What is CBH?

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Hypnotherapy may take various forms, however, one of the particular methods in which I am trained in is known as Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH). 

 

Therefore, primarily, this is a cognitive, behavioural approach to hypnosis. However, it is much more than CBT + a relaxing trance!

CBH is in fact quite a seamless integration of social, cognitive and behavioural psychology and psychotherapy with a modern approach to hypnosis.

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CBH uses the fact that thinking, feeling and behaving are all integrally connected.

Therefore, it involves talking with me about areas of your life that you would like help with by looking at how you currently react to a certain trigger situation, and then work together to make positive changes.

So, with my guidance we will discuss and discover how you manage your current responses by understanding how you think, feel and act, often highlighting how you may have developed avoidance behaviour or become entrapped in a vicious cycle. Together, we then introduce more helpful ways to respond. I use a whole range of evidence-based interventions that are cognitive-behavioural in that they teach new ways of thinking, how to let go of thoughts, how to relax, how to calm down, how to problem-solve, how to approach scary things, and how to be assertive etc… AND I make use of hypnosis in all of these approaches to make the effect much more powerful. 

This allows me to have flexibility in the way I use hypnosis and to integrate it with many techniques currently used in CBT.

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Many of the techniques I use involve:

 

• Relaxation: This plays a key part and can be applied to a lesser or greater degree depending on the task at hand. Therefore it can be used as pure relaxation for the mind and body, but is not always the primary objective. The primary objective is more commonly to increase your imaginal absorption. In other words, your ability to imagine something vividly enough so as to make it seem real. This is why hypnosis is such a powerful tool! For example, employing deep relaxation techniques whilst vividly visualising your fears is particularly helpful with treating phobias, amongst many other types of anxiety and fear related issues.

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• Self-Awareness: By focusing on, and exploring the problem, we can enable you to become far more aware of what thoughts go through your mind, for example, when you are faced with a stressful situation. By becoming more self-aware I can teach you methods such as thought-stopping or switching, and help you to let go of unhelpful thoughts. This same enhanced awareness also applies to your feelings, sensations and your body language.

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• Suggestion: What hypnosis does is to heighten your state of attention and ability to focus on an idea or suggestion - this is known as "hypersuggestibility". The more ready you are to accept the suggestions being put to you while in hypnosis, the more profound the effect. Therefore hypnotic suggestion is a means of experiencing certain helpful ideas at a level profound enough to directly influence your emotions and behaviour. For this reason hypnotherapy is very effective at teaching you how to control your thoughts, feelings and behaviours and to "suggest" positive ideas which lead to improved life skills and wellbeing.

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• Coping Skills: Many therapies will concentrate much of the session time to exploring the past and delving, often quite deeply and extensively, into what may have occurred in your past to cause you to react the way you do.  Although we will explore this to some degree, I use it more in a capacity to help discover your core beliefs and what is maintaining your behavioural patterns so that we can change future behaviour, rather than focusing on attempting to change your reaction to something that has occurred in the past. This gives you coping skills that you can apply in all sorts of situations in life, both those that you have some influence over, as well as those that you are not in control of - even if you are not in control of the situation, you still have control over yourself! 

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• Problem-Solving: Although much of our time together may involve discovering maladaptive patterns, assumptions and beliefs, I will also bring to your awareness areas where there is an absence of problem-solving skills with the intention of teaching effective solutions for specific problems encountered in everyday living. This problem-solving approach allows you to stand back and systematically analyse a problem situation in the comfort of the therapy environment, and then be guided through successfully applying it to real-life situations. This approach when combined with coping skills training is a very effective method for dealing with life's stressors.

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• Role-Play: Many people find great benefit from learning how to stand up for their personal rights, how to express thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in direct, honest, and appropriate ways without violating any other person's rights - the very essence of assertiveness is simply to act toward others, expressing any emotion other than anxiety, in a way that is reasonable and appropriate. We can apply role-play techniques into our sessions that will rehearse appropriate, effective ways of being able to ask for what you want, being able to say "no", and to be able to spontaneously express opinions, emotions, and ideas without holding back.

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• Dehypnosis: Client’s problems are often conceptualised as a type of “negative self-hypnosis” - they believe and respond to negative automatic thoughts as if they were true. Therefore much of my focus is helping you, to “dehypnotise” from your negative thought patterns as a primary task, and then, subsequently, helping you to actively focus and imagine more helpful ways to think. Through repetition and other methods, these new positive ways to think become the new mindset.