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Frequently asked questions about hypnosis

Hypnosis is a state of relaxation combined with imagination. It’s just like reading a novel or watching a film, but in a safe and easy way hypnosis takes you much more deeply into this imaginative state.

Here’s a quick imagination experiment you can do. Imagine your favourite food – that’s easy. Now – a bit more work – focus your imagination on it systematically for a full, timed five minutes. Say to yourself over and over “As I eat this food I smell …. and I see … and I taste …. and I feel … and I hear …. and I smell … see … taste … feel … hear ….”, slowly, over and over. Ignore any boredom. The imagination doesn’t get bored. Just let yourself imagine that food more and more fully and vividly. As you do, you are already beginning to  enter a hypnosis-like state. It’s just that in everyday life, we don’t normally focus our imagination like this. [>> Don’t be worried if you only get one or two of the senses, that’s normal. >> And, obviously, not while driving or similar activity!]

What does hypnosis feel like?

There is no one single experience to wait for and it differs a lot between people. Most people feel a dreamy state of relaxation, perhaps with the body feeling light or heavy or floaty, perhaps with vivid imaginations, perhaps a marked feeling of peace or safety or calm.

Think of it as a delightful relaxed feeling, entirely natural to you. It’s often rather like lying on the beach … or in a meadow or lawn … half asleep … half awake … hearing the birds  … feeling the sun …. so warm, so pleasant and safe … all cares a thousand miles away …. and then there’s the muffled sound of a mobile ringing … and you think “that’s my phone …. oh … I can’t be bothered … I’ll just leave it …it’ll stop in a minute …”

Is hypnosis a quick fix?

No. Some websites present the idea that hypnosis makes problems vanish. It is indeed very helpful. But as with any therapy at all, small problems vanish quickly, major problems take time, and it is in the end your responsibility to make life be different. That said, there certainly are some situations where hypnosis-based therapy can be very much quicker than non-hypnosis therapy.

Is it safe?

Hypnosis is completely safe and has no negative side-effects. It is exactly the same as relaxing in an armchair or meditation.

Clearly in situations like stage hypnosis care needs to be taken that people don’t, for example, fall off the stage, but even then the actual experience of hypnosis is safe.

Can everyone be hypnotized?

In laboratory tests the vast majority of people can be hypnotised, though some can’t. In therapy this is never a limiting factor, so don’t worry that “I can’t be hypnotised.”

What is depth of trance? Does it matter how deep I go?

A small number of people go so deeply into hypnosis that they can anaethetise themselves and  undergo surgery without pain. At the other end of the scale, hypnosis has hardly any effect on some people and they don’t enter an altered state at all. Most people are in the middle. For therapeutic purposes it doesn’t matter; for the few that really can’t go into hypnosis, I just use another method.

Am I unconscious or asleep?

Neither. You remain present, somewhere between dreamy and very alert. Your everday thoughts continue, more or less, in the background, commentating about what is going on. We simply ignore the everyday mind and focus on the imagination mind.

Will I lose control?

No. If we are talking, you know perfectly well what I am saying and what reply you choose to make.  All that hypnosis means is that you are giving a  very relaxed reply.

No-one can make you say or do anything you don’t want to and should you choose, you could wake up at any time. In any case, if someone seriously fears losing control, they won’t go very far into hypnosis in the first place.

How much will I remember?

You remember normally, which means you mostly remember most things, and forget some, as with any other event.

Hypnosis in the news

“Hypnosis really works” … “a magnificent therapeutic tool” … “Hypnotherapy cures panic attacks” … “a powerful medical treatment” … read more that the press say about hypnosis.

In the last few years, hypnosis has gone mainstream. Here are a few of the many news media reports which have appeared.

Hypnotherapy in The Guardian

“Hypnosis really works” … “a magnificent therapeutic tool“

Hypnotherapy cures panic attacks The writer experienced panic on the London underground after the terrorist bomb attacks.

Hypnotherapy in The Independent

“a powerful medical treatment”

Hypnotherapy on the BBC

Hypnosis ‘reduces cancer pain’ Childhood cancer patients suffer less pain when placed under hypnosis.

A knee operation with purely self-hypnosis as anaesthetic – amazing!

Hypnosis ‘doubles IVF success’ Hypnosis can double the success of IVF treatment by helping women to relax, say researchers.

Stranded boy flies back from Dubai under hypnosis

Hypnosis for the people All doctors should know how to perform hypnotherapy on their patients, according to a US expert.

Pain-free labour under hypnosis Women are increasingly turning to hypnosis techniques to help them beat the pain of childbirth.

Hypnotised patients ‘feel less pain’ Giving patients a form of hypnosis helps them cope better with the pain and anxiety of minor operations, doctors have found

Hypnotising the pain away Hypnosis can help to cut down the use of general anaesthesia in surgery, a hypnotherapy conference will hear.

The power of the mind Some uses of hypnotherapy within the NHS

Hypnosis for IBS

Hypnosis brings effective long-term healing of IBS The latest medical research shows that the very high success rates which hypnotherapy has with IBS are sustained long-term after the course of treatment has finished.

“Imagine your guts as a river…” An interview with Dr Peter Whorwell, the British doctor who is one of the international leaders in theuse of hypnotherapy to treat IBS on the methods he uses and the popularity with patients.

Hypnosis “can ease bowel illness”  A report in the British Medical Journal recommends that psychological treatments including hypnotherapy be recognised as best-practice for dealing with IBS, and laments the shortage of appropriately trained staff within the NHS.

Hypnotherapy in Newsweek

From Newsweek’s edition on mind-body health
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6037903/site/newsweek/

Research into relaxation on diabetes 
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6038054/site/newsweek/

Hypnosis in National Geographic’s website

Some science behind hypnosis

“Stop hassling me! There’s nothing wrong!” – the voice of anorexia

Routinely, people suffering anorexia nervosa (and its milder variant, diet obsession) do not feel they have any problem. They like being thin, they like the feeling of being in control and in women a good many even like the cessation of their periods. Far from wanting to gain weight, they feel that if their thinness is taken away they will be losing their dearest (perhaps only) treasure and achievement.  Yet underneath all that, there are likely to be profound wounds, feelings of inadequacy, deep family dynamics, and a terror of change.

While I am clear that extreme underweight is medically unhealthy, I don’t assume that someone who comes to see me wants to put on weight. Provided their health is not acutely at risk, I am happy to offer a safe and un-pressured opportunity for someone in this situation to explore their feelings and work on whatever aspect of the situation seems important to them, and come to their own conclusions about what to do.

Paradoxically, often people can change more easily when there is no pressure from outside to change. The pressure to change is a kind of conditional love. It’s a message, “you are OK! – provided you eat.”  As long as health is not in danger, then it is much the most useful thing to make friends with all parts of the person, the part that doesn’t wants to eat as well as the part that does, the part that fears change as well as the part that wants change. From this truely radical self-acceptance arises the safety to change.  This is not being laissez-faire about people starving themselves to death. It’s just an honouring that the problem has a perceived validity and a respect that people can make their own best choices, given the opportunity,

That said, if however I were to feel that the person may be at serious medical risk, then I am in professional duty bound to not continue to work with that person unless their doctor is informed of the health danger. Treatment of eating disorders where there is medical danger and the person is unable to see their weight loss (or binge/purging) as a problem, requires specialised treatment and typically a multi-disciplinary team approach. In general, I work with people with mild to moderate anorexia or bulemia. When people have severe or life-threatening eating disorders they need to be part of the Bristol NHS “STEPS” programme. I hear good reports of this from my clients. I have worked with people post-STEPS whose weight has stabilised and who want to bring healing to deeper emotional aspects.

My approach with emotional eating is warm, human and sympathetic, with an emphasis on self-love and self-forgiveness. To take the first step to re-gaining control of your eating, please ring me directly. Leave a message and I’ll call you back. I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour introductory meeting. My approach is friendly, respectful, and very effective. Please click here for contact information.

Past life healing (regression) in Bristol

If you explore far enough, life contains strange and wonderful experiences. Past lives are among a whole range of experiences with meditators, shamans, and other inner explorers may encounter.  They are not just dream-like images, but real and vivid experiences in the inner world. The impact on everyday life can be dramatic and uplifting. As with experiences such as meeting angels, I don’t worry whether they are “real” or not or whether historical evidence can be found. The healing is real and that is all that counts.

True and pseudo past lives

True past lives are the realm of karma – choices and decisions we make which affect our destiny. It is the realm of harm which befalls us which we create ourselves, unlike childhood regression which is the realm of hurt done to innocence, which we are not responsible for.  Typically in therapy you only get to the stage of looking at how you create your reality y your choices after your have healed your childhood in this life. So true past lives are rarely the business of the beginning of therapy. For this reason I nowadays mostly do not seek them out at the beginning of therapy in the way that I used to.

I do regard some past life memories as “true past lives” – they have a clear, distinctive quality and are often spine-tingling to encounter. The feeling is “I did this, and I am paying the price.” These are often agonising matters of adult decision – for example, in a famine, deciding which child to feed and which to let die. It really doesn’t matter about historical reality, because it is indeed difficult to see how a child born today could receive an imprint from any source of such a strong emotional crisis. So no matter whether historical or not, something strange is going on. Others, while also profoundly healing, strike me as being family memories from the first months of life, before the brain is fully developed. While not “before birth,” they are in the realest sense, “before everything – before ‘I’ came into existence.” Others are generational memories which happened to grandparents or great-grandparents.

I don’t normally start by looking for past lives, but wait until they come up naturally. Otherwise, you risk getting one of two things:

• A pseudo-past life, which is daily life events disguised in a historical skin. The healing achieved can be done more directly.
• A true past life which doesn’t resolve. Inner child healing is about the pain we carry due to being hurt as innocent children. Past life healing is ultimately about the pain we carry as a result of our choices and responsible actions; in other words, our karma. Only at an advanced stage in a person’s development are they ready to say “This situation is my responsibility – I created the mess I’m in by my choices.” If you do an exercise which opens up past life experiences before the person is ready, they gain information on what went wrong, but they aren’t ready to re-choose their decisions. There is no value whatever in believing “I was Nefertiti in a past life.” The question is, how did the choices and actions you made in that life affect your everyday life now? And do you now have the maturity to re-live that situation differently?

That said, it is also true that often the first past life to come up contains innocent suffering and is not the one containing the karmic choices. It may take some time before the root past lives, where you can re-choose your destiny, emerge. Contrary to almost universal belief, there is commonly more than one of these. That doesn’t make sense, but there it is.

An exception to not starting with past lives is that sometimes a person will come into the room and carry a past life with them – the whole room fills with a certain vibe. One client comes to mind who as he spoke of unrelated matters, filled the whole room with a vivid impression of being a prisoner in solitary confinement. He was surprised when I suggested past life work as the starting point, but agreed, and we resolved many things rapidly.

If you are sceptical about past lives or spirit releasement, I offer a quotation from someone who we think of as a scientist, but who was also a great modern mystic, Albert Einstein. He’s referring to the time when radio waves were first discovered, and were laughed at as self-evidently ridiculous:

Do you remember how electrical currents and “unseen waves” [he means radio waves] were laughed at? Our knowledge about man is still in its infancy.
Albert Einstein

Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing

Focusing is another therapy which I like a lot. It teaches you how to tune into your body and sense how you are feeling. (That’s feeling in the sense “I feel restless” rather than “I feel global warming is a major problem.” ) It is a wonderful therapy.

Normally, we ignore or over-ride our feelings. But life is the life of the body, and feelings are the truth of the body. So as you tune into your feelings, you are tuning into a deep source of wisdom about how to live. And when you attend to feelings respectfully, they automatically flow through in a healing way. Focusing teaches you how to achieve that.

In fact, all effective therapists who work in any depth work with feelings in this way. It’s proved by research to be a core part of any transformative process.  Carl Rogers’ Client-Centred therapy is a first cousin to focusing, and EFT (Emotional Freedom technique) achieves a similar effect. So it’s not unique. But Rogers brings to centre stage the therapist’s understanding of the client, so Rogerian work is not a self-help technique. Focusing is the only therapy school to systematically teach in detail this foundational personal development skill.

Strengths as a stand-alone psychotherapy: An excellent therapy and also a self-help tool which can help you move really deep. In harmony with the natural human emotional healing process. A valuable half-way house between therapy and meditation.

Weaknesses as a stand-alone psychotherapy: Not at all action oriented and weak on challenge and honesty. Entirely concerned with the moment-to-moment feeling process to the exclusion of other aspects of change. Lacks a body of wisdom about how emotions interrelate and how they arise from relationships, and no practical psychology for pragmatic change.

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

NLP is a valuable toolkit with lots of unique plusses, including a creative set of techniques, and a masterful way with words.  But as an in-depth life healing tool, it is in my view, like CBT, unaware of its limitations. (Happily while CBT sometimes appears to claim to be the best or only brief therapy, NLP is too smart and graceful to think that.) I should say that this applies to the NLP method as a movement. There are many excellent individual NLP therapists, trainers and writers for whom I have the high respect and to whom this criticism does not apply.

Technically, NLP is a cognitive-behavioural therapy. This means that you directly change the thoughts in your head without too much concern why you were thinking them in the first place. It is therefore effective in business settings exactly because of what I find its drawback – it can deal with things in an unemotional, cognitive way.

Here’s an example of what I regard as both the strength and weakness of NLP. It relates to jealousy and is from a mass-market book by a well-known author.

“Eliminate jealousy and obsessive thoughts with this simple technique …. If anyone is going to feel jealous, they have to go through three stages. First, they have to make a picture of something they want that they havn’t got. Second, they have to see someone else having it. Third, they have to say to themselves ‘That person has it, I want it and I can’t have it.’

Whenever a picture that makes you jealous comes into your mind, immediately turn up the brightness up and up and up until it whites out. … If you repeat this process over and over again, it automates to the point where it is almost impossible to think of the image any more.”

Now for rootless obsessive thoughts, this is a good technique – indeed one I use. But it doesn’t begin to heal the emotional roots of true jealousy. First of all, there can be “good” jealousy, a natural protective force in relationships. “Bad” jealousy may have roots where one person secretly feels unlovable, or secretly fears being abandoned, and is actually unconsciously pushing their partner away. Or they may be repeating a pattern of rejection handed down in their family perhaps for generations, or the jealously may represent hidden guilt about a former partner whom the jealous person feels that have abandoned. Facing all this may need real courage and openness to the truth.

So the whiteout method is quick and simple. Sometimes it is all that needed, for example for a jealousy which is no more than a shallow habit of thought. But for true emotional jealousy, it is only a sticking plaster.

Strengths of NLP as stand-alone psychotherapy

Shares with SOBT an emphasis on resources, not problems. Action-oriented, with a good balance of inner process with action. Emphasises that you are in the driving seat of your life, and that quite a few thoughts can be changed ever so quickly. At its best, uniquely precise about the micro-details of how the mind works internally – NLP has no equal for this. Many ingenious and clever techniques including the very successful “rewind” technique for phobias and trauma. Excellent with words, and applicable in sales and business. Attractive coherent vision of life, but like coaching, this is incomplete.

Weaknesses of NLP as a stand-alone psychotherapy

All that skill with words leads to unfounded hype in much NLP advertising. (As a rule of thumb, divide NLP advertising by five!) Can be superficial and quick-fix. To some extent depends on buying into the whole NLP values system. Vision is Americanist and is too oriented to change and excellence and only partly understands acceptance, let-go and dis-identification. Cannot deal with life and death issues.

Carl Rogers’ Client-centred Therapy

Pioneer US therapist Carl Rogers is one of my heroes, a great therapist and a very beautiful human being. Rogers made the bold and profound step of dropping all techniques and psychological theory from his psychotherapy. Instead, he concentrated on the relationship between the therapist and the client. He maintained that if the therapist

1. possesses empathy,
2. is caring, respectful, and warmly accepting of the client, and
3. is real and genuine in his or her responses,

then the client will change and grow. In the 1940’s, psychotherapy was still a world in which the expert therapist diagnosed what was wrong with the client, and then told the client how to get better. Rogers trust and respect for his client’s self-healing was utterly revolutionary.

Today his work is called the client-centred “approach”, not therapy, because of its wide value in all types of relationships, in schools, at work, and in the family. Empathy, warm accepting respect, and genuineness are indeed the bedrock of all relationships.

Rogers worked extensively in education, and would have been appalled by the present emphasis in the UK on testing in schools:

“I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.”

Rogers has been validated by research which shows that in all forms of therapy,  the relationship with therapist is a very important important factor.

Modern psychotherapy owes Rogers a profound debt and I’m sure his work continues to have immense value.

However, techniques do count and the psychotherapy world has moved on. The popular image nowadays of client-centred therapy is of Rogers’ minimalist phase, a reaction against psychoanalysis. In this he did nothing except repeat back what the client had said, in slightly different words, to show that he had understood according to these three criteria. (That doesn’t sound much, but it was the WAY he repeated things back – he heard underlying nuances on such a deep level and repeated them back with such compassion, respect, and presence – amazing to behold.)

The minimalist phse was a step in his own development, and that of modern therapy. But some therapists, in particular counsellors, still today practice nothing else. To me it is a mistake to cling to a stepping-stone methodology which even Rogers in the end left behind. I get many clients who have had such counselling and they all say the same thing: “I understand where my problems come from, but nothing has changed.” So while the way I do things embodies Rogers’ three principles, it goes beyond that: I want your everyday life to change. With modern Rogerian minimalist counselling, too often it doesn’t.

Human Givens Therapy – a critique

Human Givens therapy is a rich eclectic toolkit of techniques from various types of therapy which have been supported by academic research. Of all the therapies discussed here, it is with CBT perhaps the one most rooted in theoretical academic psychology. Though its founders call it a “new therapy”, I would not call it new in the radical way that Family Constellation therapy or Solution-Oriented Therapy is. A considerable amount of the actual techniques seem to be drawn from, or amount to, hypnotherapy, NLP and CBT. What is new, and valuable, is that they have succeeded in placing these tools in the hands of a wide variety of mainstream practitioners who previously used less effective methods.

The Human Givens attitude is that no existing therapy is complete on its own, and that’s right. They have identified underlying principles of abstract psychological theory which they claim underlie successful therapies, and constructed a synthesis. They also emphasise stepping back from specific problems to look broadly at  “are you getting your needs met?” Again, that’s right. Its founders, Joe Griffin And Ivan Tyrrel, have among other things identified from psychological research a list of obvious human needs which they call “human givens” and have created an integrative synthesis of therapy techniques, based around getting these needs met without the need for much inner exploration. Such exploration they broad-brush largely condemn as “introspection” and to be avoided.

In addition, they take a valuable step beyond CBT by recognising the importance of emotion. But they regard this with regrettable sweeping simplification as something always bad and to be got rid of.

So it’s a highly action-oriented storehouse of useful techniques in a clear framework of what works for, basically, Type 1 therapy on my classification above. In that respect it is, as is solution-oriented therapy, a power for good in the world of counselling and social work, where a surprising amount of what is done just does not work at all.

But where is the heart?

However, I confess to not having the enthusiasm for Human Givens all this might seem to deserve. Partly that is their simplified and hugely incomplete dismissal of introspection and emotions. But there is more. If you read other parts of this guide, you’ll know that I am interested in the overall vision of humanity which a therapy school holds. And something, it’s hard to put into words, some vibe or poetry about their work stops me falling in love with Human Givens.

One thing is that in their book Griffin and Tyrrell seem to regard the valid way of knowing, from which therapy is to be developed, as theoretical academic research and intellectual argument. But there are other ways of knowing – the heart, the intuition. It deeply troubles me that a form of therapy claiming to liberate the human condition appears to place so little value on the knowing which comes from the heart and the intuition. Of course, these forms of knowing are not valued within university psychology departments (studied yes, but as part of the operation of the department, stamped out.) Yet to me, in therapy these must have primacy. Carl Rogers, Alexander Lowen, Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, Insoo Kim Berg and Bert Hellinger first developed their therapies from their heart and their intuition, then validated them by research. This feels right to me.

Psychologists telling you how to live

Then, there is to me a quality of exalting the psychologist as expert. In Human Givens, change comes because the expert tells the person to get their needs met and teaches them how to do it. I’m not quoting directly from Griffin and Tyrrell here, but the subtext that to me comes across from their book is: “Psychology knows your needs, psychology can tell you how to get them met.” Now of course this has an element truth for any therapy, especially with certain client groups. And yet, and yet. Carl Rogers, or the Solution-oriented school, have made such radical and courageous experiments in recognising the client as the expert in their own lives. This radicalism seems to have passed Human Givens by. In Human Givens it is firmly the therapist who is the expert in the client’s life. For me, while there may well be a first stage like this in any therapy, a further message has to be present. This is the subtext to the client, “Look into your own heart and you will find all the answers you need.” Personally, I cannot locate this in the book Human Givens. All I can find is intellectual knowledge flowing from academic research into the therapy expert, who then therapises the client. In my belief what the world needs is power returned to the human heart, not to intellectual psychology and not to any expert cadre within society.

Remember, all the appreciations of therapy on this page are just my personal opinion. In everyday application by its practitioners, there is very much which is excellent about the Human Givens approach. In some contexts, Griffin and Tyrrel’s work will be a revelation (as is Solution-oriented therapy) and will no doubt benefit many people. All I can say is that just as I aim to inspire others to trust their hearts, I trust my own heart. And, somewhere, somehow, despite what they have achieved, in reading Griffin and Tyrrel’s book, my heart does not fall in love with their work.

Spirit releasement in Bristol

This is a lesser-known cousin of past life work. In deep trance, some people have the experience of thoughtforms with a subjective quality of “not my thought – belongs to someone else.” Together we ask the thoughtforms to leave, which they always do, and the person feels a great sense of liberation and clarity for life to move forward. In California these thoughtforms are regarded as being ghosts and “entities.” But that’s California. For me it’s like asking if past lives are real; who knows? who cares? – the healing is real.

It’s all a bit weird, and people are reassured to know that this is really quite common and not in any way a sign of madness. After all, if you really look, a whole bunch of the thoughts which feel like “my thoughts” aren’t really ours at all, but come from the culture of the age we live in or from what our parents thought. So it is normal to harbour thoughts which are in truth not our own.

Believe me, I’m not some kind of Californian weirdo – I wouldn’t choose to go looking for ghosts and entities. I first came across this work on a training course in California, and assumed that this was one of those things that only happen in America. (For example, psychiatrically, multiple personality disorder is overwhelmingly a US phenomenon.) I was quite surprised to find this is not uncommon in this country.

This situation is commonest in emergency workers such as police, firemen and paramedics who start to get dragged down by painful situations they have witnessed. It also occurs in teenagers who listen to too much satanic rock music. And it features in addictions, sometimes even ones as commonplace as smoking. It can happen (rarely) that someone in trance experiences they smoke because “someone else is smoking through me” and when we ask that other “someone” to leave, the person can finally quit smoking through normal methods. Yes, it is strange. But pragmatically, it works.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)

(More coming soon on EFT.) EFT is a very good method which I like a lot, though I don’t use it all that often as I have other methods which cover the same ground. It helps people turn towards their experiences and get into their feelings, it helps them stand back from a situation and make choices, it helps feelings to unfold, and to explore underlying feelings in depth. But I regard it as mostly an excellent and easily-taught combination and systematising of existing elements, rather than something fundamentally new. As such, it is a genuine step forward. I know EFT afficionados won’t agree with me, but that’s how I see it. It is a form of meditation-by-numbers.

One really great aspect is that EFT understands the importance of two key things:

1. Turning to face and experience your experiences. The fundamental truth of healing is that when you do this, in a neutral, accepting way, the painful experiences flow away and dissolve on their own – without EFT, without TFT, without anything. (See meditation).
2. It understands how “meta experiences” get in the way. Meta experiences are attitudes at the back of your mind towards your main experiences. These range from the simple “boys don’t cry, girls don’t get angry” to feeling “I don’t want to be feeling this! (eg sad, angry, panicky)” to feeling “I don’t deserve anything better than to feel like this” and many more. Such attitudes really block the basic healing process. Few other therapies understand this. (These attitudes are what EFT terms “reversed polarities.”)
   For example, it seems so natural, if you are panicky, to think “I don’t want to be feeling this.” Yet this attitude can be what is keeping the panics happening. If you turn towards the experience and feel it acceptingly, it too will flow though and away.

About me

Psychotherapy research shows that how you feel about the therapist is  an important factor for success. Do you feel understood and accepted, and safe to be yourself? Do you feel seen and heard, and have confidence that the therapist can help? Techniques do matter, but human factors come first. So you need to know something about me, and here it is.

Thirty-five years ago, I started my professional life doing research in mathematics. I wanted to know the fundamental truth of everything. I still do. I wanted to know the deeper truth of people, and emotions, and life, and every individual I met.  So I started to take my papers and sit in the psychology section of the university library. When I needed a break, I’d look through the books.

Systematically – mathematicians are systematic – I took every single book off the shelves and glanced through it. There were thousands. All disappointed me. The science, the statistics, the academic theories: so dry, so lifeless. No alive truth in any of them.

After many weeks I came to the therapy section. Finally! Psychologists with something to say! I fell in love with Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich and Fritz Perls.  I read voraciously.

A message from the unconscious

Being ignorant of how the unconscious mind works, I had no idea this reading was about to bring me to a major life change. I genuinely thought I was just curious. But after a few more months came a moment I remember vividly. I looked at the Journal of Symbolic Logic. I looked at Carl Rogers’ book On becoming a person, lying beside it. Looked back at Symbolic Logic … again at Rogers. Stared at Rogers. From nowhere a thought came for the very first time, fresh and unheralded: “Don’t want logic … want … love.”

What did that mean? I had no idea. I’d read that “the unconscious mind” could send people “messages.” But I’d never expected that to happen to me.

One thing at least was clear: I’d had enough of the academic world. The voice that spoke in me was quiet, but I couldn’t ignore it. You have to follow your inner truth, no matter where it takes you. With no idea what came next, I resigned my research grant. After toying with traveling to America to work with Carl Rogers’ school, I joined the great 70’s migration to India. India was more unknown, more of a risk  – plus, it was cheaper.

If “living in an Indian ashram” sounds tranquil and quiet, the one I was in, with at any one time up to 10,000 visitors from all over the world, wasn’t. It was bustling, busy, modern and intense. It was wonderful. (And 30 years later, it still is – www.osho.com).  The understanding was that for meditation to go really deep, Westerners needed to first do some therapy. So for Westerners there was an emphasis on personal development workshops, often very challenging.  I loved them and took part in many.

But what I really loved was that back in the West, those types of workshop – based on the work of Rogers, Reich, Perls and many others – were the mountain-top of intensity and understanding of life, the goal, the furthest you could go. Here in the ashram, they were only a preliminary foothill to an everyday life which combined a joyous vivid aliveness and the deepest silent meditation.

Accelerated change

Nowadays you see adverts for NLP courses in “accelerated change.” The ashram was an experience of accelerated change which lasted day in, day out, month after month, year after year.

All sorts of jobs needed doing, and I like doing things I’ve never done before. So at various times over many years I designed a telephone exchange, wrote for the magazine, later on ran the computer support department, and was for a long time in charge of the vital supply of clean water.  (Half a million litres per day, from a complex of borewells and pumps which looked like an oil refinery designed by Dada and built by Picasso, but less rational. When I give talks on work-related stress, that’s my reference experience. Believe me, I know about work-related stress.) Along the way came the opportunity came to train as a therapist, and I trained first in 1994 in neo-Reichian emotional release, and then in hypnosis and other things, initially in the ashram’s own therapy institute, and later with some remarkable teachers in the USA, Europe and the UK.

So in a particular sense, I came to doing therapy backwards. Most people who become therapists start off in the world of conventional society where change is rare. It’s a world where the majority of people remain in a groove their whole lives and never think to question their emotions and motivations. They then enter the world of therapy where for the first time personal change is the norm.

Instead, I started from a background where change was the norm. It has been my immense good fortune to live for so long in an environment where everyone lived their everyday lives in the understanding that what heals is love, that what keeps life moving are truth and honesty, that the key to change it to be ready to take risks, that only profound acceptance brings peace, that there is a final and ultimate enquiry: “Who is the one who loves, who is honest, who feels peace? Who is the one who is born and dies?”

As a result, I know what works and what doesn’t in life change and life healing, and that’s what I offer you in my work.  I know how much joy life is waiting to give us, and it makes me sad to see how little happiness so many people settle for.

I know that somewhere inside, everyone is completely OK, strong and loveable.

I know that somewhere inside, everyone is completely OK, strong and loveable. So I know that transformation is not a question of blundering in the dark, trying to solve problems with the aid of academic psychology. It’s a matter of beginning to find that OK place in yourself and to live from it, because when you do, your own light shines and shows you the way. Your own unique solutions naturally emerge. And what is healing is to find a therapist who can recognise that place in you when you yourself cannot.

This approach to healing works, it really works.  Extensive research proves it, in particular by the solution-oriented school of therapy. Every day in my consulting room I see from people’s faces, and hear from their success stories, how lifted and energised they are by this attitude. Goethe has it beautifully:

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

The quotation from Mark Twain at the top of this page has always been my guiding principle, and still is. If that, or anything in this website touches you in some way, and you’d like to explore further how I might help you, do please call and talk to me personally. I’m always happy to answer questions.

The dragons and the treasure: the truth of emotional healing

Change happens on different levels. Life-change methods like coaching, solution-oriented therapy, CBT  (cognitive-behavioural therapy) and workplace NLP deal mainly with conscious thoughts and actions. You experiment with doing things differently, or take a different perspective, or set old thoughts aside; you “change your mind.” This is very powerful work and with some clients, it is all I need to do.

But sometimes, behaviour patterns have emotional roots and you need to look deeper to find the magic inside yourself. That can be scary.

When we fear judgement, it is immensely healing to find instead acceptance. So I aim to create a safe and non-judgemental climate for the work.  I am very accepting and forgiving of the dark places which people fear inside themselves. That acceptance isn’t just “professional.” It comes from being extremely honest with myself during thirty years of my own inner journey.  I’ve looked into all sorts of emotions inside myself and found that when I do so, what lies beyond is peacefulness and joy; always.

Old-style therapies could easily focus on the bad feelings in such a way that the person felt worse and worse. As a result, NHS therapies such as CBT tend to either ignore the dragons completely, or with grim set resolution focus on the positive. Sometimes this works, but it has severe limitations, because the dragons are still there. My approach is to make friends with them.

If you’d like to begin to make friends with your dragons and liberate your treasures, give me a ring. I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour introductory meeting. My approach is friendly, respectful, and very effective. Please click here for contact information.

Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a wonderful – there’s no other word – natural talent of the human mind which is extremely useful in psychotherapy and healing. Basically, it is a combination of imagination and relaxation. It helps tremendously with re-programming unhelpful patterns of thought and feeling and with healing the hidden causes that problems sometimes have.

When you read a novel, go to a movie or tell a story to a child, you are entering the world of the imagination. It can be extremely powerful. A scary film can have a visercal effect, and make someone curl up and hide their head under a friends’s arm. A funny film brightens your whole week.

Even a children’s story can be life-changing – to this day I am super-extra-careful with my gloves, so strong was the effect of “The kittens who lost their mittens” when I was little!

Therapeutic hypnosis draws on that power of the imagination to change your life. Our imagination, not our logic, runs our life. If you imagine bad things, how bad life is, how hopeless, that’s what the mind will create. If you imagine good things (realistic and aligned with your values), that’s what you will move towards.

While relaxing and fascinating, hypnosis is not in itself therapeutic. Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis in therapy. Hypnotherapists are flexible in their approach, and may use many of the methods on this page, empowered by hypnosis. When they use Freudian free association to discover hidden sources of conflict, that is strictly what is termed hypnoanalysis. More generally, hypnoanalysis applies to any kind of technique exploring the deep subconscious for hidden things, including inner child healing and past life recall. In an easy, relaxed state of dreamy imagination, it is possible to entirely bypass the conscious mind and its prejudices and discover key conflicts inaccessible by other means.

A unique advantage – hypnosis pushes the reset button of the mind

Many issues can be dealt with in many ways, with and without hypnotherapy. However hypnosis leads the field with a certain class of situations where people are stuck in a repetitive habit loop of thinking and acting. “I mustn’t have another cream cake …” – but you do. “I should stop drinking now … ” – but you don’t. These mental tape loops can be completely out of control for the conscious mind. It doesn’t matter how much you tell yourself not to, you do it anyway. In these situations hypnosis can be quick and efficient in pushing the reset button of the mind. It’s like the Ctrl-Alt-Delete on an IBM PC computer.

Some hypnotherapists however give the impression that all aspects of all issues can be dealt with like this. That’s not true, though hypnosis is often excellent at some stage of the therapy process for very many issues.

Other advantages of hypnosis a stand-alone therapy

Able to work directly with the unconscious mind; routinely surprises clients by finding hidden conflicts and resources which other therapies can’t. Based on what works rather than academic theory; a rich treasury of practical psychology built up over more than a century and a half. Quick and powerful with all sorts of common problems. Able to easily incorporate the best in other therapies, and through hypnosis, make them even better. Enthusiastic and passionate about life and its possibilities. A good balance between inner process and outer action.

Disadvantages of hypnosis as stand-alone therapy

In a way, over-pragmatic – while passionate about life (a huge plus), no overall coherent vision. Sometimes over-sells: some hypnosis marketing gives people the impression that it enables major change without effort, pain, or confronting the real issues. This has a little truth, but not much: with all forms of psychotherapy, some change happens “automagically” ie with little action by the you. But for any but the simplest issues, what you get out of therapy is directly proportional to what you put in. While bypassing the everyday mind is powerful and useful, purely hypnosis-based ignores the everyday mind and the treasures that conscious understanding brings to a situation.