Thank you for visiting my website. I am currently on a sabbatical, so I am not taking new clients. I’ll be returning later in 2024.
Calm, Confident, in Control
Online Solution Focused Hypnotherapy
I am a Solution Focused Clinical Hypnotherapist, based in Gloucestershire, seeing clients worldwide on-line.
Positive Change for a Positive Life
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” ~ Henry Ford.
Whether you know what the changes are you need to make or if you feel that you need to make changes but you aren’t sure what those changes are then Solution Focused Hypnotherapy (SFH) could be the ideal therapy to help you.
For you, that change may be how you feel, or respond to events, or how you behave. It may be something tangible like losing your temper, suffering with anxiety or smoking or biting your nails or it may be more difficult to put into words other than ‘I just don’t feel like me’. You may have a specific phobia that is preventing you from enjoying your life. Or maybe poor sleep is affecting your ability to think straight.
Working with Children
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy helps children to understand how their brain works, why we experience feelings of worry, anger and withdrawal.
One of the things I love about working with children is that because I work with the parent and child together, they both learn more about how a child’s brain works
Wellbeing in the Workplace
My presentations on Managing Stress and the Importance of Sleep provide an interesting way for participants to understand how their brains work with regards to stress.
I can tailor the presentations to your needs, focusing on relevant topics for your business. For example, coping with uncertainty or change, managing challenging customers, strategies for sleep, resilience.
Mind Management
In the initial consultation you’ll learn about different parts of the brain and how when we operate in the different parts we respond differently to situations.
The primitive brain is where we find our survival responses, fight, flight, freeze. We also store some patterns of behaviour that may well have served a purpose but now no longer have the same usefulness, such as sucking our thumb or a fear of something (phobia). When we’re operating in our primitive brain it is difficult to make changes.
Our prefrontal cortex, the rational part of our brain is where we need to be to make changes.
There are some simple but very effective strategies to help move us from the primitive brain to the rational brain, notably breathing techniques and positive ways of thinking. The subsequent sessions explore these, and more. My role as your therapist is to guide you through solution focused questioning so that you spend more time in the rational part of your brain. Then you are able to consider what small changes you could make that will help you move towards your wonderful goal.
This is where hypnosis plays its part
Hypnosis is a state of focused attention and can be reached in an induced state of deep relaxation. In this relaxed state, your mind is more responsive to suggestions. In a therapeutic setting, the suggestions are designed to be beneficial to help you change unhelpful thought patterns to positive solutions.
In SFH we use an indirect language pattern to replicate the daydream state. This is when we consolidate memory and make changes. What we are consolidating is the conversation (talking therapy) we’ve had prior to the trance. The suggestions you are ‘open to’ are your own.
During hypnosis I will guide you into a similar state so that beneficial suggestions can be directed towards your subconscious mind.
On average my clients have around 6 sessions
The number of sessions needed varies from client to client with some only needing 1 and others needing more. It can be likened to having driving lessons. You need as many as you need so that you can drive safely on your own. Sometimes we might choose to have more to become advanced. That’s up to the individual. I always ask clients what was useful about the session and would they benefit from another session.
As you can see, no doubt hypnotherapy works!
We all experience trance (hypnotic state) in our everyday lives.
Have you ever driven home and not remembered part of the journey, or been engrossed in a book and not been conscious of time passing? If so, you have been in a state of focused attention, not unlike the feeling of being hypnotised. You were conscious and had not fallen asleep, but your mind was ‘elsewhere’.
This means that you may be able to benefit from Solution Focused Hypnotherapy even if you’ve tried a different style of hypnotherapy and couldn’t be hypnotised.
No one can hypnotise you against your will.
Contrary to the image often portrayed in films, books and the media, hypnosis does not involve the therapist taking control of your mind. Stage and gameshow hypnosis are designed to entertain and to make us laugh (or cringe). Consequently the ‘volunteers’ and contestants are usually carefully vetted and selected to be those people willing to behave in amusing ways.
Stage hypnotists have great charisma and showmanship and they are entertainers. Clinical hypnotherapists are trained to help you improve your life. We both use the natural state of trance but for different ends. Nobody can make you do anything you do not want to do. Your subconscious mind will simply reject any suggestion that is inappropriate for you.