Trevor's Blog

As an ex-police officer, Trevor has a particular interest in working with people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this article for Police Professional he outlines what the condition is, and how people can be helped using Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

It seems that neuroscience is adding to the evidence everyday that our memories are not only being adjusted according to our current experiences, but that just the act of remembering them can change them.

It’s a difficult idea to like, but the evidence is pointing to the fact that when we remember our past, it didn’t actually happen – at least not how we remember it.

This is something we, as Cognitive Hypnotherapists have been utilising in our work for a very long time. We all have an inherent ability to change the way we remember things; a good therapist can help you use this ability to let go of past abuse, or events that have led to limiting beliefs or a lack of self-esteem. It is possible to re-write yourself. In this excellent article, the only shame is that all the neuroscientists are loking at is how to use drugs to facilitate this kind of change, when we already have natural tools to achieve the same thing.

A study by Kansas University has shown that childrens perception of a peers ability to control an undesirable characteristic – such as obesity – will affect their attitude toward them. One of the researchers, Jennifer Livengood said “This study provides some evidence that if a child feels that an undesirable characteristic is under some sort of personal control, they are less likely to respond favorably to someone who displays that characteristic.”

This doesn’t sound that surprising, and that’s probably because we take such prejudice for granted. As adults, the degree of sympathy we tend to feel for someone in an unfortunate situation will depend on the degree to which we feel it is their ‘fault’; that they are responsible for their position. Think about some people’s reactions to rape victims, aids sufferers and alcoholics with liver disease.

I think that our mirror neurons are likely to be a factor in this perceptual position. When we see – or even just hear or read – about anothers experience we cannot help but run a simulation of it; how would that situation be for me? And from that will come a range of possible behavioural options. It’s why common advice to alcoholics is to ‘just stop drinking’, and for people with anorexia to ‘eat more’.

Because when we run a simulation of their issue through our eyes we do so with our resources, not theirs – so stopping drinking or eating more wouldn’t be a problem for us so- why would it be for them? And from there we have the root of it’s your fault’ thinking.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we train our therapists to avoid the consequences of running our clients problems through our mirror neurons. If I listen to a client’ issue and find myself coming up with a solution I have to recognise that, not as an insight to their problem, but an outsight; I’m using my model of the world, and its resources, not theirs. An insight can only truly come from them.

So the work of a Cognitive Hypnotherapist is to help the client using the client’s model of the world, because our basic position is that they have everything they need to solve the problem, they just haven’t realised it yet.

You can read the full article here.

In this article Trevor explains how you can use self hypnosis to maximise the results of your training, and your performance on the day. When you look at the opening page, though, isn’t it a shame that an article stressing the non-weirdness of trance gets lumbered with a picture that suggests the opposite. I think the designer didn’t read it…

On our Cognitive Hypnotherapy Diploma course we spend time looking at a range of differences in people that guide their preferences. One of these is a preference for sameness and difference. Think of it as a continuum; some people will be strongly sameness, some strongly difference, and many a mixture of both (often dependent on circumstances).

For example, I’m quite strongly sameness. I tend to like to go to the same restaurants, and will tend to order the same thing in them. People who are strongly difference will be appalled by this and will always go for novelty. This can make a big difference in relationships, because we tend to label differences in others negatively, so difference people will often label their sameness partner ‘boring’ and ‘predictable’. In the reverse case, the words ‘flighty’ and ‘unpredictable’ will often be thrown. Understanding that they’re not good or bad, just different can lead to a big change in your attitude to the behaviour of others.

Now a research study has shown that it might have something to do with a gene that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. Click here for more

Trevor was consulted for an interesting article on the differences that make relationships a challenge. If you’re interested in why opposites attract…and then drive each other mad, you might want to have a look at the online seminar that Trevor recorded, Talking From Uranus: How to live with the Alien you fell in love with. Within it he provides a workbook you can use in your relationship to identify what lies at the heart of the differences between you and your partner, and what you can do about them to help you get along better. As he says in this article, most relationships don’t fail from a lack of love, but from a lack of understanding.

In a recent study published by the University of Helsinki, using information gathered from men and women in the US who were subjects of a 40 year investigation, researchers concluded that beautiful women had 16% more children than plainer ones. From a Darwinian point of view, if beauty is getting selected for, then women will be becoming more attractive. The study showed that the same is not true for men. The selection pressure for them is to be successful.

If the conclusions of this study are correct, and I suspect they’re not, it’s a bit depressing. Because if women are getting selected for their looks, where is the genetic incentive for them to become more intelligent? Are we evolving Barby in our culture? And if history teaches us anything it is that the urge for men to strive, and succeed, and accrue power, has been at the heart of most of what ails this planet.

As Cognitive Hypnotherapists we so often see clients who suffer from self-esteem issues because they feel that they’re not keeping up with the expectations they feel are put upon them, or that they’re not valued as individuals, only as objects. If this study is correct, then it’s likely that we’re going to be busy for as long as this culture lasts.

You can read a newspaper article about this research here.

A new report about to be published in the Journal of Neuroscience by scientists working at the Institute for Brain Research at MIT has established that our brains can alter in a matter of seconds. “Our study shows the stunning ability of the brain to adapt to moment-to-moment changes in experience even in adulthood.” states one of the authors.

The changes are too quick for the brain to have grown new connections, and the current theory is that the change is the result of dormant short-term cortical connections being ‘booted up’ in response to some changing circumstance in the person’s environment.

I find this particularly interesting because Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a brief therapy model, and we work on the basis that change -even major change, doesn’t have to take a long time to be achieved. My argument has always been that, if a problem can begin as a result of a short experience, why can’t it be remedied within the same time frame?

This meets with resistance from a lot of psychotherapists and counsellors who are wedded to the idea that ‘change takes time’. As Woody Allen once said “I’ve been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years, and I’m starting to see signs of progress.”

I, and the people we’ve trained as Cognitive Hypnotherapists, regularly see rapid change in clients – most phobias disappear in a single session, and it’s heartening that neuroscience is supporting the notion that the architecture for such rapid change exists within the brain.

You can read about the research here.

Three techniques for keeping your mind in the best place to get the results you want.

I had a funny thought in the shower this morning. I noticed a patch of skin was peeling following our recent bit of summer weather and it reminded me of something I read in a Deepak Chopra book about how our bodies completely recreate themselves every nine years. There isn’t a single atom of you that was you nine years ago. Makes you think, doesn’t it? I’ve mainly used that knowledge with my clients as a way of making the point that we carry problems with us long after the person that experienced them has been replaced.

If you have a completely different stomach every month, why (and how) does it manage to keep your IBS?
If the brain that stored your childhood trauma is no longer your brain, how come the memory is still around?

But this morning I had a different thought about this. I’m 49. That means that in my lifetime there have been 5.5 versions of me. Enough atoms to make 4.5 versions of me are now somewhere else (actually it’s a lot more ‘me’s’ because things like skin are replaced every few weeks, and my maths isn’t good enough to begin to make a guess). As I thought of this I got a vague sense of the universe being this constant ebb and flow of energy becoming matter, and then returning to being energy. My physical presence is part of this flow; I’m never completely matter, or energy, but moving in-between, and my sense of self just gives the illusion of being a fixed point moving through a physical realm. I wish it wasn’t so vague, but the immenseness of the thought makes it feel like trying to hold smoke in my hand, and my brain just isn’t big enough to hold it for long.

One of the upshots of this thought, that my wife Rebecca liked, is that these other 4.5 me’s are somewhere. Some atoms have returned to the foodchain, so there is a good chance Rebecca, and my dog Barney, and the birds in my garden, and the grass in my lawn contain some of me, and me them. And maybe some of my atoms are Wayne Rooney, and maybe some atoms have escaped the world and are making their way through space. With this in mind I can imagine myself involved in anything and everything!

As an atheist, it’s about as spiritual as I feel able to get, and it’s all the immortality that I need. Of course, the downside is there’s a chance that some of me is George Bush…