this were pointed out to them. I am reminded of a series of conversations I had with a therapist who practiced a form of humanistic psychotherapy, and who never missed the opportunity to decry hypnosis for various reasons which showed she had a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature. Due to the vehemence with which she held these views and my own desire at the time for an easy life, I did not avail myself of the opportunity to correct her misunderstanding. Some time later, however, she described working with a client using what she would have described as a creative visualisation method yet which I instantly recognised as being blatantly hypnotic in its structure, delivery and function. Had I pointed out that she was effectively using hypnosis she would almost certainly been horrified and denied it completely. Her inflexibility in championing her own therapeutic model to the exclusion of others meant that she could not recognise or acknowledge when her own therapeutic approaches borrowed heavily from formal hypnotic approaches which she claimed to revile. It also deprived her of the opportunity to learn how to use the hypnotic states she was eliciting more effectively.
This book, however, is designed to welcome those from diverse psychotherapeutic modalities who are open to acquiring new skills and also those who may have already developed a sneaking suspicion that they are utilising hypnotic patterns in their work and who want to check out whether that is the case. A clearer understanding of what hypnosis is and how it may already be present in your work can enable you to use it with greater flexibility, intent and grace, thereby enhancing your confidence and your clients’ results. It is this desire to create a broad church, which holds some common tenets of faith but also allows wide diversity of application, that has drawn to some of my training courses students from a wide variety of therapeutic orientations. I have taught hypnotherapy to clinical psychologists, CBT practitioners, humanistic counsellors, psychodynamic therapists, medical doctors, nurses and so on. Some of these have applied their hypnotherapeutic skills in the fairly pure form in which I taught them. Others have taken hypnotherapeutic approaches and blended them into their pre-existing therapeutic framework to enrich its potency. Still others have done a little bit of both. I believe that whatever medical or psychotherapeutic background you come from (or if you are a complete newcomer to the world of therapy) developing flexible skills in clinical hypnosis can be enormously beneficial to your work.
So what are the basic tenets of faith that I feel it is useful to bring to the study of hypnotherapy? Well, the practice of therapy advocated takes the view that the only meaningful way of determining whether or not change has taken place is through the experience of the client. Indeed, the therapist using brief hypnotic approaches may well need to get used to seeing clients change without having more than the vaguest notion of how the change was generated. If clients report therapeutic change that is meaningful to them and satisfies their wishes, I take this as sufficient evidence of change. What right, one might ask, has anyone to tell the client that his or her experience ‘doesn’t count’ as it doesn’t fit someone else’s theoretical orientation? The inclination to tell the client what he or she should be experiencing is also, in my view, a very quick route to damaging the rapport that is important for effective therapy.
This approach is different from some more traditional psychotherapies in which the clinician is often encouraged to assess progress or change in spite of the subjective feedback of the client. I submit that this approach, whilst very different from others, is actually profoundly liberating. Rather than the therapist having to ‘second guess’ the client’s experiences, we can allow the client to ‘own’ his outcome and respect his ability to assess progress towards it. This is empowering for both the client and the therapist.
It is important to realise, however, that this outcome-based or solution-focused approach does not mean that we abandon any form of theory and adopt the position that ‘anything goes’. Rather, it means that theory is the servant rather than the master of the therapeutic process and that no theory should be viewed as being immune from revision or scrutiny if it is contradicted by empirical evidence. Our first loyalty is to the client, not the theory, and the focus of our therapeutic approach is on helping the client to make change in an effective, humane, congruent and ethical manner. If we achieve this, we have done our job. We can view theories as being little more than tools to give us structure upon which to base our therapeutic interventions. The psychiatrist, Anthony Storr (1997, p.205), expressed this neatly with his words:
“Problems cannot be investigated or even perceived without some conceptual framework, but all such frameworks must be able to be overturned. There should be no articles of faith in science, unless it be the faith that no discovery, no law, is so absolute that it cannot be superseded.”
What else, then, typifies this approach? Well, there are a number of factors that I believe are likely to be useful in working with clients to produce therapeutic change. Bearing in mind that these are not written in stone they are, in no particular order, the following:
•Clients have within them the ability to resolve their own problems
•The responsibility of the therapist is to assist the client in changing him/herself
•The unconscious mind contains vast resources which can be harnessed to aid the client
•Problems often tend to be learnt behaviours and therapeutic change can be likened to a re-learning process
•Effective change can take place at a number of levels, both conscious and unconscious.
•People operate within interpersonal and intrapersonal systems and change will often only persist if it is supported by, or congruent with, these systems
•The mind and body are an integrated system - a change in one will often cause a change in the other
•Lasting change can happen extremely quickly and painlessly
•Labels are for packages, not people
•An eclectic approach gives the therapist the greatest flexibility to assist the client in changing. The proof is in the pudding – if it works use it
•If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
•Therapy should aim to assist the client in living his/her life, it should not become his/her life
This last point relates back to the quotation from Leonard Cohen at the start of this chapter. One of the drawbacks of conventional therapies, such as the traditional ‘1000 hour analysis’ is that clients tend to put their lives on hold while they are in therapy. They are encouraged, either actively or tacitly, to believe that they are ’sick’, suffer some form of psychopathology and that they must endure some sort of therapeutic Odyssey before they can obtain absolution and return to a ‘normal’ existence. Therapy becomes their way of life. Nothing can be thought, said or done without having to be accounted for or investigated through the lens of the therapy they are undergoing. They become dependent upon their therapist. They ‘project’ and ‘transfer’ left, right and centre. Their diary revolves around their twice, thrice or four times weekly therapy sessions. They spend years in therapy, are just as unhappy as ever, yet are persuaded they have made progress because they now know why they are unhappy (or can at least quote their therapist’s explanation).
Respected therapist, Bill O’Hanlon, has light-heartedly compared this to the scene in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, in which Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, tells Annie that he has been seeing an analyst for fifteen years! When Annie expresses amazement at the length of time that the clearly still neurotic Alvy has been in therapy, he tells her that he is going to give it one more year and then, if he has not improved, he will go to Lourdes!
There is a risk that clients is such situations live their lives in a therapeutic limbo in the hope that one day they will experience a revelation, a ‘eureka’ moment,
