What is Cognitive Behavioural Hypnosis & NLP
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnosis
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) is a modern method combining a highly effective talking therapy technique, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy ( CBT) with Clinical Hypnotherapy to bring about positive and lasting changes.
CBT is an evidenced based and comprehensively researched model of therapy recommended by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ) which can enable you to manage problems that you wish to address.
What Happens at a Treatment?
Initially you will be helped to look at your old thought patterns and beliefs, then learn new skills and techniques to adjust the way you think, feel and behave. You will also be guided to develop realistic goals that you would like to achieve, asked to carry out home tasks to bring to future sessions .
Clinical hypnosis can help treat a wide range of physical and psychological issues. It is a completely safe and pleasant state of deep relaxation during which you mind is more receptive to positive suggestions that will help you make the changes necessary to achieve the results you want.
By relaxing, thinking positively and picturing your goals, hypnosis can help you to progressively adjust habitual feelings and behaviours.
During hypnosis you remain aware of what’s going on around you and will be able to stop the session at any point should you want to.
Neuroplasticity
Scientists used to believe that the brain was fixed, rigid once we reach adulthood. The brain is more “plastic” (changeable) than scientists thought 20 years ago and recent advances in the last decade shows that the brain does change throughout our lives. Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brains to change in response to learning or injury and involves the development and strengthening of new neural pathways, sometimes even structural changes. The good news is that we all can learn and change by “rewiring our brains”! With repeated and directed attention toward a desired change, aligning beliefs, feelings, thinking, vision and actions you will experience lasting changes in your brain.
So What Can It Help With?
A wide range of conditions can be helped using CBH, these include:
Anxiety
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” ~Arthur Somers Roche
Anxiety can in itself be the fertile ground from which other, seemingly unrelated, chronic issues grow. Anxiety keeps an individual in Hyper arousal in which the Sympathetic Nervous System is permanently switched onto a “Fight of Flight” response. This leaves the sufferer in uncomfortably heightened state of alert hypervigilance, overthinking, overanalyzing and negatively catastrophizing future events over and over again in a vicious cycle. Often resulting in a disproportionate response to something quite harmless and every day that need not cause any anxiety yet is treated with the same response of anxiety more usually associated with an incident of genuine and considerable threat.
In addition The Nervous System in the constant state of arousal is flooded with stress hormones which have detrimental long term affect on the health of many organs within the body.
Anxiety can manifest itself in so many ways such as:
•Persistent troubling/negative thoughts & erratic behaviour
•Avoidance of people, events, situations because of dread or fear
•Insomnia/struggling to get to sleep/struggling to stay asleep/lack of deep sleep
•Feeling of Nausea or’ Butterflies in the Stomach
•Tension Headaches & Migraine
•Muscular aches and pains due to physical tension
•Irritable Bowel Syndrome
•High Blood Pressure
•Hyperventilation & Panic attacks
•Compulsive behaviours & addictions
•Habits hair-plucking, skin-picking, nail-biting etc
You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favourable climate in which to learn.” ― Milton H. Erickson
In addition Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy has proved very effective for the following:
•Self Esteem
•Increased Confidence
•Increased Assertiveness
•Resilience to Life Events
•Enabling Positive Change& Self-Mastery
•Energy Boosting
•Freedom From Phobias
•Public Speaking
•Relaxation
•Guilt Release
•Healing
•Menopausal Symptoms
This list below is not exhaustive so if you require treatment for any issue you may have that is not on this list, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Facts about Hypno-Psychotherapy
Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client. (White, 1941)
What is Hypnosis?
The more you understand hypnotherapy, the more effective it is likely to be.
• Hypnosis is a special way of using various naturally-occurring psychological and physiological states. It’s a collaborative process in which you allow yourself to follow the guidance of the therapist by using your imagination to evoke positive emotions and rehearse behaviour change.
• Hypnosis is definitely not a state of mind control. You cannot be made to do anything against your will. On the contrary, normally you must want to accept suggested ideas and actively imagine responding to experience their effects.
• Hypnosis is definitely not a state of sleep or unconsciousness. Roughly 90% of people report being aware of everything that happens, and relaxation helps but is not essential to hypnosis.
• Hypnosis is completely safe when used in a responsible and professional manner. Nobody has ever been “stuck” in hypnosis.
• Everyone can, in principle, be hypnotised. It has been shown to help if you relax, think positively, and imagine the things being suggested.
Hypnotic suggestion is a means of experiencing certain helpful ideas at a level profound enough to directly influence our emotions and behaviour.
• Psychological and emotional problems can be seen as the result of negative thinking, whereas hypnotherapy aims to encourage ("suggest") positive ideas which lead to improvement.
• Comedy stage hypnosis has very little to do with clinical hypnotherapy and has been shown to foster misconceptions which can prevent people from benefiting from treatment. Take what you see on television with a generous pinch of salt.
• Hypnosis can help with an enormous range of different issues. Research tends to provide most support for its use in
Anxiety management. 2. Pain management. 3. Overcoming sleep disorders 4. Treating certain psychosomatic or stress-related illnesses. However, hypnosis is also used to conquer habits such as nail-biting or smoking cigarettes, and for personal development in areas such as sports performance, public speaking, or creativity.
• Thousands of positive experimental and clinical research studies on hypnosis have been published. It was recognised as an effective treatment by the British Medical Association (BMA) and American Medical Association (AMA) in the 1950s and, more recently, by the American Psychological Association (for obesity) and NICE guidance (for IBS) used by the NHS.
• Hypnosis is essentially a simple, down-to-earth, and common sense therapy. For example, by relaxing, thinking positively, and picturing your goals, hypnosis can help you to progressively improve your habitual feelings and behaviour.
What Is Neuro Linguistic Programming – NLP?
NLP as an owner’s manual for the brain! It is about how the brain works and stores information of your life’s experiences. Using NLP techniques you can successfully make changes to limiting beliefs, addictions, health issues and phobic responses and many more!
“NLP is an incredibly effective and enjoyable way to access more of the true potential of your brain" - Anthony Robbins Best-selling author and motivational speaker.
Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) in the early 1970s in America. They studied people who were highly successful in their particular field and identified the common factors that contributed to their success. Richard Bandler put all these techniques together based mostly on the modelling of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. Fritz Perls was a Gestalt therapist and Virginia Satir a family therapist.
The name Neuro-Linguistic Programming was an attempt to describe in a succinct manner the scope of this extensive body of insights and skills:
NLP looks at and utilises the power of the brain, communication and habitual or “self-programmed” responses. It is the science of how the brain codes learning and experience, so you could think of NLP as an owner’s manual for the brain!
Neuro. – this part acknowledges the fundamental idea that all behaviour stems from our neurological processes of sight, hearing, touch, feeling, smell and taste. We experience the world through our five senses, making sense of information and then acting upon it. Neuro refers to how the mind and body interact
Linguistic– this part indicates that we use language and other non-verbal communication to order our thoughts and behaviour and to communicate with others and refers to the insights into a person’s thinking that can be obtained by careful attention to their use of language.
Programming – refers, not to the activity of programming, but to the study of the thinking and behavioural patterns or ‘programmes’ which people use in their daily lives. It refers to the ways in which we can choose to organise our ideas, our sequences of repetitive behaviour and actions in order to produce results.
NLP looks at and utilises the power of the brain, communication and habitual or “self-programmed” responses. It is the science of how the brain codes learning and experience, so you could think of NLP as an owner’s manual for the brain! It is about how the brain works and language, and brain chemistry and the effects of states on learning.
It can be described as “software for the brain” and can be used to successfully facilitate change—a kind of state of the art communications method for nurturing personal and professional growth and change gracefully.
NLP techniques can be applied to just about all areas of a person’s life. Personal behavioural changes, e.g. phobic responses, relationship issues, health, business, enhanced creativity are just a few of the areas that can be greatly improved using these techniques.
It is about education and teaching people to run their own brains it is being used by teachers, sports coaches, personal coaches, doctors, lawyers, nurses, clergy people, accountants, negotiators, managers, entrepreneurs, motivational speakers, and so on and so on.
How Can NLP Help Me?
“Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure.”
― John Seymour
Whether you are looking for increased confidence or motivation... Looking to overcome anxieties or low self-esteem... Maybe you would like to get rid of an unwanted habit or phobia... Perhaps you would really like to stop smoking, or lose weight, or just get a good night's sleep... If so, then modern-day Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and NLP can help find what you are looking for...
Anyone who has intelligence, imagination and the ability to concentrate can be hypnotised. With that in mind, hypnosis would not be suitable for very young children. Do not make an appointment for hypnotherapy if you suffer from epilepsy or clinical depression. It is NOT a substitute for medical or psychiatric treatment. If in doubt,consult your doctor. However, other treatments are very effective with or for these conditions.
Sue Sawyer is a Qualified Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist and registered with the General Hypnotherapy Council (GHR) and Certified Master Practitioner Of Hypnosis and NLP by The American Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming ABNLP & American Board of Hypnotherapy ABHwww.abh-abnlp.com
