What are hypnosis and hypnotherapy?
What is solution focused hypnotherapy?
What issues can you help with?
How often will I have a session?
How many sessions will it take?
Can you really stop me smoking in a single session?
Is it completely confidential?
What happens if I lose internet?
I'm interested - what happens next?
Hypnosis, or hypnotic trance, is a natural, relaxed state, associated with focused attention and increased response to suggestion. It is similar to the state we all experience when we are absorbed in a film or at the gym and not consciously focused on our surroundings.
Hypnotherapy is a type of talking therapy which uses hypnotic trance to help the client accept suggestions for behavioural or psychological change.
Solution focused hypnotherapy or SFH is a model of hypnotherapy pioneered by David Newton of the Clifton Practice in Bristol. It combines techniques from Solution Focused Brief Therapy with hypnotic trance, underpinned by up to date neuroscientific research, to produce a therapeutic model that has successfully helped thousands of clients over the last three decades.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is an effective treatment for any problem that is related to stress - this includes anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, depression, OCD, and insomnia as well as helping manage physical conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome and chronic pain. It is also a powerful tool for behavioural change and therefore useful for smoking/vaping cessation, weight management and sports performance. I have worked successfully with a wide range of issues, please do email me or call/text/whatsapp on 07935 148013 to find out how I can help with your particular circumstance.
Absolutely not! Clinical hypnotherapy is very different from stage hypnotism - I cannot make you dance like a chicken or get drunk from drinking a glass of water unless you want to do those things (and they do not feature in hypnotherapy sessions!). Your moral code and normal inhibitions remain active at all times.
Zoom sessions cost £80 for 60 minutes, payable in advance by BACS transfer. I offer a limited number of reduced cost sessions for clients on low incomes, please ask me about this if appropriate. The standalone smoking cessation session is £150.
A typical SFH session begins with me asking "What's been good?" about the past week - the purpose of this is to place the "intellectual" part of your brain, the left prefrontal cortex, in control, reducing the activity of the "primitive" limbic system which controls the fight/flight/freeze response.
Following this, I review some of the neuroscience we have covered, to reinforce your understanding of how your positive actions, interactions and thoughts are supporting the progress we are achieving through therapy. We then look to the near future and look for small achievable goals that you can work towards to bring you closer to your desired life changes.
Finally, with these in mind, you lie on your bed or sofa and I read a language pattern to induce hypnotic trance for around 25 minutes - during this time your attention is completely free to drift wherever it chooses, your subconscious mind will still accept and absorb the positive thoughts we have discussed, and the messages within the language pattern.
A standard SFH session is one hour. The standalone smoking cessation session is between one and two hours.
SFH is most effective when you attend weekly sessions. As your therapy progresses, your confidence grows and the problem becomes less troublesome, we may move to less frequent sessions.
SFH is a short term therapy - for most clients and most issues, we expect 8 - 12 sessions. If you have a phobia of a simple, specific stimulus such as spiders or flying, and are not significantly over stressed in other aspects of your life, it may be possible to remove the phobia in 4 sessions. If you have a more complex phobia such as agoraphobia, we will need to spend several sessions emptying your stress bucket before we can apply the phobia protocol. If you are dealing with severe, complex or long standing mental health challenges, we may need to continue beyond 12 sessions.
No hypnotherapist can actually stop you smoking, or make you do anything you don't want to do. So, for smoking cessation hypnotherapy treatment to be effective, it is important that you actually want to give up smoking. If your life is currently very stressful, it is advisable to address other issues - or, as we say, "empty your stress bucket" - before tackling the smoking habit, so in this case you might expect to have 8 - 12 sessions in total, depending on your situation. However, I have helped clients stop in a single session - please do contact me to discuss your own situation.
In general, anything you tell me in our work together is strictly confidential, subject to the following provisos: if you divulge knowledge of certain serious crimes (acts of terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking), I am legally obliged to break confidentiality and inform the police; if you give me reason to believe that you or anyone else is at risk of serious harm, I must take appropriate steps to prevent this, including breaking confidentiality; I have a clinical supervisor, with whom I discuss my work with clients, but that is on an anonymised basis, I will only refer to you by your first initial.
I am currently only working online using Zoom - this saves us both the time and cost involved in renting and travelling to a therapy room, and ensures that you are in familiar, comfortable surroundings for our meetings. Online hypnotherapy is practiced widely, and is just as effective as working in person.
If our internet connection is lost before you go into trance, we will attempt to reconnect - if this is not possible within a reasonable timeframe, we will rearrange the session at no further cost to you. If your connection goes down while you are in trance, you may stay in the trance state for a short while and then your attention will return to normal. I will contact you by text/whatsapp/email to check you are OK, then we will arrange the following session as normal. Be assured that I have a very reliable 910Mbps full fibre internet connection and loss of internet connection during sessions is extremely rare. I will always ensure that you receive the sessions you have paid for.
"Hypnotherapist" is not a protected title in the UK, meaning anyone can call themselves a hypnotherapist. When looking for complementary healthcare, it is important to check the qualifications of the provider. I hold a level 4 diploma in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy and a Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma - these are both nationally recognised professional qualifications. I am a member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy and the Association for Solution Focused Hypnotherapy. I am registered with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), the independent regulator of health practitioners. CNHC's register has been approved as an Accredited Register by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care, a body accountable to Parliament. I am insured for public liability by Holistic Insurance.
As with any information you share with me, your personal details are confidential. I will never pass your name or other identifying data to any other person or organisation without either written instructions from you or a court order. All communication between us will be kept on password/fingerprint protected devices, either carried with me or kept in a locked location. I do not keep any paper records. I am registered with the information commissioner's office.
You can email me, or call/text/whatsapp on 07935 148013. We will arrange a free initial online consultation session over Zoom, which will take around 45 minutes. This is a time for you to outline the issues that have brought you to seek help, and for me to tell you about the way SFH works. From there, should you wish to proceed with therapy, we can book you in for your first session.