Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) is a powerful therapeutic approach that combines Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and hypnosis. 

 

CBT leads the international guidelines for psychosocial treatments. It invites us to identify, dispute and restructure negative thought and behavioural patterns. Hypnosis, often misunderstood, is extensively studied and its effectiveness is firmly grounded in scientific research. Hypnosis is not a trance but a relaxed state of focused attention. It beautifully compliments CBT.

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The mind has been called a ‘predictive machine’ that strives to guide us through life based on information gathered from experience. It is no surprise that our thoughts, feelings and behaviours tend to follow familiar contours, shaped by our upbringing and culture. Patterns that were, once upon a time, adaptive and helpful may cease to serve our new ambitions. It is almost as though the predictive mode of the brain and body keeps us hooked in to the safe harbour of the known. In order to think, feel and behave in new ways we have to relinquish old narratives and clarify a vision of the new and unknown. We have to make the unfamiliar familiar.

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The purpose of hypnotherapy is to bring new information to this ‘predictive machine’, mapping out and rehearsing the desired self and preferred future, so that we shift into a new state. When we become the state, we become the reality.

 

Techniques from cognitive and behavioural therapies help us put the past to rest, enables acceptance for the present, and clarifies our thinking and behaviours into aligned and empowered intention and action. Hypnosis quiets the analytical mind, relaxes the body, and enhances receptiveness to new positive suggestions. We can then utilise our imagination to give our mind and body a template, vision and very specific direction for change. The imagination is not a departure from reality, on the contrary, it is the faculty that allows us to take the reigns in our life, to 'own the script'.

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CBH is a refined, effective and adaptable toolkit for treating and supporting a vast myriad of challenges or goals presented by a client.