Trevor's Blog

There are days that punctuate our lives, and weddings tend to be one of them. They can also be opportunities to count your blessings, and to tune into the circle of life. Our second son got married last Saturday. The ceremony was conducted in Orleans House in Richmond, a beautiful location built by George II for his wife. We were blessed with good weather – sunny but not too hot, because who decided that men should wear three layers of morning suit while woman can shimmy about in diaphanous sleeveless creations? Not that I’d look good in the latter, but I’m all about choice.

Waiting for the bride gave me a chance to watch my sons. Two years ago Stuart, the youngest, was best man to Mark. This time the situation was reversed, although apparently not the worry; Mark looked the more nervous by far on both occasions. I’ve no idea how your children turn out liking each other, especially when they’re so different. My two spent their childhood in a small bedroom in bunk beds, even when they had the choice to have separate rooms. We always encouraged them to sort out their own disputes, and somehow they did – and during the teenage years when my brother and I drifted apart, they stayed together, sharing friends and hanging out. Football was a glue, but love was by far the more powerful adhesive. And in that room, waiting for the bride, it was never more evident.

Sitting quietly was Mark’s wife Tara, heavily pregnant and glowing with our first Grandchild. Should he have a capital letter like that? I’m not sure, but he feels that important to us all. At one stage I knelt beside her, touched her tummy – which is obviously public property now – and said “Just think, in 25 years’ time we could be sitting somewhere like this watching him get married.” Like I said, weddings are part of life’s punctuation, and a grandson present makes you realise that the story being punctuated isn’t just your own, or the happy couples, it’s endless.

The bride arrived. Ksenia is Russian. We live in a wonderful world where people can be raised thousands of miles from each other and find love, and somehow the unlikeliness of that made it even more precious. Maybe others felt that too because the room was awash with emotion as she entered. Tara was in tears almost immediately – so maybe she had her hormones on full and we were just caught in their waft. That’ll be my excuse anyway. Ksen radiated. Of course she looked gorgeous, it was always going to be a given, but throughout the ceremony she had a smile whose proportions challenged her face to contain it – and every time the word marriage was mentioned it got even bigger. Her happiness was utterly contagious. And when Stu and Ksen are together the world seems to recede from them a little, you can almost hear a click as they come together and the world has to fight to gain their attention. As his father it’s wonderful to see. At Mark’s wedding Stu was a four day drive and a boat trip from a place called love, and doubted its existence for him. I could have had a ‘told you so’ moment, but it escaped me in the relief. He’s not doubting now, and your children finding love is the biggest reason for a parent to relax that I’ve experienced.

The wedding speeches were informative too. Ksen asked me to speak on the morning of the wedding. Who needs preparation, I’m a professional? I stood, I looked at them, and my mind went blank. All the clever things I meant to say waved from a distance. I stumbled through some stuff, and it’s going to need the dvd to remind me exactly what, and I sat back down in record time. Stu fared much better, and then it was Mark’s turn as Best man. I knew how hard he’d worked on the speech, and how much he wanted to do a good job for Stu. And he looked at them, and the same thing happened to him! It wasn’t quite like Smithy in Gavin and Stacey, but it will be when we talk about it in the family in the future, after all, that’s how family myths are made. And do you know something? I have never loved him more than I did at that moment. Seeing Stu so happy, how could he contain his emotion? And why would he, we’ll remember his love a lot longer than we’d have remembered his jokes. They have women they love, and they have each other. I’m a lucky man.

A wonderful day. A wonderful family. A wonderful life.

On Sunday I was booked to appear on the Jeni Barnett show on BBC Radio London. It was for an hour and the plan was just for me to take calls about how Cognitive Hypnotherapy can help people with their problems. I was really looking forward to it. I awoke on Sunday morning to hear the news about Amy Winehouse, and guessed that the show was going to go entirely differently.

I watched the news and saw a succession of experts on addiction give their opinion on what had happened and why, and I was resolved about one thing: I wasn’t going to be one of them. Much of what they had to say was valid – about the general patterns of addiction and its timeline, and some spoke movingly from personal experience, but nobody other than Amy herself could really speak about her addiction, certainly not someone who never met her.

I work with addicts. I find there are two main areas that need to be worked on for recovery to occur and be sustained. The first is the physical addiction. Chemicals are a vital part of the brain’s operating system. Anything we add to the mix of them changes the way the brain works. After prolonged exposure to the effects of a chemical that chemical can become part of the operating system. If it is withdrawn or runs low the brain causes us to behave in a way that will restore its balance – as deadly as that balance might actually be. An addict will experience that as a craving.

The good news is that because the brain is amazingly adaptive it will change itself again in response to the continuing absence of the chemical or its effect – it will find a new balance, given time. Part of my work is to use the techniques I have available to create a sense of that stability as soon as possible, and minimise the degree of the craving as much as we can. Many approaches focus on this area, and some stop there.

Personally I believe the second area is even more important because the first can lead to recovery, but not necessarily prevent relapse. A basic premise of Cognitive Hypnotherapy is that all behaviour has a purpose. So why we would invest in something we know is going to kill us? Why wouldn’t Amy stop? Most of what we do is driven by our unconscious, and as a therapist I see many variations of behaviour geared towards the same thing – trying to feel better about who we are, or damping down the bad feelings we have about who we are. Mood altering substances can be used for either – they can make you feel more comfortable around people and able to ‘be yourself’. They can make your feel sexier, more interesting, more talented, more loved or loveable. They can also be used to dampen your response to traumatic memories, to escape from an unpleasant reality or to distance you from your self-loathing. So here, in my opinion, is the key to sustained recovery: improving your relationship to yourself. If you change the learning your brain has taken from past experiences that led to the unconscious seeking drugs or drink to make you more able to cope with yourself in the world then you can learn to live without them. Tune your brain to a reality that allows you to enjoy being you and everything changes. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

And that’s why only Amy could tell you what led her to addiction, and what prevented her from being able to sustain her recovery – and why I didn’t want to sound like an ‘expert’. We know the chemistry of addiction, and it applies to everyone, but the psychology of addiction is a story the person writes themselves. In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we believe that is true of all clients. They are the experts. It’s for us to fit into their ideas, not force their issue to fit ours.

Sadly for Amy there was an additional obstacle: I believe that everyone has the potential to recover, but it depends on many factors, even with a better relationship to yourself. A healthy environment is one of them. Protection from people looking to profit from you is another. Showbiz is not the ideal place for recovery. We should all take care to create the best environment to support who we’d like to be – and that includes work, relationships and friends.

On a more positive note, the show did demonstrate how people bond through music. It touches us emotionally, and a singer’s words can resonate with our own lives. Amy sang of the struggle to love and be loved, and to live. And most of us have understood that struggle at some point in our life. Listeners struggled to voice their loss for someone they never knew. And that, in what has been a dire week for humanity, is some reason to hope.

If you’d like to listen to my bit on the show where I talk about Cognitive Hypnotherapy and speak to some callers about self-esteem, insomnia and procrastination then click on this link.

I was invited onto the show by the lovely Jeni. As well as talking about Cognitive Hypnotherapy I also got to speak to some listeners about insomnia, low self-esteem and procrastination. Oh, and weight loss and the producer’s jealousy. It was a busy time. I’ve edited out the music to save you time. Ooh – and Tony Blackburn walked past!

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An event last weekend was one of my highlights of the year – and for the second year in a row. In 2010 we launched a presentation skills workshop for Questies interested in adding training to their income stream. It was a magical, transformative three days that went far beyond my expectations, and the feedback was amazing. Last weekend we ran it again and I wondered, as it approached, was it a fluke? Would we get the same response again? Certainly the run up was very similar: we have a higher last minute drop-out rate for this course than any other, and the emails we get beforehand indicate a high level of nervousness from many of the attendees.

The first morning you could light the building with the nervous energy in the room, and yet by the Sunday afternoon every single delegate was standing in front of the group talking comfortably, and often movingly, about what being able to do so has meant to them.

So the question I was left pondering is, why should this be so? Why do people get so het up about public speaking? Surveys seem to show time and again that fear of public speaking tops the charts, even outranking fear of death. As Seinfeld commented, the figures seem to show that at a funeral the person giving the eulogy would rather be in the box!

This is my take on it.

Our genes have evolved to select for sociability. Over millions of years it’s been our ability to work and collaborate together at the level that we have that has led to our success as a species. So individually, the ability to be acceptable within a group has proven important, if not vital, to our survival. The more you prosper within your clan the closer to the fire you sit, the bigger your share of the carcass, the better your selection of mates. And what causes us to prosper is the way we’re judged and rewarded within our social group, peer group, company or family according to the values that are held to be most important to them. Some are pretty universal – bravery, intelligence, honesty, those kinds of things. Others are specific to the culture: small feet, big feet, singing voice or practical ability. What matters here isn’t what the criteria is, but that our brain is sensitised to the fact of there always being criteria and asking ‘what is my value here, and how do I raise it?

That means that we’re hardwired for sensitivity to the way others respond to us. Just as a spider phobia can be created from a single negative exposure to one, while a neutral object like an apple would take several bad apple incidents, so it doesn’t take many youthful encounters with rejection or withdrawal of approval – or the perception of either – for us to become over-sensitised to situations where further similar censure could occur. Our unconscious is constantly building a mental model to guide us towards actions that will reward us and away from actions that will damage us or waste energy. So what can happen when we’re young to question our acceptability to others and cause our unconscious to seek to avoid exposure to their opinion? What can’t?:

Standing up in front of the class and getting ridiculed by the teacher for getting their times table wrong.
Running on stage during the school play and falling over your costume to the laughter of the crowd.
Your mother shouting at you for breaking something in the supermarket
Friends picking on you in the playground because your shoes weren’t fashionable.

That’s a short random list of stories that clients of mine have found to be the root of their fear of public speaking – which I think is really a fear of other people’s opinions. As you can see, it would be exceptional for a child to get through their formative years without experiencing something like those things on the list, a situation where they become the focus of attention in the eyes of others in unpleasant circumstances. Objectively quite trivial, but in the light of our sensitivity to any question about our social acceptability, subjectively of prime importance. And what happens to us is used to anticipate what will happen to us, so once the pebble of self-doubt has been dropped into your mindstream, the consequences can continue to ripple outwards for the rest of your life.

What can these childhood events lead to? What can’t they? Anything involving people and judgement:
A fear of being rejected in relationships
A fear of not being good enough that leads to under-achievement.
A fear of not being good enough that leads to over-achievement, but no fulfilment
A fear of offering an opinion to your peers or bosses.
A belief that you’re a fraud and will one day be found out.

These are common problems that people bring to me and the people I train. And they can be sorted using Cognitive Hypnotherapy. And also, the presenting course has taught me, by the right training in the right environment.

Many of the group arrived on the Friday with a fear of presenting. Most had a belief that they need to be someone else to be a good presenter and are expecting ‘tricks of the trade’ to turn them into that someone else on stage. I’ve seen plenty of presenters who do just that, and I’m not going to add to them. I think the secret of good presenting, teaching or training is authenticity; the confidence to just be yourself.

Through a weekend of misdirection in the exercises I ask them to do, through a supportive and safe atmosphere they create, and through the feedback they receive from each other that makes them realise they share similar illusions about their limitations, they quickly begin to grow. And while I give them some ideas on presenting structure and some tips on state management and the like, what I’m mainly doing is taking away from them. I’m taking away the notion that they have to be someone else. I’m taking away the idea that they have to know everything, I’m removing the thought that presenting to a group is anything other than another form of conversation.

That’s why teaching people to present can be so personally transformative. It works indirectly on the illusion I think most of us walk around with to some degree in some context or another: that it’s not enough just being us, being someone else would be somehow better. There is no ‘better you’ to be than you, and no more fun to be had than fully enjoying who you are. And we should keep on learning until we believe that in any situation we find ourselves in.

The message from the weekend is very clear. You’re already ok. Believing that will change your life. If you’re scared in situations where there isn’t anything real to fear, the feeling is just a signal that there’s something to learn that will help you grow, not a signal to run. And there are plenty of ways to help you grow – one of which is by stepping through the illusion of what scares you most.

My congratulations and gratitude to everyone who did that very thing.

It takes a lot to make my wife Bex rant. It takes even more for her to still be ranting at dinner to something she heard that morning. Dr Peter Naish obviously has a gift. He was reported widely in the press yesterday talking about hypnosis being used more widely within the NHS. This is obviously great news and something to be applauded. So many people have been working for years to make the benefits more widely known and accepted within the medical establishment.

We listened to him speaking on Radio Four. That’s when the trouble started:

“Hypnosis isn’t really of itself a therapy, although it’s often portrayed as such. It’s a tool.”

Really? Is that line still being touted after all these years? Oh dear, I hoped he’d be more in touch with modern trends.

“Hypnosis is almost trivial. It’s easy to learn, there’s no magic. All that a hypnotist is likely to do is speaking, so they’re not doing very much to you that you couldn’t do anyway, but the effects can be potent.”

Cue hissing from my wife. Almost trivial? I suppose I should have been angry too. In one sound bite he’d trashed the hard work that many thousands of professional hypnotherapists have put into learning how to use this approach to help people. ‘Just speaking’? I have hundreds of people losing weight from listening to my Thinking Slimmer downloads. I think there might be more to it than just speaking. Even so, I didn’t get mad because at that point I suspected one of two things:

1. That he was talking about hypnosis from his own level of application of it. There are many people who learn hypnosis at a superficial level. They tend to believe that hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation; that reading an induction will take people into that state, and the deeper the better, and that in that state people are open to suggestion. If that’s as far as you go, it is easy to learn and there is no magic to it. You simply read scripts aimed at their problem. And it’s about as far into the possible applications of hypnotherapy or suggestion as a surgeon who stops when they learn to extract a splinter with a pin.

In my particular approach, Cognitive Hypnotherapy, I’ve written a book of 90,000 words which provides not only a scientific rationale for why a modern interpretation of hypnosis can help people, but also a framework that allows us to utilise techniques from any approach Dr Naish would consider ‘proper therapies’ within our methodology. That makes those therapies tools of ours, not vice versa.

In my first book, Wordweaving: The Science of Suggestion, I described a model of suggestion that all the people I train use (and many others) which uses the client’s own perceptions to create the change they want. It takes a lot of effort to learn and skill to apply. It works without any degree of relaxation, loss of control or any of the other things that tend to be associated with what Dr Naish calls hypnosis. And it works.

So, my first reason for not joining Bex in throwing of objects in the direction of the radio was the possibility that Dr Naish is so stuck in his academic medical world that he doesn’t know what’s been happening with hypnosis over the last 15 years. Eminence doesn’t always signal expertise.

2. My second suspicion wasn’t long in being realised. He went on,
“We want it to be in the hands of people who are medically trained already.” Ah, things are becoming clearer. So despite it being a trivial tool, only medical people are safe to use it. Right. Instead of who, exactly? Obviously instead of “some strange person in Yellow pages with questionable qualifications”. They were his words.

How superficially clever. There’s the choice members of the public, a trained medical professional or someone wearing a spangly kaftan. Ridiculous and insulting, but with a political aim – the medical establishment ring-fencing hypnosis – so understandable. The irony is, of course, that the reason that the medical world is taking an interest in hypnosis is because more and more evidence is emerging of its usefulness, but most of that evidence hasn’t been provided by the medical establishment, but by the increasing number of members of the public who have been to see a lay hypnotherapist – the very people Dr Naish is seeking to exclude.

I saw he trotted out the old stories of ‘cowboy’ hypnotherapists installing false memories in their clients in some of the newspaper articles . Now, I’m in agreement with him on this one point. There are too many hypnotherapists out there who are superficially trained, unsupervised and/or pursuing a personal agenda in their therapy such as he describes. Frankly, one is too many; they need to be weeded out. However, Dr Naish seems to be oblivious to the fact that last year hypnotherapy actually became self-regulated for the first time, within the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, which is itself approved by the Department of Health. It’s not ideal, but it’s a start and I’m hopeful that the crooks and cowboys will be forced out as standards are raised. And they’re already a small minority.

I too have seen clients who’ve been to see hypnotherapists who were rubbish. But I’ve also seen as many clients who’ve been to see medical professionals, like psychologists and psychiatrists, who didn’t help them either – and who actually added to their burden. Only last year I had a client of 16 who was diagnosed with anorexia by a psychiatrist and promptly spent 18 months as an outpatient at a high profile clinic working hard to live up to her label. I think I saw her 6 times and she was back at her BMI and moving on with her life. Time and time again I see clients crowbarred into medical diagnoses and fed treatments that fit the training of the person they are seeing, not the treatments that might best fit them. So I’m not in any hurry or feel any pressure to surrender the potential of our approach to the medical profession, but I’d be very happy to work more with them. At least those without the snobbery towards lay practitioners.

The good news is that Dr Naish’s efforts have led more people to consider seeing a hypnotherapist – the people practising in my network have reported that happening.

We know that the NHS is struggling, and the chances of them being able to offer what we can in the private sector is non-existent, so I don’t see Dr Naish’s wishes as any kind of a threat. It’s just a shame that people in a position to positively promote something they know to be potent, can’t do so without connecting it to a blinkered agenda that would rob many of the benefits, simply because of their prejudice.

There are good hypnotherapists and bad hypnotherapists. The buyer needs to beware, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to differentiate. There are good doctors and bad doctors. Often they’re harder to spot.

Anyway, that’s my non-rant rant over. I’ve sent Dr Naish a copy of my book. You never know…

Now, is it safe to loosen the buckles on my wife’s jacket yet?

The Daily Express recruited several of their staff to listen to a Slimpod, a recording designed and recorded by Trevor to help people lose weight, and available through Thinking Slimmer. As you can read, the results surprised them.

The use of hypnotic suggestion has been one of the key elements of Cognitive Hypnotherapy from the beginning, and Trevor’s book, Wordweaving: The Science of Suggestion, established him as a thought leader in this field. A lot of scientific research has demonstrated how we unconsciously make decisions, and Wordweaving uses this knowledge to retune people’s attitudes towards whatever has been their problem.

In the case of Slimpods, listeners listen for 10 minutes per night and the ideas present within the recording gently change their perceptions and responses around food. It sounds too easy to be true, because losing weight is supposed to be tough, isn’t it? Only because your unconscious is making it so. It can make it as easy as it’s been making it hard, so, if you need to lose a lot or a little and nothing has worked so far, why not try something new?

You could lose a little money, but you could gain a lot of slim:)

For most of my life I’ve been at war with vegetables. Apart from peas, pretty much they were just table decorations – and salad? Well, salad came in for a particular level of contempt. Despite a lifelong enjoyment of keeping fit, I spent little time thinking about keeping healthy through my food choices, and what is probably just a lucky constitution allowed me to get away with it.

That’s changed. In the supermarket this week I stood beside my wife looking at the salad display and said, “What shall we get, they all look delicious?” And I wasn’t joking.

At this point I suppose you’d expect me to start talking about a marvellous bit of therapy or a new technique I’ve developed that has led to this transformation, but that’s not it at all. It came from a simple question, and it started because I set myself a goal.

I’m lucky that I’m surrounded within the Quest network by a lot of people who inspire me. They discover new things, they take on new challenges, they stretch themselves in new ways. In other words, they quest. One of these guys, Jamie Panter, posted on our forum about a book by Tim Ferris called the Four Hour Body, and how he was using the principles in it to get fitter. I’ve been searching around for a physical goal for a while and the spiel on Amazon intrigued me, so I got a copy. Tim is an interesting man. He strikes me as a guy who uses his OCD nature in a positive way to explore things that interest him. How his body works, and what it can be made to do, is one of those curiosities. He hooked me right away because he doesn’t stick with received wisdom, he explores the edges of fields such as strength training, endurance sports, and diet. What he had to say about diet got me started. Most people would consider me reasonably slim, but my body fat is higher than you’d imagine. He was talking about how to reduce body fat, not lose weight, and that interested me. So I decided to give his way a go. Please understand, this is not a diet. Diets don’t work, they make you fatter. This was just a different way of eating to manipulate your metabolism. It includes a number of hardcore things – like icy showers – but I thought I’d start off easy and just cut out the things he says contribute to fat gain, principally white carbs – that means, rice, bread, sugar and potatoes. What you can eat is meat and vegetables (no fruit). You see my problem?

Anyway, I committed to it. I made myself a wordweaving download to support its principles and I asked Bex to put any veg she chose on my plate and I promised to eat it without complaint. For the first few days I had a mantra: I was eating meat and medicine, and it got me through the strangeness of it. Then I became aware of an increasing dissonance in my head. If it had been a conversation it would have gone like this:
“This actually tastes ok.”
“No it doesn’t, you don’t like veg.”
“But, you know, actually, I am really quite enjoying the tastes and textures.”
“Shut up. You don’t like veg.”
“I know I didn’t but…”
“La la la…NOT LISTENING. You aren’t someone who likes vegetables.”

And then a question sprung into my head: “Who would I be if I did?”

It was like a bucket of cold water. It was like walking into a glass door you didn’t see because of a daydream. It was a sudden, shocking moment of waking up. In an instant I realised that all these years it hadn’t been about the veg, it had been about ‘who would I be if I…” Like a film on fast forward I recalled images of the times I was made to stay at the table to finish my dinner when everyone else had got down. I can remember hiding things under a lip of the dinner table, and putting loads of salad cream on my plate so I could sink the salad beneath it out of the view of the shrewish dinner ladies. At home and at school my childhood finickity nature with food was confronted, and it became a war. Me against authority with green things as the battleground. And I don’t remember ever losing. My whole life I’ve reacted strongly, including over-reacting, against anyone imposing their will on me, and never realised that lettuce was at the root of it. Who would I be if I was someone who ate vegetables? The answer my unconscious was using was clear: A weakling. Someone who surrenders. Someone who does as he’s told. It was around this moment that I walked into the glass door. What a load of rubbish. I’d been a version of myself based on that?

The edifice collapsed. If it’s not about vegetables, then it was time to create my own relationship to them. Who would I be if I was someone who liked green stuff? Someone who instantly felt happier, more in control of their choices, and definitely healthier, that’s who. How weird. I’ve realised that I’ve been carrying a stomach around inside me that’s been unhappy with my diet for so long I’d forgotten it could feel any different. For the first time it now feels like it belongs to me. And it’s going to be interesting to see how I’m changed in situations where I feel I’m being manipulated.

Who would I be if I didn’t?

This question has become a very important one. Bex and I have started to use it when we confront any limitation or reluctance to do something. “I don’t want to…” is met with “Who would I be if I did want to?” and it’s led to some interesting realisations, especially that a lot of things I ‘don’t want to’ I’m glad I did after I’ve done them.

In my latest book I made the point that we are the creators of ourselves. This food experiment has given me a chance to witness that fact, from the exposure of an unconscious belief, to its instant updating when opened up to the light of the present day.

What has come from this is the importance of questing. In my Peak Performance course I speak about setting unreasonable goals, ones that you have to adjust your world to be able to achieve, ones that are beyond your sensible expectations. This question has given that a new focus. If that goal is unrealistic, who would I be to be achieving it?

So, I’ve set some goals. Ali Turner went from not running at all to a half marathon in 12 weeks. Another great Questie, Mani Hirani, ran a marathon from never running at all in just six months. I’m going to run in next year’s London marathon. Tim Ferris claims you can run it without huge training mileages. I’m going to try that.

On a recent holiday to Spain we stayed in a hotel where few staff spoke English. The cheek. I am someone who expects people to speak my language. Who would I be if I wasn’t? I’m going to learn a foreign language while I run.

And another questie, Lenny Deveril West, has just started a 100 press up challenge. I think I’ll give that a go too. And if anyone reading this thinks “I don’t do press-ups”, ask yourself, “who would you be if you did?” You might find yourself enjoying being you even more. That’s what I’ve found that question has done for me.

The book that made Tim Ferris’s reputation was the 4 hour work week. I’ve read that too, and it’s made my head spin. I’ve worked a minimum of six days a week for the last 11 years – and thought that a good thing. Who would I be if I didn’t? So I’m going to adjust my business so I can cut my hours drastically. Who do I need to be to achieve that? I’m looking forward to finding out.

So, here’s a challenge: If you’re not someone who can ask someone out. Ask yourself “Who would I be if I was?” and act upon the answer.

If there’s something holding you back from something you’d love to do ask yourself “who would I be if I was the kind of person who did what they loved?” and act on the answer.

You get my drift. Set an unreasonable goal, ask the question, and act from within the answer. And let me know what happens.

Quest-trained Cognitive Hypnotherapist Lesley McCall describes in the Guardian what it feels like to help people as a therapist. Read it here.

ThinkingSlimmer is a new approach to weightloss using short recordings (known as Slimpods) to adjust our unconscious relationship to food. It only requires 10 minutes listening per night and we’ve had some brilliant successes. I used Wordweaving to create them, and I’m ‘the voice of the Slimpod’. Darin is one of our most inspiring successes – from couch potato to running the Great South Run in just a few short months. You can read his story here.

Sandra, the founder of ThinkingSlimmer, Bex and myself will be running with him and we’re looking for people who want to join us who want to lose weight – we’re offering free Slimpods to the first 20 volunteers. So, if having a goal helps your motivation, why not join us?

This particular blog began as a response to a thread on our student forum – an extremely lively place which often receives up to a thousand visits a day from our network of students and therapists (collectively known as Questies). Someone on the thread had quoted me as describing counselling as a backward step – and you can imagine how that went down amongst the Questies who are trained counsellors! Here is where my thoughts led me:

If you’ve read my new book you’ll know this. Cognitive Hypnotherapy isn’t a therapy like other therapies, and it’s a bit difficult to explain, but easy to grasp. I used Bruce Lee as an example in the book, so I’ll continue. If you filmed him fighting and split it into distinct segments, and showed people who didn’t know him one of those segments they would probably says “He’s karate”. Show someone else another clip they’d say “He’s judo”, yet another, “He’s kung fu”. It’s only when you show the whole fight you’d see he’s doing Jeet Kune Do – using his opponents responses as his guide for which technique from which approach to use at each particular moment. It’s the same with Cog Hyp. It’s a framework to guide the same kind of choices we have to make with each client, rather than a therapy in itself.

So to put Cognitive Hypnotherapy in a list of other approaches is only accurate if you realise that everything else in that list is, potentially, part of a Cog Hyp approach. In any one session you could be ‘doing’ CBT, NLP, counselling, Parts, Gestalt etc, singly or in combination. You’re only limited by your knowledge of those options, its appropriateness for your client, and your creativity.

There are many great counsellors and psychotherapists working out there, and I think many are limited by the fact that every approach seems to develop an orthodoxy over time. All begin with certain assumptions that determine the way its practitioners work. Often in the beginning these assumptions are novel, revolutionary, and even threatening to the ‘establishment’ – as Mark Twain said, “All truth begins as heresy.” And I think that’s the problem. Every approach, from Freud onward, began as a heresy – a contrast to the established order. But, for me, the danger comes when it’s accepted as ‘truth’, because once something becomes ‘true’ it becomes set in stone. Our brains like certainty, so it becomes immensely attractive to feel you are following the ‘right’ way – and feels wrong if people don’t. Usually the approach develops guidelines to prevent people doing things ‘wrong’, which over time become rules, which over time become holy writ. The assumptions become the commandments, the originator becomes the prophet, the approach becomes the church, and the rules become the law. And other churches that aren’t your own become…

Let’s look at some of the assumptions:

I find in counselling the idea that ‘change takes time’ is often mistaken as ‘a truth’. I trained a counsellor once who used a regression technique on a client who had been stuck for months in her problem. The change in a single session was marked. I got an email from the counsellor asking “But is it ethical to let people change that fast?” My response was, “Is it ethical to stop them if they find it possible?” If you enter a therapeutic relationship using your belief about time being a necessary part of change, you are infecting your client with a limitation. I don’t agree with that – and I feel the same about a therapist who forces on a client their belief that change ‘should’ be quick. Time is just another variable. Some problems develop over years, some emerge from a moment. I think solutions can operate within exactly the same time frame, it all depends on the context and the client.

For example, in cases of bereavement, very often a counselling-type approach is necessary to pace the grief, and would be much more appropriate for many people than a technique-driven brief approach. But not all. Choosing one as your default assumption is one way, using either according to the need of the client is Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

A second assumption – and not just amongst counsellors – is that exploring your feelings about your problem is a means of resolving it. Freud would no doubt agree – but maybe not if he had access to recent science. Reconsolidation theory suggests that every time you recall a memory (ie any event that’s happened other than the one that currently is) you render it unstable – i.e. capable of change. What kind of change is going to be possible if each time you think about it you just explore the same feelings? Surely it will just become more of what it was, and you’ll feel worse about it each and every time? If memories can change – in fact, if they can’t not, then change them for the better, don’t just keep describing them. There are techniques for this available within a range of approaches. And, at the same time, in cases like bereavement, just the verbalisation of your loss [I]can[/I] be a great help. Just not forever.

By contrast, an assumption from brief strategic therapy is that, in the main, talking about their problem won’t help – only exploring evidence for their improvement will . And that can be very successful, but, again, not with everyone. Choosing one as your default assumption is one way, using either according to the need of the client is Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

As a final example, in CBT the emerging orthodoxy increasingly seems to be emphasising the need to stick to agendas set at the beginning of a session, and to remain within a fixed protocol. This is just another example of the ‘heresy becoming truth’ problem. In their desire to base their approach on evidence that it works – which I applaud – they are stifling innovation and, like a lava flow, I think the progress of their approach will slow as it loses the heat you gain from innovation. The danger is that, when it grinds to a halt under the weight of its own assumptions, the belief will be that therapy has achieved all it can, rather than what it can when confined within a particular set of assumptions.

When I describe counselling as a backward step – and I’d generally describe psychotherapies in the same way – I really mean at an organisational level, not at an individual one. It’s because, as organisations, they have become churches in the way I described earlier. They look to preserve their beliefs rather than challenge them in the light of new evidence or ideas. Their approach is more of a faith than a science, and their congregation is fed assumptions as truth, and subtly pressured to conform to them.

So I’m not saying that counselling or any form of psychotherapy doesn’t work. In fact I’m saying the opposite. All approaches work. Just not on everyone, all the time, for all problems. Which is why I am going to keep passionately crusading for a unification of the churches into something that isn’t a church at all, and keep fighting anybody who tries to make their church the official faith. If anyone only offers counselling, or CBT,or Gestalt, or EFT or EMDR, or hypnotherapy then, in my view, they’re limiting what the client might achieve. And Cognitive Hypnotherapy is just an idea of how all these approaches might be incorporated into a flexible model of therapy that responds, moment by moment, to the emerging needs of the client.

And here’s the rub. If Cognitive Hypnotherapy becomes accepted to the degree that counselling and CBT has there will be a pressure to begin to view it as another ‘truth’. It could cease to be a heresy and become another church, and another limit to the potential of our clients.

To avoid this we have to find a way of remaining an organised, permanent, heresy. At the moment the only way I can think of achieving that is by tattooing our primary assumption on the inside of the eyelids of every one of our graduates. ‘Nothing is true.’ And remembering that in 100 years everything that we currently believe is cutting edge will seem archaic.