November 3rd, 2010

How many times did people tell me when I was growing up that I needed to  learn to love myself?

Oooo, erm, only thousands of times. But it’s taken decades for me to work out what that actually means.

[Cue aerial shot of hundreds of people standing, hand-in-hand, singing:]

‘I’d like to build the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow-white turtle doves.’

Stop. Rewind. Euuueek.

You know, back then, at the precise minute that some kind, generous and very well-meaning person told me to ‘love myself‘ or be extra kind to myself or talk to myself in the way that I might talk to my best friend, the nasty, mean voice in my head would just get louder and louder and louder…

Because, back then, the very idea of being kind to myself might mean wimping out, not actually doing the thing I was driving myself to do and the sneaky, wheedling, taunting idea that not beating up on myself with that great big stick in the corner might mean never achieving anything.

Oh, yes.

What does being kind to yourself actually mean? You know, I’m the woman who can’t bear the idea of a long soak in a bath with bubbles. Too hot, too slow, too… Well, what would I do in there, actually? Probably, my book would get all soggy.

But I could stay in bed all morning and read and write in my notebook and scribble down all the ideas that are always clamouring for more attention. I could do that.

Except that, if I don’t pay attention, I might then end up feeling guilty about it. After all, there was a load of laundry to get done and four answerphone messages waiting to be answered and, says finger-wagging,  scrunched-up Ol’ Mean Face in here, ‘You are not allowed to do that. You should, should, should be actually doing something…’

And it goes further deeper, wider than that. I’m going to let you into a secret about me: Sometimes, even when I’m not having ‘down time’ (and probably especially when I’m not having down time) the voices get so mean, so niggly, so snidey that I really just have to take a big, deep, slow breath and tell them to SHUT  UP.

Uh huh. I have to tell them in no uncertain terms.

So the concept of being kind to myself, having a little compassion for myself, is not something that comes all that naturally to me. It’s not one of the skills I have easily learned along the way.

I was naturally so much better at learning the telling-myself-off, finger-wagging stuff. And I’m still working on it. I have to be very alert, very wary of those mean, nasty voices and I am so utterly grateful to be learning how to tune into, cultivate and get to know so much better the kinder, gentler, more helpful and wise self that (well, fancy that!) helps me to do my own best stuff or, alternatively, to not do anything in particular at all which, of course, is often when the best stuff happens.

Today, I want to share with you something that has helped me in this process – and as I’m writing this I’m thinking, actually, I’m going to go off and do this very thing again today.

1. Notice when you’re beating yourself up, picking on yourself, basically talking to yourself in ways that you wouldn’t talk to a friend.

2. Make some notes about the idea of ‘compassionate’ behavior or a ‘compassionate self.’ e.g.

My most compassionate self would be…

When I’m being compassionate towards others, I…

Qualities of compassion are…

The most compassionate and kind people I know are…  and …. and they do ….

3. Then take these ideas you’ve jotted down and nurture them into being. Close your eyes and see, hear, experience a compassionate self who embodies all these qualities [e.g. kind, wise, caring, loving, warm, strong... ]

What does this embodiment look like? Shape, face, colour, feeling, tone of voice, etc? Hazy and fuzzy or clear and Technicolour? Just experience this being (person? animal? ball of lght?) in whatever way it manifests for you. You could even give it a name. (And you might be surprised at the form it does take for you.)

You can use this each time you notice that you are talking to yourself harshly or unkindly to really experiment with how a compassionate being might act or talk to you in that situation.

4.
Set aside no more than 20 minutes (set a timer).

- Write for 10 mins to this compassionate being – a letter, a dialogue, however it comes…  Tell them everything that is currently on your mind, e.g.

Dear [...],

or

Hello, ….

- Keep your hand moving. Resist temptation to pause, edit, cross out.

- Next have the compassionate being reply back to you for 10 mins. What does it say?

I’m wishing you a day filled with kindness. Not the syrupy, Coke-ad kind but the real, heartfelt, warts-’n'-all, warmth and kindness that comes from gradually getting to know your own kindest self.

With love.

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November 1st, 2010

Sonetimes we need something new to happen to jolt us out of our everyday, wake us up to ourselves, make us look at the world in a different way. We know we need new, but what kind of new exactly?

Perhaps the mistake we so often make is thinking that, in order to shake up our lives, we need some seismic event, a grand gesture.

When, in fact, it’s often the smallest changes that give us some new perspective.

There are many ways to invite new into your life. You could pledge to Do Something New or Different – big or small, ordinary or extraordinary – everyday for a week (and email me and tell me about it, if you’d like a little extra motivation). And if you need a little inspiration for your ‘different,’ you could experiment with the Do Something Different Journal from fabulous husband and wife psychology team, Karen Pine and Ben Fletcher here.

Or (one of my favourites) you could grab your phone and go for a walk, taking pictures of the things you notice along the way.

Or pop a notebook in your pocket and jot down snippets of overheard conversations on your journey home from work today.

Small actions. Big shifts.

Suddenly, it’s November. And we’ve got an entire new month to experiment and find out what happens.

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October 28th, 2010

I’m thinking a lot about beginning things right now.

Firstly, because I’m working with a group of wonderful women in the second week of my Word Sauce Online Programme right now. We’re looking at how to get going with writing, how to let go of all the stuff that so often gets in our own way when we even think about sitting down to write (or paint or make music or create anything, really).

Secondly, I’m starting a new phase in my business here online, cooking up some new projects and collaborations. That’s always an exciting – and slightly scary – time: ‘I am soooo clear about where I’m going with this.’ ‘Oh, hang on a minute, now I have no idea whatsoever where I’m going with this.’

And finally, I started a new fitness programme at the gym. I had to take about six weeks off recently and I was amazed to remember just how hard it is to get going again, just how many conversations can go on in my head before I finally drag myself away from the laptop and 0nto that cross-trainer… and remember how much I love moving around.

Such an enormous shove required to get that big boulder moving at first, and then so much easier to keep it rolling down the gentle grassy slope with just the occasional nudge and a little daily attention.

I like that my muscles ache in new places from my new Jukari class. I like this reminder that it can seem so monumentally hard to take that first important step but then, from the other side of it, I always look back and say, ‘Wow! How did I ever not have the energy/courage/conviction to do that?’

And he distance between that first thought-laden, guilt-ridden, oh-so-difficult step and the looking back and saying ‘Wow?’can be as short as a single day, an hour, ten minutes.

So I’m dedicating this bog plost to anyone who is thinking about making the call, joining the thing, asking the question, writing the first sentence.

How will it feel in ten minutes or so, or this afternoon or tomorrow, when you’ve already done it?

Take a big, slow deep breath.

Then jump!

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October 13th, 2010

Do you find yourself bristling when people talk about ‘getting closure’?

That word ‘closure.’ It’s become a cliche, an example of the way that our language is now peppered with terms from pop psychology.

When I worked in training in a City corporation, we had a ‘bingo’ game designed around similar jargon from management psychologese. The idea was to guess in advance the main terms and phrases that would be used in any one meeting (‘blue sky thinking,’ ‘going forward,’ ‘out of the box,’  ‘brainstorm,’ and so on), then cross them off a grid each time they were mentioned until you had full house.

Well, the word ‘closure’ is one of those words, really, isn’t it? Except that, as Oliver Burkeman, a man I admire for his down-to-earth, common-sense approach to personal development, writes this week in his column here, it’s also much more than that.

A new study by Xuping Li at the National University of Singapore puts the idea of closure to the test by exploring whether people really do gain a sense of emotional closure by physically ‘sealing off’ a representation of their troubling thoughts in some sort of container.

Participants in the study were asked to write down a recollection of a decision they regretted or an unsatisfied strong desire and then seal it in an envelope. A control group wrote down their regrets or desires but didn’t seal them in an envelope (therefore distinguishing the benefits of sealing from those of writing). Afterwards, the participants who had literally sealed their worries away experienced a significantly greater reduction in negative emotions.

Follow-up experiments checked for any emotional benefits from sealing away something unrelated to the emotional experience or simply doing something extra with the words. These experiments further supoorted the idea that physically enclosing our worries seems to reduce our unhelpful feelings about them. In fact, when participants sealed away disturbing newspaper clippings in the envelopes, their details too appeared to fade from memory.

Discussing possible mechanisms for this effect, Li speculates that we are metaphorically putting our troubles ‘out of reach.’  Burkeman suggests that ‘they’re being metaphorically “kept safe”, for future reference, since part of worry’s relentless force seems to come from the fear of forgetting the subject of the worry. That’s surely why making lists feels uplifting even before you’ve started the tasks concerned.’

Metaphors do seem fundamental to the way that we experience the world and ourselves. According to philosopher Mark Turner, we all think and feel in metaphors.

Conceptual metaphor theory examines the ways that our bodily experience organises and shapes the structure of our conceptual experience, the values we place on the objects around us and their relationships with us. The now classic work that began research into conceptual metaphor theory is Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) in which the authors make a number of proposals about the ways in which what they call ‘orientational’ and ‘spatialisation’ metaphors might have arisen ‘from our physical and cultural experience.’

For example, we experience happy as up (‘That boosted my mood’) and sad as down (‘I feel so low’).

Crucial to this theory of conceptual metaphor is the idea of ‘image schemas,’ the ‘skeletal patterns that recur in our sensory and motor experience’ (Turner 1996:16) such as: bounded interior, or motion along a path. These image schematic concepts also seem to arise from the shape and structure of our  empathic, perceptive but also highly interactive relationships with the world around us. When we project one concept onto another, it is image schemas that appear to do most of the work for us.

How do you experience the concept of time? Do you sense a timeline or a turning wheel, a globe or a fathomless mass of dark matter? When you think of the unit one week, what does that look or feel like to you? Chances are that you are projecting spatiality onto temporality so that time – which of itself has no actual spatial shape – becomes linear or circular, acquiring depth and resonance for you.

The linguist, Kovesces, looked at the language of emotion in over seventy different languages around the world and concluded that the image schema container is a ‘near-universal’ conceptualisation of the body by different cultures around the world. We mostly seem to experience  ‘an “inside-outside” perspective for the human body’ (Kovesces 2000:37) made up of an interior, an exterior and a boundary that separates them.

As we project this container image schema onto the objects around us, we
experience bottles, bags, cups, rooms, buildings, cupboards, drawers, a valley as potential containers, as psychic and symbolic equivalents to our body’s own ability to contain things .

In fact, Kovesces found that this image schema container is crucial for our understanding of emotions. We talk about love, happiness and sadness in terms of a kind of fluid inside the container of our bodies: ‘She was overflowing with love,’ ‘she was filled with pride,’ ‘he was brimming with happiness.’

Sometimes we experience our feelings as pressure or heat inside this container: ‘He exploded with passion,’ or ‘she was boiling with anger.’

Kovesces’ analysis of the conceptual language of friendship (2000:87-113) finds that our idea of our ‘real self’ is made up of a combination of our experience of ourselves as containers for the objects of our innermost experience. We can open up the container, look inside and see ‘the truth, the real self.’ Our idea of friendship or of a therapeutic relationship seems to be universally based on this idea of sharing our innermost experience objects.

Kovesces concludes that the language of emotion is ‘a large metaphorical force system’ in which our feelings are experienced as dynamic forces – fluid, heat, pressure – and our relationships are structured through a more rational handling of the internal and external objects of our experience. At the centre of this metaphorical system, we find ourselves facing a possible loss or gain of control.

Seen in these terms, an envelope has enormous metaphorical power as a container.  The act of sealing away our worries becomes the way that we exert control over the force of emotions that threaten to overwhelm us. We can safely enclose the innermost objects of our ‘real self’ from the force of our feelings.

As Burkeman points out, it seems that the folk psychology of the ‘worry jar’ or ‘worry dolls’ in which you safely deposit your troubles may be more than mere ‘placebo.’ It has a basis in the essentially metaphoric way in which we think and the benefits of utilising this may be measurable, as in the Li study, and more significant  than we could have imagined.

It would be interesting to run an experiment comparing the physical act of sealing off worries with an imaginary act, using a visualisation or guided imagery protocol from hypnotherapy. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that guiding people through an imaginary act of physical enclosure provides similar benefits. Wouldn’t it be helpful now to measure it empirically?

Reference:
Xuping Li et al (2010) ‘Sealing the Emotions Genie: The Effects of Physical Enclosure on Psychological Closure,’ Psychological Science. Vol 21 No. 8. pp. 1047-1050.

Kovecses, Zoltan. (2000). Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Turner, Mark. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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October 11th, 2010

When my Saturday copy of The Guardian landed on the doormat this weekend, I was immediately drawn to the supplement cover story, a frank account by writer Meredith Maran of her own false memory of childhood abuse.

It begins: ‘When I was in my 30s, I accused my father of molesting me. I didn’t see him or talk to him for eight years. I didn’t let my children see him, either. And then I realised that it wasn’t true.’

One of the major debates in the field of hypnotherapy right now is the use of hypnosis in the recovery of memory and, more specifically, the use of hypnotic regression – when and how, if at all, it should be used and the evidence for doing so.

My colleague, Adam Eason, wrote a couple of days ago about this topic on his blog and about the research that points towards the tendency for hypnosis to heighten our experiences, creating the possibility for new and potentially false ‘memories’ to form. I recommend his round-up of the research, where you can also read comments from practising hypnotherapists about this always controversial subject.

In Meredith Maran’s moving account of her own experience of false memory, now to be published in a book called, ‘My Lie: A True Story of False Memory,’ there is no hypnotherapy involved (or, at least, she doesn’t tell us about it in her account). Maran simply began researching the area of childhood abuse, attending therapy groups and talking to survivors of incest.

During this time, she writes: ‘I started having dreams – about incest, about my father – but how could I tell whether they were based on memories? I saw a series of therapists, and my marriage fell apart. Around the same time, I surprised myself by falling for a woman, Jane, whom I’d met through work. Like everyone else with whom I’d surrounded myself, she was an incest survivor.’

And that is how Meredith Maran’s false memory began – a memory that would devastate her relationship with her father and his relationships with his grandchildren for the next eight years. She didn’t set out to tell a lie. She simply believed and put her faith in the people around her who told her that ‘Feelings don’t lie. Dreams don’t lie.’

But, of course, dreams do lie sometimes. Quite a lot of the time. They can seem disturbingly, terrifyingly real. And we wouldn’t generally accuse someone in a court of law of doing something that we had seen them do in a dream.

And feelings can lie too. They can be messy and complicated. They are sometimes hard to acknowledge or accept in ourselves; and the way that we interpret our feelings can be strongly influenced by the people around us or the particular style of thinking that we’ve learned or even what is happening in the culture.

And even memory can lie. Did it really happen in exactly that way? Cognitive science increasingly suggests that we need to recreate our memories in order to re-experience them.

All these factors contributed to the formation of Meredith Maran’s false memory.

None of this, I really want to be careful to emphasise here, should diminish the very real feelings, experiences and memories of people who have been abused. In these situations,  a well-trained and experienced therapist can be crucial in helping someone to come to terms with and move forward from the past. Our lives do not have to be shaped by our past experiences.

I must also add here that, to my knowledge, there is no evidence that using regression to take someone repeatedly through past experiences of abuse actually helps that person to feel better. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that this process can heighten and exacerbate the traumatic feelings.

There are many other ways of working with unwanted memories and feelings – including using hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis – that can help someone to create new meaning and new possibilities for themselves.

What I think is extremely helpful about Meredith Maran’s account of her false memory is her courage and honesty in tracing how the false narrative developed inside her own mind and how she came to believe it in the first place. I think it’s essential reading for any therapist and particularly for clinical hypnotherapists.

Some practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy might describe what Meredith Maran and her family experienced as a kind of ‘negative self-hypnosis’ (NSH), a  mental process by which a person forms unhelpful beliefs about themselves and/or the world. When we form such negative beliefs, we can tend to accumulate evidence to support them and dismiss anything helpful in our lives that might contradict our unhelpful view.  Again, a cognitive approach to hypnotherapy can help us to begin to restructure that mental process and develop new ways of thinking and experiencing.

As Maran’s father says to her when they manage to make a kind of peace with one another towards the end of his life, ‘ “You know how it is. You hear something often enough, you start to believe it’s true.” ‘

And there, right there, in that one sentence is the reason why I think we need to continue to develop our understanding of the powerful process that is hypnotic suggestion – including self-suggestion -  and how best it can be used as a tool for positive change in a therapeutic process.

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October 7th, 2010

Yes, today is National Poetry Day here in the UK and there are all sorts of things happening. It’s the day when people like me – people who enjoy secretly scribbling poetry – come out of the closet and declare themselves to the world.

It’s also a day when people celebrate the role of poetry in their lives and, this year, it’s been good to see lots of discussion in the media in the run-up to today’s events. For example, a dear friend of mine told me about the discussion on the Jeremy Vine show yesterday on Radio 2, in which people were phoning in to share and talk about the poems that had helped them in times of grief and bereavement.

I often read poems with my clients where I think this might be appropriate or helpful to them. In fact, there is actually a term for this kind of ‘poetry prescription’ or ‘reading therapy’ – bibilotherapy.

A few weeks ago, I helped to facilitate a workshop at the Hull York Medical School Educational Conference attended by doctors and consultants and we talked about the ways that creative reading – of both poems and prose – can nurture us as health care professionals or help us to gain new insights into the experiences of patients and colleagues or to understand things from a different perspective.

Many GPs are now recommending reading to their patients – not only self-help titles but also novels and poetry collections that offer new ways of  understanding our common human experiences. You might like to read more about bibliotherapy in this article, ‘The Reading Cure,’ by Blake Morrison here.

People often delight me with their ‘confessions’ that they ‘write a few poems.’ There are the health care professionals I meet who write regularly as a way of reflecting on what they do or rediscovering some time for themselves in a pressured and often frantic working environment; or the clients who tell me that they woke up in the middle of the night with a poem half-formed in their head that they just had to write it down… and, Can you believe it? The thing that has been bothering me just isn’t a problem  anymore…

Well, I can believe it. There are many benefits to reading and enjoying poetry: the shared experience half-hinted at by another writer and that speaks to you at just the right moment in your own life; the sheer pleasure of a line or image; the rhythmic resonances of words learned by heart and repeated over time.

There are many benefits to writing poetry: a sense of catharsis, of having got the feelings out there onto the page; a pleasure in sharing and talking about an experience with others in a writing group; a sense of making shape and meaning out of a feeling that perhaps just hours before felt utterly meaningless.

Today, on the UK’s National Poetry Day, I’d love to hear about poems that have spoken to you over the years? Is there a favourite that you treasure or a poem that came to your rescue at a particular moment in your life?

Here are the first lines from one of my favourites, ‘Wild Geese,’ by Mary Oliver, that many of my clients have found helpful over the years:

‘You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.’

I highly rcommend the rest of this poem which, for copyright reasons, I’m reluctant to include here in full. (And that is so hard! It seems brutal to chop it down in this way.) It’s beautiful – especially the wonderful final lines. Do go and read it.

And I wish you a day filled with poems.

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September 28th, 2010

Imagery and visualisation in hypnotherapy

This is one in a series of brief articles aimed at students of hypnotherapy and professional hypnotherapists.

The use of imagery in psychotherapy has a long tradition. Freud placed great emphasis on the ‘dream content’ and mental imagery of his analysands. For Freud, what seemed most important was to bring ‘a state of evenly suspended attention’ to the analysand’s free-associations of words, images and feelings, avoiding ‘as far as possible, reflection and the construction of conscious expectations,’ trying not to ‘fix’ the things he heard but instead ‘catching the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own’ (Freud 1923:239).

In other words, and at least in the early stages of his career, Freud believed that the role of the therapist was to enter into a free-floating reflective state alongside the client and allow some kind of meaning to emerge.

Hypnotherapy has long made use of mental imagery to enable people to achieve a cognitive restructuring of their inner experience. The prevalence of the use of imagery in hypnotherapy might be because it seems to become easier for us to follow guided visualisation processes or become more aware of our spontaneous mental imagery when we close our eyes or begin to relax.

Sensory deprivation or distortion

The changes in the way that we experience ourselves proprioceptively in space that are commonly associated with hypnotic phenomena, seem to make it easier for us to shift our attention inward and practise visualisation techniques or become more aware of our own mental imagery.

In neuroscientific terms, studies seem to point to decreased activity in the parietal lobes and a deafferentation of the posterior superior parietal lobule (PSPL). The functional deafferentation suggests a decrease in the arrival of distracting stimuli to the striate cortex and PSPL, enhancing a sense of focus and producing an altered perception of self-experience. This PSPL deafferentation is supported by three neuroimaging studies of subjects engaged in meditation (Newberg and Iverson, 2003) but is not without controversy.

Guided imagery or visualisation

Guided imagery or visualisation might involve asking someone to imagine themselves in a number of situations or contexts, feeling calm, confident, relaxed and having already mastered a particular task that previously challenged them. It might involve them visualising themselves in a situation, whilst ‘borrowing’ resources from a role model (real or fictional) who does this task with total confidence, and then doing the task themselves.

Hypnotherapeutic techniques for physical healing make use of other applications of guided imagery: for example, imagining an affected area and then changing its colour or shape or sensation or using visual metaphors that represent the body healing itself. There are a number of studies looking at the use of guided imagery in physical healing such as: Roffe et al (2005), which suggests that guided imagery may be ‘psycho-supportive’ and may ‘increase comfort’ and recommends further research.

One area of research into hypnotherapy using guided imagery is in the treatment of IBS. A systematic review by Wilson et al (2006) found that out of the 20 studies (18 trials of which four were randomized, two controlled and 12 uncontrolled) and two case series evaluated, over half of the trials (10 of 18) indicated a significant benefit.

Imagery used in research studies includes ‘gut-directed’ scripts such as those developed by Whorwell at the Wythenshawe Hospital, including imagining the digestive system as a river and adjusting the river’s flow.

It is interesting to note that guided imagery can be more or less guided, according to the style and approach of a particular therapist. For example, in the gut-directed work cited above, it might be more appropriate to suggest that a client connects with her own experience of her digestive system – its look and feel and colour or any images or metaphors that come into her mind – and work with these. Other clients may benefit from more specific suggestions: ‘Imagine your digestive system as a river…’ I would suggest that this is an area for further research.

Ability to visualise

One of the common issues encountered in hypnotherapy around the use of mental imagery is the client’s ability to visualise. Some people will tell you that they find it very difficult to ‘picture’ things in their minds.

Visual mental imagery, or ‘seeing with the mind’s eye’, has been the subject of considerable controversy in cognitive science. Scientists do not yet fully understand whether images are fundamentally different from verbal thoughts, whether they share underlying mechanisms with visual perception or how the information contained in images is represented.

What might be helpful in enabling clients to work with mental imagery is to help them to think of imagery in terms of imagination – the ability to form mental images, sensations, sounds and concepts. In this way, mental imagery becomes more than ‘pictures in the mind’ and encompasses the entire spectrum of our experiencing. (The literature on synesthesia may form useful clues in the future to understanding the rich and multi-modal ways that we process and structure our inner worlds.)

One of the assumptions made by NLP, despite a current lack of evidence, is that people structure their experience primarily according to visual, kinaesthetic, auditory (or digital) processes and that a therapist can deduce this sensory preference through subtle ‘eye accessing cues.’ Given the lack of evidence, it my be  preferable to use language that enables someone to make use of the entire spectrum of sensory experience in their mental imaginings.

Further benefits

In addition to the kinds of cognitive restructurings that can be achieved through the specific content of guided visualisation (the specific tasks and contexts visualised), it seems that the process itself of repeated visualisation brings further underlying benefits.

As we continue to learn to connect with the inner world of our mental imagery or imagination, we tend to gain an increased sense of ourselves (what the traditional hypnotherapy literature might describe as ‘ego-strengthening’).

In the 1970s, the psychologist Jerome L. Singer, conducted an analysis of the use of mental imagery techniques in psychotherapy (1974) and concluded that clients who practice visualisation techniques develop an underlying sense of confidence and self-control which seems to correlate with their increasing sense of mastery over their own mental imagery (Singer, 1974: 132). Don Robertson provides a very helpful overview and discussion of Singer’s ‘cognitive-affective’ theory of mental imagery in his excellent article here.

It’s interesting to note Singer’s use of ‘affect,’ suggesting that mental imagery is as much about working with and mastering our bodily affects and emotions as it is about ‘picturing’ things.

The process of consistent and repeated visualisation or mental imagining seems very similar, in this sense, to Jung’s key therapeutic practice of ‘active imagination.’ Jung saw his technique as a way of granting the psyche freedom and time to express itself spontaneously, without the habitual interference of ‘ego’ (or of social and cultural constructs and expectations). Jung also called this process ‘the art of letting things happen.’

According to Jung, the client makes himself more and more creatively independent through the method of active imagination. No longer dependent on his dreams or his therapist’s knowledge, he gives shape to himself in a new sense, by actively imagining himself (Collected Works of C. Jung. XVI para. 106).

References:

Newberg A.B., Iversen J., (2003), The neural basis of the complex mental task of meditation: neurotransmitter and neurochemical considerations, Med Hypotheses, 61 : 2, p 282-291.

Roffe et al. (2005) ‘A systematic review of guided imagery as an adjuvant cancer therapy.’ Psycho-Oncology Volume 14, Issue 8, pages 607–617, August 2005 which

Singer (1974) Imagery & Daydream Methods in Psychotherapy & Behaviour Modification. New York.

Wilson S, Maddison T., Roberts L, Greenfield S., Singh S. 2006. ‘Systematic review: the effectiveness of hypnotherapy in the management of irritable bowel syndrome.’Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics.Volume 24, Issue 5, pages 769–780, September.

Copyright Sophie Nicholls 2010. All rights reserved.

Tags: active imagination, cognitive-affective theory, Freud and hypnotherapy, guided imagery, hypnosis, imagery, imagination, mental imagery, sensory deprivation, ung and hypnotherapy, visualisation
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September 23rd, 2010

I am very excited about this bit of news.

Adam Eason and I have been listening to your feedback and we’ve decided to take our Hypnotherapy Training Diploma monthly, starting September 2011.

There has been lots of feedback from people in the North who want to train with us over a longer period of time and so now we’ve put the arrangements in place so that you can study for our Diploma over ten monthly weekends in my beautiful home town of York. It’s going to be fun, fun, fun.

Hard work too. Because you will be training to a rigorous and comprehensive syllabus. By the time you leave our programme, you’ll be equipped to begin work with clients as an effective, evidence-informed hypnotherapist with a solid framework of practical experience and theoretical  knowledge.

So much so that this programme has been awarded accreditation for Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma status (HPD) – a ‘gold standard’ for hypnotherapists in the UK – as well as with major hypnotherapy boards in the States and Australia.

I’m really proud to be teaching with Adam on this programme. Find out more and download a prospectus at the York Hypnotherapy Diploma page on Adam’s web site.

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September 22nd, 2010

Have you experienced a thought that just won’t go away?

You know, one of those thoughts that goes round and round in your head. The more you try not to think about it, the bigger it gets. Maybe you find yourself replaying a conversation that you felt went badly with someone, over and over again, or rehearsing a conversation that you want to have.

Sometimes the thought forms a kind of monologue. Some schools of psychotherapy might call it an internal script and suggest that it can be helpful to recognise whether the script reminds us of someone we know – a parent, perhaps, or an ex-partner. We can easily internalise the words or ideas of people around us when we hear them say something often enough. It’s a kind of learned script, a sort of habit. It can begin to shape the way that we represent the world outside us – events, experiences, arguments, conversations – to ourselves inside our own minds.

It can be very revealing to slow down and begin to notice consciously the conversations or ‘voices’ or internal thoughts that are going on daily inside our minds. It can also be helpful to begin to ask ourselves whether those voices or thoughts have a certain kind of tone or remind us of someone we know. But then what?

What do we do next?

Sometimes it might be tempting to think that we need to get rid of those unhelpful scripts/voices/thoughts. But is that really possible?

In my own experience, both of working on my own internal critical scripts and of working with clients, it perhaps isn’t helpful to think of never having one of those unhelpful thoughts ever again. In fact, the desire to rid ourselves of such thoughts might throw us back into feelings of guilt or shame about even having them in the first place.

What seems more important and helpful is how much importance we give to the thoughts. Saying to yourself ‘It’s just a thought’ might be more helpful than worrying about how to get rid of it.

Remembering and reminding ourselves that the thought has no power over us unless we choose to give it some kind of value seems to help the thought to dissolve.

In other words, our internal thoughts can be ‘hypnotic’ – but only if we allow them to be.

If you think about it, when you try really hard to get to sleep, you’ll probably find yorself achieving the opposite effect. When you try really hard to stop giggling in a lecture theatre or business meeting, you probably find it quite hard to stop.

Hypnotherapy  has a long tradition of talking about this relationship between the conscious will and the unconscious imagination. Emile Coue’s theory of auto-suggestion and Milton Erickson’s ‘indirect’ model each recognise that trying to do something usually brings your conscious will and your unconscous imagination into conflict. A kind of resistance is created to the outcome that you want to achieve.

One method to experiment with when you notice yourself having an unhelpful thought is to take a nice deep slow breath, letting your shoulders soften, your stomach gently expand, hold it for a moment and then breathe out, listening to your breath leaving your body. Thinking about something whilst cultivating a relaxed kind of focus seems to help the thought to become less important or troublesome.

As you continue to cultivate this relaxed focus, say to yourself, ‘It’s just a thought. It’s just a thought.’

It might even be helpful to make a kind of internal gesture in a way that feels helpful to you, such as brushing the thought gently away or watching it dissolve.

Hypnotherapeutic techniques such as creative visualisation, repeated regularly, can bring a calm, relaxed quality of acceptance and kindness to the experience of any previously troubling thoughts or scripts.

Over time,  you might also begin to notice that such thoughts happen more often when you’re feeling tired or in a certain context. In fact, your unhelpful thoughts or voices can even become friends to you, offering useful signals e.g. that you need to rest or that a certain person or situation is unhelpful to you.

We probably don’t need to get rid of our unhelpful thoughts but, by noticing them and accepting them for what they are – just thoughts – we can help ourselves to live more easily with them.

Tags: CBT, cognitive therapy, Coue, Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, Milton Erickson
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September 13th, 2010

I was at the cinema on Friday night with my sister and found myself responding with frustration to one of the ads (for a Muller yoghurt, I think… or some such yoghurt-based product).

You might have seen the advert I’m thinking about. It starts with a rather beautiful cow, standing on an empty beach, and the voice over says ‘This is Molly. She’s always dreamed of being a horse.’

(Or the cow might be called Mary – I can’t remember.) The point is that this is such a hypnotic concept, isn’t it? A cow that has always dreamed of being a horse.

Just the idea of this cow having an inner world that might be rather like our human one, with dreams and longings and aspirations, is powerfully hypnotic. It gets our attention and we start translating that experience into our own wanting and yearning and longing and what that might mean for us.

And then Molly, or Mary, begins to canter along the beach, her hooves splashing through the shallow water, her body rippling, her udders swinging, whilst the soundtrack surges to something that stirs our own sense that, hey, perhaps we too could do anything we dream of… (And also, isn’t it a bit funny too? What do we ourselves  dream of that is a bit funny or even ridiculous?)

And all that is going on beautifully, we’re engaging with it all and then…

WHAM! The voice over starts talking about other stuff, starts spelling out to us what is going on and what might actually happen and telling us what to think. The camera cuts to a girl with beautiful red hair and a far-off expression who just happens to be poised perfectly on a rock eating a spoonful of yoghurt.

At this point, for me, the ad’s hypnotic effect just ebbs away. I’m being told what to think. It’s overdone. It’s ruined.

I sat in the cinema thinking, ‘Why didn’t you just leave us with this delightful Molly (or Mary) cantering on the beach? Why did you overcomplicate it?’

And the flow of my own thoughts began to move to how true this is of life in general, of what I do as a therapist, making use of hypnosis and hypnotic principles, to help people to experience changes in their own inner states and private worlds.

I know that if I try to do too much in a session, it won’t be as effective as if I keep things simple.

I meet people from time to time who seem very pleased and proud that they know sixteen different NLP techniques for a phobia ‘cure’ (and how I hate that word ‘cure,’ as if there is something ‘wrong’ with the person in the first place, which they have to be somehow ‘cured’ from rather than just some unhelpful habit or way of thinking they’ve got into that it might be helpful for them to unlearn).

Yes, we may know five techniques for helping people to see things from a different point of view but, probably, we only need one – and that is the one that is right for that particular client at that particular time.

You know, I think it is so easy to overlook sometimes that the most powerful and effective ways of working with our clients might often be the simplest.

For example, you could use an all-singing, all-dancing method with all kinds of complicated visualisations for helping someone to let go of their spider phobia but, first of all, why not just take them through a very simple desensitisation process and find out what happens?

And, even more hypnotically, why not allow them to really own that process as their process rather than showing-off your language patterns and your fifteen complicated techniques?

And I think that if we have a a cow-who-wants-to-be-a-horse for a client, we need to help them to check out whether wanting to be a horse is the most helpful wanting that they can be doing right now. And, if it isn’t, why not help them to find the experience that is most helpful for them, right here, in the here and now, and how they can begin to connect with that and allow it? In their way, a way that makes sense to them.

Then we need to get out of their way.

Oh, but eat lots of yoghurt too. It’s supposed to be good for you.

Tags: hypnosis and advertising, Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, hypnotic, self-hypnosis
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September 2nd, 2010

This photo perfectly encapsulates my holiday in the sun.

I spent a week in my beloved Portugal, east of Faro, in the places that are becoming an annual ritual for us.

I swam – in the sea and in the pool – ate delicious pasteis de nata and spent time generally hanging out with my love and my three gorgeous ‘step daughters,’ relaxing in the sun and shade, playing their favourite card games (the game ‘Cheat’ seems to feature heavily) and gathering shells on Barril beach.

One highlight of the holiday was my rediscovery of the pleasures of the hammock. I last encountered hammocks of many bright colours strung between the trees in the grounds of a hotel on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. This holiday, the hammocks were white (courtesy of the owners of the stylish Quinta do Anjo, possibly the best holiday house in the sun that I’ve ever encountered – and believe me, I’m picky).

This holiday, I remembered just how good it feels to surrender to the gentle rhythm that is hammock relaxation, the ropes gently swaying, the light filtering through the cut-cane canopy and dappling my face, the crickets chirruping somewhere above my head.

Is this a kind of self-hypnosis? I think so. I can just close my eyes and be there now.

It’s good to be back in my beloved Yorkshire – via the Edinburgh Festival, where we were guests of the fabulous Dean Parkin (more on this later) – and to work with wonderful hypnotherapy clients this week.

I’m also returning – slowly, gradually – to the blogging thing and the Facebook and Twitter thing – but with  a new insight into how my break from the world of social media reinvigorated my creativity in many ways. More on this in days to come too.

In the meantime, thank you to those who noticed I was gone and enquired after my well-being. (I forgot to say that I was going away!) I so appreciate your kindness and caring.

It was good to be away-but-at-home-in-myself and it’s good to be home-and-fully-present-here in that way that taking some time out always creates for me.

Thank you for being part of it and connected with me.

Tags: hammock, holiday, self-hypnosis
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July 7th, 2010

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.

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June 10th, 2010

‘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
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June 7th, 2010

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
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May 26th, 2010

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.

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May 17th, 2010

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?

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May 10th, 2010

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.

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April 20th, 2010

Past participants of my Word Sauce e-courses will be very 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.

Journaling

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).

Wide attention

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 can’t think of a more 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.

Felt self

In fact, the latest research in cognitive science 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 understanding how to acquire the attitude and skills of happiness. Her writing is perhaps more relevant today than it ever was.

Tags: haooiness, indirect hypnosis, Marion Milner, Milton Erickson, positive psychology, Word Sauce
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April 14th, 2010

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 and self-hypnosis, R D Laing, self-hypnosis
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April 13th, 2010

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…

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