Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 4.2

At the start of each day, we've been doing group hypnosis - where one student puts the rest of the class into trance. It was my turn today. I felt more nervous that I thought I would be, but it seemed to go really well - and a few of the other students said it was one of the best ones so far. It does feel very odd sending 20 people off into trance at the same time, but it's all good practice for the future.

As well as abreactions being something that doing a hands-on course helps with (as I mentioned before), it also helps a lot with people getting 'stuck'. I.e. when you're waking them back up, but they just stay in trance. That would have probably made me think I'd broken them as well. The only time I've had anyone react that way so far has been during the group hypnosis - but for that student, it always takes a few attempts to bring her back, so at least I was expecting it :)

We also did some more on phobias - I found the positive phobia replacement technique we covered pretty good, and I can see myself maybe using that one to start with before the SUDS scale work I mentioned yesterday. It basically involves linking positive feelings to the phobic situation. During the practical, as the client, I went into fits of laughter as the other student was trying to bring back feelings of laughter to link to my 'phobia' (I don't have any phobias, so I tried something that mildly niggles me). I suspect if it was a real phobia I had, then I wouldn't have been quite so uncontrollable in my laughter :) but I do find it a lot easier to bring back positive feelings or emotions (such as laughing) than negative ones - so maybe it would have still worked just the same. Either way, it seemed to work for me.

The only negative part of this weekend was this afternoon. We were covering anxiety disorders. It was pretty much all just listening to the lecturers telling us stuff, and I found it difficult to concentrate. It might have just been down my mind wandering from the other ideas I'd had during the day, and lack of sleep last night, but I do prefer to have more interaction when I'm learning.

Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 4.1

This day was pretty interesting, we started covering a bit of Behavioural Psychology (Pavlov's dog and that kind of thing), then some of things that it can be used for, with the help of hypnosis. E.g. nail biting - you could use some form of aversion therapy to make their nails taste horrible when they bite them. During the practical for this, I found it really difficult to think of any habits that I wanted to give up. So I ended up just going for Marmite - I already hate the stuff, so hating it even more should be fine :) The other students that did choose something sensible (e.g. biting their nails) seemed to have a lot of success with it when being the client.

I found it fairly straightforward from the therapist point of view as well, and I think it is a technique I'd probably use for a habit such as nail biting - and also maybe for smoking cessation if my usual 2 session method wasn't successful. It seems a bit too unpleasant for the client to use right from the start though, but it'll be handy for times when it's needed.

We also covered some desensitisation methods for dealing with phobias. I think for phobia work I'd probably start of using the NLP fast phobia technique (given that I've had such good results with it in the past), then come up with a SUDS scale to help with desensitising the client to a hierarchy of stressful situations (i.e. work from the bottom of the scale up to the top, getting them to be comfortable with each item before moving to the next one).

All in all, a pretty good day. I've already got a few people lined up that want some help with phobias, so I'll have plenty folks to practice this stuff with :)