One final thought

The flexibility of the QCH Therapy model means I have supported clients with many different  challenges. Most of my focus tends to be around fear, which might show up in a client’s life as:

• Anxiety and Burnout, whether Generalised Anxiety Disorder, or anxiety in specific situations such as: public speaking, presenting, dating, social anxiety, etc
• Phobias and fears of all varieties (including: medical, flying, animals, driving, vomiting, etc)
• Depression or low mood 
• Being “stuck”, in life, work, relationships, health, etc

If you’re curious whether working together could help you, contact me to book a no-obligation consultation call.

How many sessions you need will depend on many things, including what you’re experiencing, what underlies the issue you’re having, how much change you want or need to feel, and how consistently you’re able to take steps to support our in-session work in between sessions. Some people experience the changes they’re looking for in 3 sessions, I work with many people for somewhere around 6 sessions, and can work with others on and off over more sessions and longer periods. Often we’ll arrange to see each other weekly or every other week to start, and after that we can be flexible to your needs. I ask all new clients to commit to at least 3 sessions as a starting point to give them the best opportunity to start to notice changes.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a modern form of talking therapy developed by The Quest Institute and Trevor Silvester (QCH Therapy). It’s a highly collaborative approach in which the therapist will act as a guide to individualise treatment to the client and the specific ways they experience the issue they’d like to change. It draws tools and techniques from Hypnotherapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Positive Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), amongst others, with the aim of tailoring the tools to the client, rather than requiring the client to “fit” a rigid set of tools: we are all individuals so it stands to reason an individual approach could be most effective.

QCH Therapy works with a client’s past, present, and future, as required. Working in the present might mean helping a client learn tools to change the way they feel or think. Working in the past might mean exploring ways to relate differently to old experiences, or dissipate difficult emotions from old memories. Working with a client’s future is often called Solution Focused Therapy, and is key to guiding them towards the future they would like to experience in place of the issue they’re having. 

Fundamental to QCH Therapy is an understanding that humans function with a dynamic unconscious mind, which for the majority of the time (some studies suggest up to 95% of the time), is responsible for “running the show” as it were. This means that QCH Therapy works on both the Conscious and Unconscious elements of someone’s experience to support faster, more complete, and longer-lasting change. Key to this is utilising the trance state the client moves into while experiencing their issue as a pathway to dissolving the issue.

There are many different forms and schools of hypnotherapy, so what follows is a generalisation, and like all generalisations, it will be true in some cases and not in others. Cognitive Hypnotherapy is an approached developed by Trevor Silvestor and The Quest Institute, hence the “Quest” as a diffrentiator:

Individualised Approach

That said, QCH Therapy tailors both the use of suggestive language and the tools, techniques and interventions to each individual client and their specific experience of their world and issue. In practice this means that no two treatments, even for the same presenting “label” (eg. anxiety) will be the same, because each of those clients will “do” the anxiety they experience differently, at different times, with different triggers and implications, and each will want something different beyond that experience. Some other forms of more traditional hypnotherapy use set scripts for specific issues, which can mean a less individualised treatment, and those scripts are often based on a standardised idea of what changes should be, rather than what the client has said they specifically want.

Trance as an every-day experience 

Traditional Hypnotherapy often looks at experiencing trance as a state that the Hypnotherapist puts the client into, and that being “deeper” in trance is better. By comparison, Cognitive Hypnotherapy understands trance as an every-day experience that all of us have. If you’ve ever driven your car somewhere and arrived having thought through everything on your To-Do list, but with no memory of actually driving the car, you’ve experienced trance. If you find yourself getting scared in the face of something that doesn’t have the same effect on everyone else around you, you’ve experienced trance. If you’ve ever said to yourself you’ll stop eating cake, or drinking wine, and then found yourself at the fridge with the thing you’re not having in your hand, you’ve experienced trance. And because trance is part of how we all “do” the issues we experience, it can also be used as a route in to helping clients “un-do” it. So “deeper” isn’t better or worse, in a Cognitive Hypnotherapy approach, it’s just not important.

Solution Focused and More

A lot of traditional hypnotherapy is solely Solution Focused, it uses language to help clients connect to internal resources and guide them to more of what they do want, and less of what’s brought them to therapy. This is what you could call a “future focus”. Solution Focused therapy is a key element of Cognitive Hypnotherapy, but it also acknowledges the power of the many different ways working with a client’s past can allow them to let go of old behaviours and beliefs, and how changing their present experience can become a platform for a different future. So it works with past, present and future, rather than just the future.