poor, old abandoned roof space had become a bit of a dusty dumping-ground.

But last week I cleared it out. I was craving a new space – a light, airy private space that has something to do with making things in secret. And I realised that I already had just that space. Time to reclaim it.

On Saturday, I went up there and unwrapped a new canvas and some acrylics. I had decided that I would make a painting to go in a space above our bed and I felt full of zizz  and spark at the idea of getting the paint on the canvas – and my fingers.

Now, can I just add that I have never really painted before. I have no idea about technique. I just knew that I wanted to do it. And what did I discover? That painting is just like writing.

Yes, the small square of blue sky framed in the window above my head. Yes, the white clouds passing, the sound of birds, the sunlight on the table. Yes, the thrill of mixing a colour and experimenting with different sized brushes.

There was a moment when it was just right – the bluey-green seemed just the right shade of bluey-green, a little hazy, letting the paint underneath show through. Everything was flowing – my hand, the sun on my shoulders, the smell and feel of the paint.

And then I thought something like, ‘Now, I just need to get more texture here and add in something with a finer brush here… and what is it that I’m making, anyway? Does it need more of this here? Does that look a bit clumsy?’

Gone! My painting suddenly more thought than felt. Over-thunk. Bang. Gone. In one teeny moment!!!

And I thought, this is just like making a poem. The minute I catch myself saying, ‘Oooo, I’m writing a poem about X, Y, Z ,’ I might as well get up from my desk. Because I’ve already left the process. I’m sitting outside of it going ‘Oooo’ and ‘Errrr’ and ‘Not good enough’ and ‘That would be better.’

I looked at my painting – you know, the one that was supposed to go in that space waiting in our bedroom, well, that is if I’d actually been capable of doing it right - and I heard myself starting in on more of this, just for a second, ‘See, not as good as you thought you would be, are you? What did you even try for? Why didn’t you just stick to writing?’

And then I realised. And I laughed. I had a good old chuckle at myself.

I think I’ll be painting over the canvas and beginning again – some parts, anyway. But at least I know that I can.

And I had so much fun painting.

Even now, I’m looking at my painting and thinking, I’m going to be kind to myself about it and curious about what will happen next. And I feel a big surge of joy for this new process I’ve discovered.

It seems that painting, like making poems, is all about the process. Surrendering to it. Rolling around in it. Loving it. Laughing about it. Knowing you can start all over again and make something even better. Remembering to trust that there’s so much more where that came from.

Funny, that. Who would ever have thought it?

Tags: creativity, painting, process
2 Comments »

I come across this particular myth all the time. We could call it a myth. Or we could call it a limiting belief.

It’s found all over the place in personal development speak. I think I probably have it sprinkled liberally all over my own web site.

And, in some senses, this statement is true: You already have all the resources you need to achieve whatever you want to achieve.

You know how it goes: If you think you can’t, then you’re right – you can’t. If you think you can, then you can. That’s the powerfully hypnotic effect of our ’self-talk,’ those scripts we’re constantly running somewhere inside our minds. By taking the conscious decision to choose to believe that we can do something, we can actually start to make it happen.

My job is to help people to recognise, uncover, rediscover, nurture and love into being their special abilities and inner resources for positive change.

On the other hand, that pesky statment can also act as a limiting belief: I already have all the resources I need to achieve whatever I want to achieve. (So I don’t have to do anything. I’ll just lie back and close my eyes and the therapist will do it all for me.)

This is where the ‘magic wand’ perception of hypnotherapy can be so unhelpful.

Because we have to actively grow and cultivate a mindset, an attitude, behaviors and habits that create our sense of well-being. We have to work at them every day. It requires commitment and effort.

Get to know your resources, even the nascent ones, the hidden or not-quite-ready-yet ones. Recognise the difference between the knowledge and skills that you might not have yet and the stuff you already know how to do. Fill in the gaps. With love and patience and curiosity towards yourself.

You have the capacity to learn and grow everything that you need to learn and grow. And you will need to actively cultivate it.

That’s the bit that sometimes gets missed out in the more Pollyanna, happy-clappy interpretations.

You already know what to do. The thing is, do you really want to?

Tags: hypnotherapy myths, limiting beliefs, positive psychology
No Comments »

And, yes, I really did just say that.

Because over the past few months now, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it is that I do as someone working in the field of well-being or personal and professional development or whatever term you prefer for it. OK, I am constantly giving it thought but lately I’ve been giving it extra turbo-charged thought and asking myself, rather frequently, whether all my stories about being a therapist sit easily with me.

Is being a therapist really congruent with who I feel I am? Are the particular stories I’m telling myself about what a therapist does and how I think a therapist might be perceived by others really helpful to me? (You know, at parties, when people ask me what I do, I have two things I can say: “I’m a therapist’ or ‘I’m a therapist and a poet.’ Yes. Exactly.)

But seriously. Passing on advice that might be helpful to people in living their lives is not exactly a new phenomenon. We’ve been doing it since ’society’ as such began. It used to take place in a tent or a hut or a cave or around a camp fire. Women or men passing on their knowledge and experience to one another, sharing stories, offering advice about everything in the human experience from how to bake the best bread or make the best tools to how best to deal with particular emotions – grief, loss, anger, love -  or care for a sick family member or deliver a baby.

Now we have the internet. And self-help books. If we’re lucky, we also have access to good medical and health care professionals and a supportive network of friends and family to help us to process our experiences as we move through life in progressive ways.

We might even enlist the support of a therapist or a coach. Because sometimes we don’t have that support network or it fails us in some way – by judging us or some bit of our experience or by just not being there for us in a way that is helpful.

And if, like me, you find yourself in this simultaneously completely natural (see ancient tribal systems, support networks, your granny) and also rather odd (see the Popular Psychology  section of any major book store) role of offering support to people, people who are challenged by something in their lives, whether that is fear or sickness or anxiety or the temporary  break-down of their ability to make meaning out of their life, that is one weird thing.

If you then blog or write about it too, perhaps you do open yourself up to the possible accusation that you might be telling people what to do, raising yourself above others in some way or claiming to have all the answers.

At this point, I am chuckling into my keyboard. Because, oh my goodness, the extent to which I just don’t have all the answers (whatever having all the answers might mean).

There are people who do appear to set themselves up as gurus, who appear to cultivate (consciously or subconsciously) a sense of status around who they are and what they do in the field of personal development. It may be fair to say that some people are attracted to this field for reasons other than trying to be of benefit to others.

But I don’t want this post to become all about How I Am Not One of Those People.

I want to share with you the script in my head that goes something like this: ‘I have discovered a few things, a few tools and approaches that are really helpful to me in my life and for my clients and I read all kinds of research that seems to hold some promise for what we are discovering all the time about how to develop the skills of happiness and resilience, but if I blog about them or write about them, people are going to think I am a Great Big Know-All. They might even attack me because they might think that I think that I am somehow better than them. Which I am not. They might think that I am claiming to have all the answers. Which I clearly don’t have. So I’d better just shut up and not try to share this stuff. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t be a therapist. Because who do I think I am?

Do you know that script? Or maybe you have something similar that applies to your stuff? You know, something like ‘I won’t send this poem out because then people might think that I think that I’m a really good poet, when actually I don’t think I am. And how embarrassing if it really is a bad poem and then they’ll think I’m stupid.’

I catch myself having these sorts of conversations with myself from time to time. Better shut up. Better not say anything that might make people think you are somehow better than them. Who do you think you are? It happens a lot less than it used to – and it’s usually a sign that I’m tired and need to rest.

And then a couple of days ago, Paul sent me (thanks, Paul) an excerpt from an interview in The Telegraph with the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The Telegraph calls him ‘the world’s hippest philosopher,’ which is another example of how the media loves to create a persona for someone.

The article is about Zizek’s new book and the excerpt Paul sent me reads like this:

‘When I ask Zˇizˇek if there are any pointers I’ve missed, he explodes one final time: “I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep s— you are in!” ‘

Hmm, I thought, as I read that. Tell that to the people with clinical depression who want to work with a therapist because they feel they have nowhere else to turn. Tell that to the young 19-year-old boy who can’t even leave his house or create friendships or do meaningful work because he is so incredibly anxious. Tell that to the client who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. What if we just said to these people ‘Go away. We’re all in deep s— anyway.’

Would that be helpful?

The interesting thing about Zizek’s argument is that he seems to be on the side of impossible dreams. Earlier in the interview, he argues against what he calls ‘the standard liberal-conservative argument against communism’ which says that ’since it wants to impose on reality an impossible dream, it necessarily ends in terror.’

Zizek argues that we should be able to build something new, maybe a new kind of communism. He asks: ‘What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we none the less change the coordinates of what appears as ‘possible’ and give birth to something genuinely new.”

Well, yes. Exactly. Reach for the moon. Travel joyfully. It’s not about arriving but about the journey, the process. These are central tenets of most personal development systems and approaches.

It seems that Zizek isn’t personally in deep s— after all. He has hope, he has ideas. He has a sense of purpose and passion. He sees that the impossible really can become possible.

I hope people realise that I don’t presume to tell anyone how to live or make themselves happy. But I do passionately believe in the value of the camp fire (virtual or otherwise), in story-telling and sharing. I believe that people have a right to as much information and discussion as possible about what might be helpful and what seems to work for others.

It’s easy to scoff, to say ‘why bother?’ or to talk about the ‘luxury’ of so-called developed world psychological problems. You might as well say to someone ‘Pull yourself together.’

In the end, we do need more and better ways to help people to feel good and live ordinarily every-day wonderful, even ‘impossible’ lives.

Zizek has reminded me why I continue to write about them.

No Comments »

‘Hang on a minute!’ I hear you cry. ‘But you have been lecturing us for the last three years about how important it is to recognise that hypnosis is not the same as being asleep…”

Exactly. Which is why a new study led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, and reported here in the wonderful Mindhacks blog, is so interesting.

The new study investigates the early phases of sleep, the transitions between wakefulness and sleep often referred to as the hypnagogic state.

The way that our mind works in this phase is, as yet, poorly understood – just as the phenomena of hypnosis are poorly understood from anything other than a phenomenological level. As yet, neuroscience can’t explain hypnosis, just as it can’t yet fully explain the complex mechanisms of sleep and dreaming.

This new study took a very small sample size – 20 people – and asked them to take an afternoon nap in the lab whilst wired up to an EEG monitor measuring electrical activity in the brain, eye movement,  heart rate and muscular movements. It combined this data with accounts from the participants themselves about their experiences. Here is how Mindhacks reports the study:

‘As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ’stage 1′ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ’stage 2′ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ’stage 2′ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.’

The study found that the experience of having control over their own thoughts, and how coherent and logical these thoughts appeared to be, began to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes. As time went on, the thoughts appeared increasingly unusual and autonomous.

However, as soon as ’stage 2′ sleep began, participants seemed to experience a marked change into a state of mind where thoughts became much more freewheeling and seemingly illogical, almost as if they took on a life of their own.

Participants’ awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ’stage 2′ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

It seems that, when woken, people largely reported the experience that ‘I was asleep’ when they felt that they no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts and not when their awareness of their surroundings was reduced.

This is very interesting on a number of levels for a hypnotherapist. Firstly, as hypnotherapists, we will have experienced our clients returning to full conscious awareness of the room, reporting things like: ‘That was weird. I know I wasn’t asleep. I could hear everything you were saying but it was as if my thoughts kept drifting around.’ Or ‘I was aware of everything and I could hear your voice but I can’t quite remember now what you were saying. I went to all kinds of places.’

If I were to guess, I would say that the ’stage 1′ phase of hypnagogia certainly seems quite similar to that of hypnosis – with the marked difference that the hypnotherapist is using language and suggestion that is designed to enable the client to  experience a more focused quality of awareness, with their thoughts directed towards particular imagery, ideas, feelings and sounds.

Another way of interpreting the test data might be that thoughts become less consciously directed as participants drift from ’stage 1′ to ’stage 2.’

I often feel that these fascinating studies are just barely touching the surface of some of the richest and most mysterious experiences of our inner life: thought, day-dreaming, fantasy, creative imagination, trance.

What I like about this small study is its methodology – correlating EEG data with interviews with the participants themselves. I think it’s only when we start to put the two kinds of research together  that we begin to get a picture of what happens when we turn our attention inside ourselves.

Tags: hypnagogia, hypnosis, hypnotherapy research, sleep research, trance
No Comments »

Today I’d like to talk about an application of hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis that, as a female hypnotherapist, I feel particularly passionate about: that is, the area of hypnosis for pregnancy and childbirth.

I’m passionate about it because it seems to me that so much can be done with some very basic information and resources that can make very positive changes in the experiences of so many women and babies. And it could result in huge costs savings to the NHS.

Athough there is a lot more information now available about using hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to prepare for the birth of your baby, many women still do not pursue this approach and one of the reasons that I think tends to put them off is the perception that hypnosis for childbirth is all a bit ‘hippy’ and ‘alternative’ – in other words, that there is enormous pressure on women choosing this approach to have a totally natural and drug-free delivery.

So I want to dispel this myth right here and now. Because any well-trained hypnotherapist will adhere to a strict code of ethics in working with women to help them to prepare for the birth of their baby in a way that supports the client’s choices, views and desires. This is all about using modern tools of hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis to enjoy the birth that you want to have.

The women I’ve worked with have used the hypnotherapy sessions and self-hypnosis audios that I give them to let go of fear, unwanted emotions, unhelpful stories and associations around birth and to access the powerful natural resources they possess to have a safe birth in a way that works for them.

The work we have done together has helped them to enjoy more control and calm over their birth experience and to make choices that feel right for them.

There is now a growing body of research to suggest that the use of simple self-hypnosis techniques can reduce length of labour and the need for medical intervention.

This is not really rocket science. It makes perfect sense that anything that helps to minimise the adrenaline response – therefore minimising muscular tension, production of other stress hormones and sensitivity to pain and discomfort – is going to be enormously helpful in childbirth. We are beginning to discover that consistent practice in self-hypnosis can enable people to minimise or interrupt the the ‘fight or flight’ or adrenaline response and increase production of ‘feel-good’ chemicals such as the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin.

Regular practice with self-hypnosis audios, use of simple ‘anchors’ to reinforce positive, progressive feeling states and develop calm and confidence and looking at the way that you talk to yourself inside your own mind are all part of this process.

Then there are other interesting applications of hypnotherapy – working in session with a trained and experienced practitioner – that can provide other sorts of powerful benefits. A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to be able to assist a first-time mother in helping her baby, who was breech position, to turn. We achieved this together through simple visualisation and breathing techniques in hypnosis – and this client felt justifiably proud that she had been able to achieve this. There is lots of anecdotal evidence of using hypnotherapy to help breech babies to turn – I’ve witnessed it quite a few times in my practice now – and I think we need more research into this fascinating application of hypnotherapy.

For me, the most important aspect of my work using hypnotherapy for childbirth  is that my client feels supported and able to make the choices she wants to make with informed advice from her other health care providers. For me, this isn’t an ‘alternative’ treatment but one that beautifully complements the work of doctors, consultants, nursing staff and midwives.

Whether you opt for a homebirth in a birthing pool or a birth in hospital – and whether these plans change over time – self-hypnosis and hypnotherapy help you to prepare and develop valuable tools that can help you at every stage.

In amongst all the many messages and pieces of advice that seem to be targeted at expectant mothers from every angle these days, hypnotherapy for childbirth is about finding and strengthening your way – by developing trust in what your body can do so wonderfully and finding what is most helpful for you personally.

Hypnotherapy for childbirth – not just for drum-banging advocates  of ‘natural childbirth’ but a powerful modern complement to the very best health care.

Tags: hypnosis for childbirth, hypnotherapy for childbirth
No Comments »

Today, I wanted to share with you a poem made by a participant in a writing workshop I ran the other day for a group of hypnotherapists.

This writing is a piece of free-writing, produced very quickly, without pausing to edit or cross-out or ‘think’ things through. Free-writing is about letting go of our expectations of ourselves, the ’shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ through which we think rather than feel our writing. It’s about letting go of or slipping past that internal critic that sits waiting to judge us before we’ve even opened our mouths or made our mark on the page.

I asked participants to use free-writing to write a ‘praise poem’ to their clients  – or perhaps to a particular client that came to mind, perhaps even a client who had been challenging to work with in some way.

What emerged for this participant is, we all thought, so beautiful and already so naturally formed and it really spoke to all of us, and so I asked her permission to share it with you here:

Praise poem to my clients

You who want something different, different from this, different from before;

you who have been carrying, hauling, dragging;

you whose hands spin dinner plates to a song heard once on the radio in that restaurant in Mykonos, so many years ago now but still as new; and you whose feet dance tango to a different tune;

you who shriek, who whisper; and you who don’t yet know the words.

Put down what you are carrying,

put down your plates, whole and broken, your whispers, whole and broken,

put down your feet, one in front of the other.

See that different is where you already are, when you tilt your head in that particular way,

when you look over my right shoulder and see the future.

I love this poem. It so perfectly sums up for me the spirit of what the hypnotherapist, Stephen Brooks, calls ‘working from the heart.’ I thank the person who allowed me to share this with you all. I’m deeply grateful that I get to work with such wonderful people.

No Comments »

Goodness me. It seems like a long time since I did one of these ‘myth-busting’ posts.

I have been so busy planning various new projects including new work with the University of York in Writing for Personal and Professional Development, my new Hypnotherapy Training Diploma in York in 2011 with Adam Eason and a new peer support group for all hypnotherapists in the Yorkshire area.

The new peer support group is this Wednesday 19 May at 7pm at the York Novotel. Please do get in touch if you’re a professional hypnotherapist in Yorkshire and would like to come along.

So myth-busting. Well, actually, it’s not exactly myth-busting today but more a discussion about a term. This term ‘hypnotherapy/ist.’ What do we mean by it?

For example, in my own mind these days, I tend to think of hypnotherapy as a form of solution-focused, brief psychotherapy that utilises hypnosis to help people to make positive and progressive changes in their lives. When I’m working with someone, I might use an entire range of approaches that a solution-focused brief therapist would use together with hypnotic language patterns and hypnotherapy ‘techniques.’

I might use tasking and journaling and draw upon ideas from the Human Givens approach or Stephen Gilligan’s Self-Relations model of psychotherapy. I will always, without exception, teach my clients self-hypnosis – because, really, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis (according to my own research and understanding, anyway) and I believe that self-hypnosis is a very powerful tool for increased calm, confidence and the ability to manipulate our own internal states in helpful ways.

However, one of the issues which I think we face in the field dof hypnotherapy today is the public understanding of the term ‘hypnotherapist.’ For example, some people might immediately think about past life regression – although I never use this in my work – or that a hypnotherapist will help them to ‘remember something they’ve forgotten.’ Or they say ‘Don’t look into my eyes…’ as if I have some kind of power over them…

These are all concepts that are surrounded with controversy, mystery and, yes, comedy in the public awareness and need careful consideration if you want to be an effective hypnotherapist.

For me, becoming an effective therapist of any kind is about developing a style of therapy – and my style happens to incorporate hypnosis, self-hypnosis and Ericksonian approaches, along with some CBT (which has a long history of association with hypnosis) and some more broadly brief therapy approaches.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘hypnotherapy’? We know that there is nothing intrinsically therapeutic about hypnosis as a state (or non-state, depending upon your point of view) in itself.

I don’t like calling myself a ‘hypnotist’ because for me that has connotations of stage hypnotism and the idea that there is a person doing the hypnotising to someone else – whereas my personal model of hypnotherapy is a kind of self-hypnosis that two people co-create. Something like that. I don’t think someone can go into/access the feeling of hypnosis unless they agree to and want to do so. (But there will be hypnotists out there who disagree with that statement.)

There are colleagues of mine who are equally happy with both the term ‘hypnotist’ and hypnotherapist.’ There are others who want to distance themselves from the least possible whiff of ‘New Age’ jargon. There are probably as many ways of doing therapy as there are clients out there looking for it.

But it seems to me that we do need some kind of framework – especially if we are going to continue developing standards of training and CPD and incorporate research – qualitative and quantitative – into the field of hypnotherapy.

So I am really interested to hear what you think? What does the term ‘hypnotherapy’ mean to you?

No Comments »

I was out and about in the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside yesterday and I bumped into a very nice person who has worked with me in the past.

I was browsing a bookshop in Helmsley at the time and she came up behind me and said, ‘Is that you, Sophie?’ Apparently, the fact that I was looking in the poetry section was the give-away. Ha.

Anyway, this very nice person had spotted that I have been talking in recent weeks about the new Hypnotherapy Training Diploma that I’ll be launching in 2011 here in York and which I’ll be co-training with the hypnotherapist and author, Adam Eason.

She wanted to know all about the Diploma and why I had decided to work with Adam in this way.

I thought this was a very good question. So here are the reasons why I’ve chosen to get involved in this fantastic Diploma course and co-train it with Adam.

Number One: Adam Eason is, in my opinion, among the foremost hypnotherapists working in the world today. Not only is he like a walking encyclopedia of hypnotherapy but he is also a very skilled communicator of this knowledge… and a darn fine therapist too. So I couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with him in this way an help to bring top-class training to the North of England.

Number Two: As you will probably know if you read this blog regularly, I’m passionate about working to improve the quality of information out there about hypnotherapy and therapy in general. I believe that, as a therapist, I have a responsibility to help improve understanding of best practice in my professional field, to disseminate the latest research and to help potential clients to make informed choices about whether my style of therapy is most likely to be helpful to them.

Part of that is also contributing to high-quality, evidence-based training in hypnotherapy. And that is exactly what this Intensive Diploma provides.

Quite frankly, it offers the kind of training that I wish I had been able to access at the very beginning of my career as a therapist. It’s taken Adam and I years to accumulate the knowledge and experience that we’ll be sharing with you – about precisely what does and doesn’t work – and also about how to have a successful practice that will enable you to keep working with people to make changes to their lives.

Number Three: It’s going to be lots of fun. These days, I am committed to only getting involved with projects that I know I will enjoy. And I know that I’m going to have so much fun spending focused time with a group of highly-motivated people in a lovely room by the river in my beautiful hometown of York, talking about and giving them hands-on experience of the work that I love.

Plus, I get to work with Adam, one of my favourite people (but don’t tell him I said that).

I’m not going to fib. It’s going to be hard work. We are going to challenge you and push you in all kinds of ways to develop all the skills you will need – but we’re going to have lots of fun in the process. I love running training. I always learn so much myself. And I get to meet some amazing and personally very inspiring people.

If you’d like to find out more about the Intensive Hypnotherapy Training Diploma in York in 2011, accredited with all the major hypnotherapy bodies in the UK, the States and Australiaclick over to Adam’s site here and all the information that he’s posted for you about the course content and what you can expect from working with us.

Because we want you to get a flavour of our approach as therapists, we’re offering some freebies, including one of Adam’s amazing self-hypnosis audios, just for requesting the prospectus. (In my opinion, Adam’s self-hypnosis audios are simply the best around – well, perhaps apart from mine, of course. Ha ha ha.)

So if high-quality, comprehensive hypnotherapy training in the North of England is what you’re looking for, this just might be the course for you. Did I mention that it also includes an NLP Practitioner certification too?

OK, I am heading off to put the finishing touches to my planning for an exciting new Writing for Personal and Professional Development workshop later this week at the University of York. It’s all go here. Have a great Monday.

No Comments »

The graduates of my annual Word Sauce Online Programme will be familiar with the name Marion Milner, a psychologist and psychoanalyst from the early part of the twentieth century.

In 1926, Milner decided to keep her own journal (a sort of close self-analysis) of the movements of her own mind, which she later published under the name of Joanna Field as a little-known but fascinating book, A Life of One’s Own (1934).

Milner’s motivation for keeping a journal was in order to understand more about the background feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction with herself that she had experienced for as long as she could remember. In particular, she wanted to understand why:

‘in certain moods the very simplest things, even the glint of electric light on the water in my bath, gave me the most intense delight, while in others I seemed to be blind, unresponding and shut off’ (p.68).

Using a method that would now be widely recognised by the field of positive psychology, Milner decided to track her moods and to identify what was helpful and unhelpful to her well-being. Her approach was not psychoanalytical but practical and behavioral, focused not on analysing the past but on noticing more consciously what is happening in the present.

In fact, her journal became an impressive piece of qualitative research as well as a practice of self-care. She kept it faithfully for seven years, at the end of which time she concluded that the single most important aspect of the way in which she experienced any one event or situation was the quality of attention that she brought to it.

She wrote: ‘I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of my awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw’ (p.15).

Although, initially, Milner was only able to access this more bodily awareness when she was ‘too tired to think’ and so able to ‘let go of the idea that one ought to have thoughts’ (pp75-76), she gradually developed the ability to induce this state by making what she describes as ‘an internal gesture of the mind’.

For example, when listening to an orchestra in concert, Milner noticed that ‘direct trying’ did not enable her to really listen or to still the chatter of her own thoughts; but by making an internal gesture by which she ‘seemed to put my awareness into the soles of my feet,’ or sent ‘something which was myself out into the hall’ she enabled intent listening to ‘just happen’ (pp.69-70).

Milner describes the series of small, barely perceptible movements through which she arrives at this wider more bodily awareness. Among them, she notes a pressing of her awareness ‘against the limits of my body until there was vitality in all my limbs and I felt smooth and rounded,’ and ‘the
spreading of some vital essence of myself…like the spreading of invisible sentient feelers’ (pp.73-74).

Over time, she realised that she could learn to control this ‘internal gesture’ so that she could move from a more narrow focus to a more bodily ‘wide attention’ at any time she chose.

I cannot think of a relevant piece of research for the practice of personal development today. Milner’s experiements in attention seem to me to be  fascinating descriptions of discovering the benefits of self-hypnosis and how these can be applied consistently over time.

In fact, if we look at the latest research in cognitive science, we might even suggest an underpinning for the kind of ‘internal gesture’ that Milner describes. There is growing evidence from developmental psychology that, as children, we possess interpersonal body schemas (an awareness based on self-other) and a rudimentary sense of proprioceptive self – from birth.

If this is the case, then Milner’s idea of ‘wide attention’ – based on a more bodily and felt self-experience (rather than our more habitual conceptual and thought experience) -  might be fundamental to the way that we experience and develop in the world.

It’s possible to see Erickson’s work as building upon this ‘indirect’ approach. By practising wider attention ourselves as hypnotherapists and by helping our clients to learn how to let go of more ‘direct trying’, we may be accessing something that is crucial to our sense of well-being.

Marion Milner – a woman ahead of her time and bold enough to depart from the ideas of her contemporaries to seek ways of undestanding how to acquire the attitudeand skill of happiness. Her writing is perhaps more relevant today than it ever was.

References:
Maron Milner [Joanna Field] (1934) A Life of One’s Own. London: Virago

Tags: haooiness, indirect hypnosis, Marion Milner, Milton Erickson, positive psychology, Word Sauce
No Comments »

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R D Laing

This, from one of the most influential psychotherapists of the 20th century, merits further reflection, I think.

When we slow down enough to notice, to become more consciously aware of, a feeling or a response and how we are doing that response, we can begin to let go of it or enhance it, do more or less of it, depending upon the effects that we now notice it has on our well-being.

So much of what I do as a hypnotherapist is about helping people to notice, right now, how they’re doing this thought, this feeling.

What is that film you’re running inside your mind, right now, and what effect is it having on the way you live your life?

Sometimes your body is desperately trying to tell you something. When you slow down enough to notice – not just with your head but with your body and your breathing – what is happening for you and how you’re doing that response, it is so much easier to begin to recognise what is helpful and what is unhelpful to you.

It can be interesting, surprising – and fun – to notice, with a kind curiosity towards yourself, what you’re doing in any one moment.

You may want to spend the next hour or so just experimenting with that and notice what you notice.

Tags: hypnotherapy, R D Laing, self-hypnosis
No Comments »

Just a quick blog post today to mention that I am organising a peer support group for professional hypnotherapists in York and across Yorkshire.

Our first meeting will be in central York on Wednesday 19 May, beginning at 7.30pm.

There will be an opportunity for us to learn new approaches to hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis through informal short presentations and workshops and to do some peer supervision together and discuss issues relating to our business and practice in a friendly and supportive environment.

The first meeting will be on Wednesday 19 May at 7.30pm.

I’ll get us started with a fun workshop on ‘That Self-Care Thing I’m Supposed To Do: New ways to nurture your well-being and creativity as a hypnotherapist.’

If you think this group sounds like something you would enjoy being a part of, or if you’d like to come along to the first meeting and decide if it’s for you, please do drop me an email or give me a call and I’ll confirm details and venue.

Have a fabulous day – the sun is shining here in York, the daffodils are nodding away…

No Comments »

I have spent the last few days researching venues for a very exciting new project that I’m involved in – a Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma that is coming to York in 2011.

Together with my colleague, the incredibly talented hypnotherapist and trainer,  Adam Eason, I’ll be offering an intensive 18-day training throughout February and July 2011 in my beautiful home town of York.

Adam and I are both very excited about working together to offer people this unique opportunity to gain all the skills and knowledge necessary to become fully qualified and accredited Clinical Hypnotherapists. It is going to be fabulous to work together in this way, combining our approaches to equip people with the latest evidence-based skills and practices in this field that we are both so passionate about.

You’ll train with us in February, go away and deveop your skills with our guidance and then return in July for further in-depth training.

More details to be released over the next couple of weeks. Watch this space – or in the meantime drop me a line if you want to be the first to find out more.

Tags: hypnotherapy, hypnotherapy training diploma
No Comments »

In recent weeks, I’ve been having a lot of fun working all over the country. I’ve just counted up that I’ve been on a total of nine rail journeys and four car trips in the past five weeks. I went down to Bournemouth to give a talk about my Hypnotic Journaling process to a peer support group run by my friend and colleague, the wonderful Adam Eason. I met lots of lovely Hampshire hypnotherapists there too. What a great bunch of people.

After a short deviation through Sussex, I read my poems and gave two workshops at the Writers Festival at Leeds Trinity University College for my good friend, the lovely Oz Hardwick. And then, most recently, I spent a week in the Suffolk countryside with some wonderfully talented poets, working on my own writing under the inspiring tutorship of Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom.

I’ve actually been back working in Yorkshire for a week now but I’m still processing and benefiting from my time away. I find it so helpful, sometimes, to move my physical space – have a change of scene, move out of the old cosily established ‘comfort zone.’ It seems to quite literally help my brain to make new connections.

Interestingly, in one of those serendipitous  patterns that so often happens in what I do, I’ve been working with a couple of clients recently who need to make more space in their lives for their own self-nurture.

And, of course, you don’t need to get on a train or drive half-way across the country to do this.  Journaling and free-writing or self-hypnosis are very effective ways to create a change of mental and physical scene. And, of course, if you are me, then you will probably combine the two in a Hypnotic Journaling process, where you use free-writing as a kind of self-hypnosis to get that old stuff that may have been bothering you out onto the page and make room for new possibilities to come in.

I think we often tend to think about taking a break or a holiday is some Big Event that we need to spend months planning for. In fact, over the years, I’ve worked with people who find themselves feeling stressed at the thought of going on holiday – it feels as if it’s just so much effort to organise and make happen!

But you can take a self-hypnosis mini-holiday whenever you choose. You may even form the very helpful habit of blocking off some time in your diary every week to do that – and then get out your notebook or plug yourself into a self-hypnosis audio programme or practise a self-hypnosis technique in order to give yourself a deep, refreshing mini-break.

So next time you catch yourself saying, ‘I really need a break…’ maybe it’s time to give yourself just that.  And you may only need to make twenty minutes to enjoy it. I think we can give oursleves a really hard time over taking time off – as if work hast to be really, really hard and we’re not allowed to enjoy and look after ourselves in the process.

I can tell you that my own different kinds of changes to my working environments and my writing retreats over the past few weeks have resulted in lots of new and exciting projects. I’m going to be running  a very exciting Hypnotherapy Diploma training with Adam Eason here in the beautiful city of York in 2011, for example. And I have some other training projects in the pipeline.

More on all this very soon. In the meantime, have a fabulous Tuesday.

No Comments »

Last night, I was listening to music whilst cooking Tom one of his favourite suppers. (For any foodies out there, it involves chestnuts and Savoy cabbage and it is really a lot more delicious than that actually sounds…)

As I blanched, chopped and stir-fried, I stuck my iPod in our speaker-gadget thingie (technical term) and whacked up the volume. It wasn’t long before I was dancing around the kitchen to tunes I hadn’t heard in a very long time: Morcheeba, Moloko, Goldfrapp and one of my all-time favourites, ‘Instant Pleasure,’ by Rufus Wainwright.

I had my music on the shuffle setting and tracks popped up that I hadn’t listened to in a couple of years. It was very interesting to me that, as each song came on, images from the past would pop into my mind.

Some of the songs were powerfully associated for me with the last long hot summer I spent living in London; others revivified for me the experience of driving around in Tom’s car through the Yorkshire countryside in the first months after we met.

It reminded me of just how powerful music is for me in inducing these trance phenomena. To be more specific about it, you might say that music has the ability to trigger a series of age regressions in which I revisit specific scenes and feel in my body some of what I felt back then combined, in a particularly potent way, with my emotions about remembering those scenes from my past.

Fragrances and scents do that for me too:  the smell of old books with a certain kind of paper can regress me right back to particular moments from my childhood; the smell of a cocoa butter body lotion I like to use still carries with it a memory of my first holiday in France. I am leaning out of the window of an old house on the coast, looking at the sun making long shadows between the olive trees, stretching my arms above my head.

Of course, I have cultivated that particular association, perhaps deepened it over the years, because I enjoy experiencing it so much. I can still connect with the sense of excitement, of my life opening for me, that I felt as a thirteen-year-old in France and I want to reconnect with that feeling, from time to time.

The iPod-induced trance phenomena I experienced last night was a powerful reminder of the ability of our minds to create these associations. Sometimes it is extremely pleasurable to revivify and reconstruct the happy, life-enhancing memories and experiences that nurture deep parts of our selves.

You know, I think that sometimes, as hypnotherapists, we can easily forget that spontaneous regression as a phenomenon doesn’t have to be difficult or unhelpful. We might spend a lot of time working with people who need help in stopping the unhelpful regression to and endless reconstruction of incidents and events in their past that are troubling them in some way.

And yet there are all kinds of powerful positive memories and associations that we can draw upon as resources to help us to strengthen aspects of our selves.

I don’t think that’s what Rufus Wainwright actually means when he sings about, (ahem!) ‘Instant Pleasure,’ but it works for me.

Tags: age regression, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, instant pleasure, music, regression, Rufus Wainwright, trance phenomena
No Comments »

Yesterday, I ran two Word Sauce workshops and read my poems at the 6th Annual Writers’ Festival at Leeds Trinity University College. How wonderful to see so many enthusiastic people experimenting with writing of all kinds and developing their creativity.

One of the participants in my afternoon workshop asked me a very interesting question. We were talking about using writing to ‘dialogue’ with feelings, emotions or physical sensations when he observed, ‘But to do that, wouldn’t I have to be a creative person?’

So what is a ‘Creative Person’?

Who is this person, so different from most of us, who is Creative with a capital ‘C’?

When we begin to become more consciously aware of the stories we tell ourselves about creativity and creative people, we can begin to question and challenge some of the myths around creativity and what makes people creative.

In his book,  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihalyi Csikszentmhalyi interviews creative people from many different fields: the arts, mathematics and science, inventors, educators, thinkers, therapists. He concludes that creative people are not people who simply happen to connect with and express their own innate abilities but people who combine their abilities with disciplined practice. They actually invest time in finding and developing their flow experience – through activities which actively nurture this.

Many of our ideas about the messy, crazy, slightly chaotic or even brilliantly tortured creative soul are simply not true – and probably extremely limiting to us.

To create, we need not only to be able to allow our ideas to emerge, but we also need to work at our particular skill, through consistent disciplined practice.We need to combine playfulness with emotional intelligence, nurturing creative freedom and discipline.

When we talk about ‘creative people,’ we often leave ourselves out. I loved helping people to rediscover yesterday that, using self-hypnosis and writing as self-hypnosis to find our flow or optimal state, we can create something out of an apparent nothing; that, by connecting with the feelings and emotions that are always going on for us, beneath all our ‘busy-ness,’  we can remember and reconnect with our innate creativity.

And when we practice a few simple self-hypnosis and free-writing techniques, regularly and with consistency, we can enjoy experiencing ourselves as Creative People every day.

Next time you catch yourself wistfully wishing that you were ‘more creative’ or that you could be more creative ‘if you only had the time/ the right space/ could leave your current job, etc, etc,’ it might be helpful to ask yourself if that story is holding you back in some way.

Take a few deep breaths. Learn and practice a self-hypnosis or free-writing technique. Invest a little time each day in finding your own flow.

Tags: creativity, Csikszentmihalyi, flow, free-writing, hypnotic journaling, self-hypnosis, writing
No Comments »

There is something about that swinging watch, ‘look into my eyes,’ association with hypnosis, something about the idea of hypnotism and the hypnotist, that produces an expectation in many people that, in order to go into a powerful state of trance, first their eyes will need to close. (And, of course, soon after that their head will loll back and they will start drooling and dribbling and then an hour later they will open their eyes and wonder ‘Where was I?’ and have no recollection of what has occurred.)

Yes, this is still what many, many people think about when they think about hypnosis: that the hypnotist induces the state of hypnosis in them or for them and their bodies respond in a particular way, perhaps like being in a walking dream or even totally anaesthetised or unconscious.

In fact, as we have discussed before on this blog, a hypnotherapist does not and cannot put you into hypnosis. Perhaps the only thing we can say with any accuracy is that, when you are willing, a hypnotherapist can facilitate the process with you, helping you to create a certain quality of attention or awareness in which you are more receptive to suggestion and change.

In order for this to happen, you do not even have to close your eyes. You can be in trance with your eyes open, moving around, going about various aspects of your day.

As many hypnotherapists will tell you on their websites, hypnosis is a very natural state (or non-state) that we move in and out of quite naturally. One of the common examples of a natural trance state is the ‘driving trance,’ that state of relaxed and focused awareness, often a heightened kind of awareness, in which your conscious mind drifts off with all kinds of thoughts and suddenly, to your surprise, you realise that you are reaching the end of your road, approaching your own house and you think to yourself, ‘How did I get here? Who has been driving all this time?’

If you are a child of the 80’s, like me, you might remember the famous shower scene from that 80’s soap, Dallas, where Bobby Ewing drifts off in the shower, thus imagining or day-dreaming an entire series, with plot twists and side stories, that had audiences on the edge of their seats trying to figure out who shot JR. That is, until Bobby realised that he had been standing in the shower for far too long and really should get out now because he was becoming a wrinkled prune. The entire series had been imagined and experienced inside his mind. And Bobby Ewing certainly didn’t have his eyes closed. (Maybe there was a little soap involved.)

Or you may be most familiar with the particular trance state, often described as ‘hypnagogia,’ in which we drift somewhere between waking and sleeping, either at the beginning or end of the day.

Or, like me, you may enjoy being fully immersed in a certain creative activity  such as writing or painting or gardening, where you lose all track of time. This kind of temporal distortion is a strong sign of trance. I would even argue – and I regularly do – that writing, when approached in a particular way, is a kind of self-hypnosis and can be used to induce a state of trance.

And so this idea that hypnosis is something we do with our eyes closed is clearly unhelpful and misleading.

One of my favourite books on hypnosis and therapeutic trance is called ‘Trances People Live By,’ by Stephen Wolinsky, a book that, as the title suggests, describes our problems as states of negative or unhelpful trance. Wolinsky writes:

‘Reactions are trance states when they happen to us – which is more often than not. We blow up, raise our voices, slam our fists down on tables, get red-faced,  get passionate. We don’t usually experience ourselves as consciously, intentionally creating our reactions, especially when any degree of emotional valence is involved.’ (Wolinsky. 1991. p. 15).

You may have noticed, only after the event, this kind of unhelpful trance state.  For example, you might be experiencing a certain relationship trance: he says that, you say that, then he says that and, before you even know it, you’ve both had that argument again, that one, the one that goes like that. You’re firing off all kinds of post-hypnotic suggestions to each other: ‘You always do that… You’re always late… You never do that…’

According to this model, our reactions are very useful tools, giving us valuable information, once we’ve blurted them out for the hundredth time and can see them clearly and become less identified with them.

An enjoyable in-the-present-moment experience can turn into a particular kind of trance state when we start spinning fantasies or stories – either positive and pleasurable or anxiety-invoking – into the future.

I love the way Wolinsky describes the trance phenomena (age regression, pseudo-orientation in time, positive or negative hallucination and so on) that we can create in this way: ‘Trance phenomena “shrink-wrap” our focus of attention, leaving a very consricted perspective with which we usually strongly identify’ (p.15).

One of the most wonderful and fascinating hypnotherapy sessions I ever experienced was when I was working with a very young client, aged seven, who had been refusing to go to bed at night, refusing to go to school in the mornings, getting very distressed, crying and screaming and shouting and generally creating all kinds of problems for herself and her parents. Her parents were worried that she was very anxious about something and asked me if I could help.

Sure enough, the girl arrived in a temper. She was really very angry with her mum and she proceeded to kick her legs and stamp her feet and sat on the floor in the corner of my consultancy room, with her back to us and her hands over her ears.

She shouted repeatedly, ‘I don’t need your help. I can do it myself.’

As her mum told the story of the problem, I noticed that the little girl’s body language became more marked whenever her baby brother was mentioned and so I continued to question her mum about the little brother until we were talking about him almost exclusively.

Sure enough, my client soon stopped shouting, turned around, tried to climb on her mum’s lap and started interjecting herself into the story. After some time, I asked her if she would like to talk about the feelings that she was having in the morning before school and she repeated, more quietly, that she didn’t need my help. She could ‘do it herself.’

I replied that I could see how grown-up and clever she was and that I was absolutely certain that she could do it herself extremely well.  I then went through an elaborate rigmarole of taking out my notebook, asking her questions -  her name, age, the school she attended, her favourite activities – and I made a great show of writing them all down in my book. Right at the end of this I said ‘So could you tell me exactly, just so that I can write it in my book here, when you will have this problem sorted; exactly when you will be able to do it all yourself?’

Quick as a flash, she answered, ‘By tomorrow.’

I wrote that down too, gave her mum a self-hypnosis audio programme to help the client to enjoy deep, refreshing sleep – when, and only when, she would like to use it – we finished the session and arranged that I would call her mum to check in with her the following day. And how wonderful it was to discover that my client had got up, got dressed, had her breakfast and gone happily off to school as if without a care in the world. And this new behavior continued for the next few days, weeks, months. She certainly did do it all her self.

Only the most indirect and conversational hypnosis was used in the session. There was certainly no formal kind of eyes-closed trance.

I often think about that session and just how well it illustrates that a problem itself can be a kind of negative trance-state in which we unconsciously do the things we do, creating all kinds of bad feelings for ourselves. As a therapist, I believe that, when I can meet my client in his or her particular trance, I can then help him or her to shift it and transform it.

If we think about hypnotic trance as a quality of non-conscious attention – sometimes helpful and sometimes not so helpful – that we can naturally find ourselves in at all kinds of times, then this subtly changes our understanding of our role as practitioners and clients of hypnotherapy.

By becoming more consciously aware of that trance thing you’re doing – with your eyes wide open – you can begin to make changes to it, to manipulate it and move it forward.

No Comments »

“Memory is continually created, a story told and retold, using jigsaw pieces of experience. It’s utterly unreliable in some ways, because who can say whether the feeling or emotion that seems to belong to the recollection actually belongs to it rather than being available from the general store of likely emotions we have learned? Memory is not false in the sense that it is willfully bad, but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past.”

Jenny Diski

Tags: Jenny Diski, memory, story, wordsauce, writing
No Comments »

Every Monday, I address a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

I feel I need to warn you. This myth is a Big Myth. In fact, this myth is so pervasive in the world of therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnosis that perhaps it should carry a health warning.

I mean that seriously.

The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that there are many therapists out there – working in many different disciplines – who will tell you that it is necessary to understand why you feel the way you do in order to feel better. Let’s call this myth the Big Myth of Why.

But first, let me ask you something. Are there things going on for you right now that you understand perfectly well – and perhaps you may even have had a couple of years of soul-searching and/or therapy to understand where those feelings come from and you have a very good intellectual understanding of these problems – and yet you still seem to be experiencing them, all the same?

I meet people every day who have an incredibly finely honed and articulate understanding of the history of their problems. They have spent years thinking about it and analysing it. They can understand why that something is happening and yet the why doesn’t necessarily help them to change the behaviours, habits, emotions and responses that they want to let go of. The why doesn’t necessarily change anything.

My feeling is that ‘why ‘doesn’t serve us particularly well when we want to make changes in our lives.

And, indeed, I have met people who are on a search for why. They are on a big mission of why. They are making why their life’s work. Their internal script goes, ‘If I can just understand why this is happening, I will feel better…’ and they have been trying to understand why for the last two or twelve or twenty years. And this trying to understand why has become a painful and tortuous journey in which they find themselves feeling worse than when they started. Maybe they are now obsessed with the idea of wanting to know why or caught up in endless rumination and questioning that is creating a lot of anxiety and feelings of somehow not being good enough.

And this search for why brings them to the consulting room of a hypnotherapist. Because the Big Myth of Why says that a hypnotherapist can go inside your mind and discover why. A hypnotherapist can regress you to the exact time and place in your life where the problem started – and then you will know and then you will feel better. Right?

Well, erm, actually, not necessarily. In fact, probably not.

It’s a seductive notion, this concept of ‘deep underlying causes’ for our problems and issues. If we could neatly pin it down to one formative event – for example, the day our primary teacher told us off in front of the class for getting a word wrong and then we suddenly became unable to read aloud in front of others -  that might certainly be very convenient. But is this a little over-reductive?

Problem One: Now, I am not saying that some issues that people experience do not carry with them the resonances and echoes of prevous experiences. Of course, they can do. Over the years, we can form beliefs about ourselves as the result of our experiences, the things we hear around us,  our interactions with significant others, for example.

However, fears, problems, phobias and habits tend to fade away over time unless we are actively keeping them fuelled with our own thoughts and worries and beliefs and the way that we talk to ourselves inside our minds.

So our primary school teacher may have introduced us to the notion of fear – but that is only part of the story.We have somehow kept the fear going. In order to let go of the fear, we need to understand how we are still doing it to ourselves twenty-five years later, so that we can start to change things.

Problem Two: Even if a hypnotherapist can help us to indentify the so-called ‘root cause’ of a particular issue, this doesn’t mean that it actually happened  or happened in the way that we experience it now in hypnosis.

We still do not sufficiently understand the way that memory works, for example, but it is thought that, in order to experience a memory, our brains need to go back and reimagine or recreate that memory in order for us to experience it again. And we may not recreate it in exactly the way that it actually happened.

Have you ever experienced a situation that really didn’t bother you until you began to go over and over it in your head and it gradually assumed all the proportions and details and colours of a horror story? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In a similar way, dreams and fantasies can be re-imaginings and re-workings of what we have experienced in the day. And although our dreams can feel very ‘real’ to us when they are happening, we wouldn’t dream of supposing that they are representations of truth.

We can’t be sure that how people experience things in hypnosis is how things actually happened either. There may be a feeling-tone, a sensory theme of the hypnotic experience that carries emotions and  memories and associations from way back. But things can get a little blurry and what actully happened and how we re-experience it can get a little mixed-up.

But what really concerns me about the Big Myth that goes, ‘there must be an underlying cause somewhere in a person’s past for the problems and challenges that s/he might be facing in the present,’ is that this assumption can result in long (and often expensive) periods of fruitless searching, over-thinking, rumination and anxiety.

If you’re asking yourself why something is happening for you, a well-trained hypnotherapist can help you to understand how you are doing that thing in the present and what you can do differently to change it as well as any possible emotions, associations and habits you’ve been carrying from the past.

So, I think this is good news. Because if it’s possible that there is no why,  no single pin-downable ’cause’ for what you are feeling, then you may simply have been looking in the wrong direction. The search for why may have been holding you back from becoming more consciously aware of how you can do the problem differently.

Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, regression, underying cause
No Comments »