I’m feeling less stressed already Seriously…..

Good for you! Continue the hypnotherapy and I’m sure you will have a stress free life..

This part “cognitive therapy works on the premise that emotion is a consequence of thoughts, Cognitive Hypnotherapy believes that thoughts are the consequence of emotions.”

Now that is fascinating. I had CBT for about a year and I found it extremely helpful, however, there were situations where I simply could not accept that the way I felt was the result of a thought. on many occasions, yes, it was true - I was worrying about something; however tiny and when I looked for it, I found it.

But at other times, it used to drive me to distraction looking for this elusive thought that had triggered an unpleasant emotion and I was quite sure it wasn’t there at times! and that my wheel of thought / emotion was turning in the opposite direction to the beliefs of the therapy.

Perhaps it was!

Like you said too - it takes a lot of consistent work to achieve changing thoughts. It works great if you get it, but I can understand why there is a high drop out rate. I got totally exhausted by it all at times.

that was great - thank you for explaining things more.

Good question Mrs Green! I shall try and keep it brief! It is essentially quite different but utilises a couple of theories from cognitive psychology. I shall give some examples of the similarities and differences.

From cognitive psychology and neuroscience it takes the theory that the mind operates like computer software, a number of programmes running at the same time processing information. These programmes are developed from our genes and nurture. They follow a process or pattern when dealing with problems (called the Problem Pattern). This understanding is used to tackle the process the problem follows as it is lived out, not just the cause of the problem.

From cognitive psychology it also takes the theory that people’s emotions and behaviours are influenced by their perception of events, not the event itself. Although cognitive therapy works on the premise that emotion is a consequence of thoughts, Cognitive Hypnotherapy believes that thoughts are the consequence of emotions.

A cognitive therapist will look to change the clients automatic thoughts in response to a situation at the conscious thought level rather than unconscious with Cognitive Hypnotherapy. Changing an automatic thought in response to a situation at the conscious level can be very hard work for the client, take a long time (e.g. curing a phobia can take up to 10 sessions compared to one or two with Cognitive Hypnotherapy) and as a result can lead to a high drop-out rate.

I hope that gives a flavour of the similarities and differences!

I’ve heard of cognitive behaviour therapy and I’ve heard of hypnotherapy. Is cognitive hypnotherapy a combination of the two or something completely different?

Also, we talked in this interview about stress; what other conditions is cognitive hypnotherapy most used for?

@Wendy: Hi Wendy, I’m glad you enjoyed doing the relaxation exercise. I did it last night before bed and it felt great.
I hope you managed to do your yoga - do you do yoga daily? How long for?

@Richard: I love the way you explain things in your last line, Richard. And I hope that this gives people hope that they really can change their lives for the better. So many of us believe things are set in stone, but it seems, from what you way that this is not the case.

That should give us all something to celebrate!

There are unique factors of Cognitive Hypnotherapy such as the utilisation of the cool fact that neuroscience is recognising our mind is more plastic than we first anticipated, so you can ‘reframe’ old memories in the light of new learnings removing any negative emotion associated with them.

As an NLP practitioner this rings true for me too. We put it another way that ‘constructive imagination and memories share the same neural pathways’ So just imagining a new positive outcome and rehearsing it ‘as if it was a past event’ can make dramatic changes in the way we perceive our negative histories. Within the therapeutic frame this is a powerful tool for change.

You are right, the mind is very eleastic, but sometimes the rubber needs stretching again to get it used to change …

I just did ‘The Help Yourself’ section and feel very relaxed. It reminds me that I completely forgot to do my yoga today (no wonder I’ve been so tense!).