Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 3.1

This weekend is the 3rd at-school weekend of the hypnotherapy course I'm doing. The main thing we covered today was Ego-States Therapy, or more specifically parts therapy. This basically involves negotiating with the 'part' of you that is causing some internal conflict (which is probably resulting in undesirable behaviour, otherwise you wouldn't have sought help) to try and find a new way to achieve the goals that the offending 'part' is aiming for, but without such undesirable behaviour. This takes the stance that all behaviour has a positive intent - if it didn't, we wouldn't keep doing it. So no matter how dysfunctional the behaviour may be, it still has a positive intention. That idea is also one of the presuppositions of NLP, and it fits in with my beliefs as well. Once you've sorted that internal conflict, you can reintegrate the part you've been negotiating with and start getting the benefits of the new behaviour.

When I first heard about parts work, it seemed like a very strange idea. I've came across it a fair bit recently though (mostly to do with NLP), so the things we covered today made sense straight away. I'm pretty sure I would have found it much more difficult to get my head round if I didn't already have some knowledge about it.

We also covered dissociation techniques that could be used to help someone take a more objective viewpoint on a situation. Without experiencing all the, possibly traumatic, feelings and emotions. Again, I was already a little familiar with this type of technique from various NLP things I've been reading recently so I think that helped today, and it's always good to have more than one point of view about something.

So all in all, an interesting day.