Joining us today was the lovely Lisa Hartford. Lisa is a solution focused hypnotherapist. Solution focused hypnotherapy works via looking for finding answers to the solution and not spending too much time looking at the past. Most of the session is spent talking and looking for solutions or way forward, a third of the session is spent in hypnosis changing oldprogramming in order to provide the solutions. I hope that makes sense... when I refer toold programming, I’m talking about early programming which comes from those around us, when we were younger and more impressionable, I will talk a little more about this later on.
Our question today was “what is the difference between hypnosis and Psychotherapy orcounselling?” my brief answer is one is passive one is active; hypnosis is passive, counselling or Psychotherapy is active. With many types of hypnotherapy (not solution focused) the client is fairly passive in the process, I say fairly as the practitioner will have to extract information from the client, gaining an understanding of why the client is with them, what they want to achieve from the hypnosis process and in some cases the hypnotherapist may want to understand where the original issue came from. If I were helping someone stopsmoking, then I wouldn’t need to know when or how they started. If I were helpingsomeone change some really unhelpful thinking, or negative thinking then I might want to know how and where it may have started so as we can unpick the thinking from the beginning. Again, this is very dependent on the model being delivered. Lisa explains her model of hypnosis far better than I have.
When we go to change old unwanted programming or habits, we have to access the unconscious mind, this is where the hypnosis comes into its own and this is where the client becomes very passive to the process. With psychotherapy and counselling the same old unwanted programming or habits are accessed but via client and therapist talking. This again is done in many different ways depending on the model being used, there are lots.
I mentioned earlier “old programming” by this I mean beliefs, habits, thoughts we may havelearned when we were younger. This could be things like a grandparent who had a great work ethic, so might be constantly saying “it’s really important you work hard” we hear thisand digest it as our own belief. This then can have an effect on us, for example we may then overwork in adult life, or work to our detriment. We can be full of beliefs and habits that we may have learned from those influential figures as we grew up. So, what beliefs or habits doyou have that aren’t actually yours....?
Spending this time with Lisa was really interesting and I feel it gave further insight into the world of hypnosis as a practice.
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Peace Kev
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