What is Cognitive Hypnotherapy?
Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a flexible and effective model of therapy and coaching which can be used for practically any personal problem. As client and therapist, we work together as a team to reach agreed outcomes.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy is unlike traditional hypnotherapy because it utilises effective techniques from Evolutionary Psychology, Positive Psychology, Cognitive theory and Neuro Linguistic Programming, incorporating them into a modern idea of hypnosis to provide a framework for therapy.
The work we do together will be completely centred around you.
Trance is an everyday phenomenon
Studies show that around 90% of our behaviour is unconscious. This means we are only truly in control of our actions 10 percent of the time!
Traditional hypnotherapy and stage hypnosis create the belief that hypnosis is a state the practitioner must “put you under”. As Cognitive Hypnotherapists, we understand hypnosis to be a natural, everyday state, which is most useful to us!
How complicated would life be if we had to consciously think about putting one foot in front of the other for every single step we take during the day!
And what would happen if we had to pause and think of what to do whilst driving our usual route each day – brain overload!! We’d never get anywhere, so it’s this natural, self-hypnotic state that carries us, without thought, through these every day activities.
Our unconscious mind is there to help us. It’s our library of Standing Operational Procedures (SOP’s) and is in control, most of the time, of all that we do. Therefore, it makes sense that it’s the best place to start when making changes to our thought processes, feelings, and behavioural patterns.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy will help you to understand these processes and how you can take greater control of them.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Anon
Want to know if Cognitive Hypnotherapy is right for you?
Give me a call on +44 7 548 946 438 to discuss your situation.
All behaviour has a positive intention
If any aspect of modern life is viewed by the unconscious as stressful it treats it like a threat and the fight or flight response is triggered to protect you.
This means, for example, that going to pieces in an interview is actually a struggle between your unconscious trying to get you away from that situation (threat: feelings of not being good enough) and your conscious fighting to stay put.
You can see why we use the basic assumption; “all behaviour has a purpose”. Even when that behaviour is having a negative effect, it has a positive, protective intention behind it.
The Fight or Flight Response
When the fight or flight response is triggered, your body is flooded with hormones. These perform certain functions, like increasing respiration, body temperature, moving blood toward the muscles and away from areas of the body that isn’t involved in fighting for survival.
This accounts for the butterflies in the stomach. It also redirects blood away from the brain, because you don’t need to think to fight or run away. So, you can either think or feel, but not both at the same time.
The moment the feeling of anxiety or nervousness reaches a certain level you become less able to think – your mind goes blank and you struggle to put together a sentence. But at least you could run from a big scary animal!
This model of mental functioning often explains the basis of many problems. Even smoking or a nervous tick, blushing etc, can be explained this way. If you had an experience when you were young that led your unconscious to believe that the way to react is by doing whatever your problem is then it will continue that reaction no matter how much you consciously wish to stop.
Whenever we lose the sense of being in control of our actions, we’re in a trance
Want to know if Cognitive Hypnotherapy is right for you?
Give me a call on +44 7 548 946 438 to discuss your situation.