What is Cognitive Hypnotherapy?
Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a modern, effective solution based therapy. It uses three key ideals, which set apart our practice from that of traditional hypnotherapy.
- Trance is an every day occurrence: e.g. We miss a motorway exit because we are running an unconscious thought process in our head. This is a trance state of mind.
- All behaviour has a positive purpose: The intention of our trance behaviour is always positive, but due to processing errors made by the unconscious mind (often in early childhood), some of these behavioural choices end up creating the opposite effect of what we want to achieve.
- Everyone is unique: I design a bespoke therapy program for each client.
3 minute explanation of Cognitive Hypnotherapy
What elements make up Cognitive Hypnotherapy ?
The Cognitive Hypnotherapy model uses elements of, Positive Psychology, Neuro Linguistic Planning (NLP), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and Gestalt. These therapies combined with Wordweaving create various techniques unique to Cognitive Hypnotherapy. My individual clients are provided with a bespoke therapy program.
What is Wordweaving?
Wordweaving uses gentle yet powerful hypnotic suggestions saved onto a MP3 . It provides my clients with an extra support to the work we are doing between sessions. Wordweaving is unique to Cognitive Hypnotherapy.
How our brain works in an easy to understand way
The front part of our brain works like a smart phone, it records information and attaches emotion to what is happening to us at the time, this information is then stored in the back part of our brain. If the emotion attached is painful, because of a significant emotional event (SEE) our subconscious will be triggered when it feels a similar situation is happening again. When we feel this way our behaviour can change to the behaviour we would have used at the age we were when the SEE actually happened, and we can feel out of control and like we are not good enough. Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a gentle but effective way of helping you to let go of the emotion without making you relive the original event.
Stress Response Fight ~ Flight ~ Freeze
Strong Emotions Make Us Stupid!
I came across this statement in my cognitive hypnotherapy training. A common reaction to a stressful life change is the primal human stress response of fight, flight or freeze.
At times in our lives we face situations which trigger our primal survival response. Back in the days of the caveman we only had our primal responses to rely on to keep us safe.
A caveman encountering a sabre tooth tiger would have had to stand his ground using fight, flight, or freeze.
Fight – Battling the Tiger to get away
Flight – Run away as fast as possible to a place of safety.
Freeze – Standing frozen like a statue to keep yourself safe.
The subconscious mind still uses our primal response to react to a perceived threat. Therefore when we face stressful situations in our modern life it still uses fight, flight and freeze for it’s initial response.
Click here to read a Guardian article on Cognitive Hypnotherapy