Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 7.1

On this day of the course, most of the time was spent covering different therapy methods. Part of that involved watching a movie (called "The Gloria Tapes", sorry no link - can't find much info about it online) showing a woman, Gloria, visiting 3 different types of therapist. It was interesting seeing the 3 different types of therapy getting pretty close to same thing in the end, even though they started from completely different places. Gestalt therapy seemed the least therapy-like of them, I already knew it was more in-your-face than most other methods, but I didn't expect it to be quite as much as it was. Fritz Perls seemed to just argue with her for a bit, but he was getting results from it anyway :)

Paul McKenna, Sky One

Paul McKenna's new show on Sky One is a total change from the norm for hypnosis on TV. It makes a refreshing change to see hypnosis being shown as a useful therapeutic technique, instead of just a way to get people to act like chickens and generally make a fool of themselves. Lots of people seem scared about hypnosis being some magic mind control thing that lets the hypnotist make them do whatever they want, which isn't really surprising given the way it's usually portrayed on TV. Hopefully this new show will help give people a better understanding about what it's really all about.

I was also surprised to see how much he makes of various NLP techniques when doing therapy. Given that he seems to be working with Richard Bandler these days I probably shouldn't be surprised. It still has a fair bit of showmanship, but then it is supposed to be entertaining TV after all.

Good NLP website

I've recently come across a very useful NLP site, NLP Weekly. As well as having lots of interesting articles about various things about NLP and hypnosis, it also has pretty active forums as well. I've already found some of the stuff there useful for things I've been doing. Definitely worth a visit if you're interested in that kind of thing.