Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 10.2

The last day of the course for me, all that's left to do now is the final exam next month. The topics we covered today seemed to be mostly variants of parts therapy (which we covered on weekend 3), nothing really stood out as being especially groundbreaking - but then I have been trying to learn as much as I can in my spare time as well. So towards the end of the course I'd already come across several of the techniques being taught on my own (especially with the NLP stuff). Most of the techniques covered today could also be used for 'content free' free therapy (so the client doesn't have to let you know what the problem is, all they have to do is think about it).

Across this course we've covered quite a few content free methods, but they've all seemed a bit too 'new age' to me. I guess it's the fact that they are so undirected that feels a bit odd to me, even though that's the point of them. I think it's the geek side of me which wants things to be a bit more focused. But if I do ever have a client who doesn't want to discuss what the problem is (which would be strange enough in itself, I think) then at least I'll be aware of these methods so I can try and help anyway. I just haven't had a need to use any of them yet.

Looking back over this course, I think the most useful things we've covered has been smoking, phobias and pain control. I suspect a lot of my work will be dealing with stopping smoking - it seems to be the first thing people think of when I've talked to them about hypnotherapy, and it could be thought of as the life saving part of all this (about 106,000 deaths each year because of smoking) so it's a very good thing to help with. I also find working with phobias and pain control to be pretty satisfying, and I'm still surprised at how well (and how fast) those things work.