Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy:
Turbo-charged.
Tailor-made.
Evidence-based.
Since Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a form of Hypnotherapy, then obviously it involves the use of hypnosis and ‘trance states’, but going into trance is a perfectly normal thing to happen and we’re doing it all the time without realising it. If you’re driving a car and realise that you were just ‘somewhere else’ for a moment, if you’re engrossed in a book, or bored and staring off into the distance, then you’re in a trance. It’s a normal part of human existence.
We use our clients’ natural trance states to help them to uncover the feelings, thoughts and memory patterns that led them to have their problem, and which continue to maintain it.
Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy uses a wide range of different techniques to modify these patterns so you are able to take control of your behaviour. Every person’s problem pattern is formed in a unique way, even when the label given to it is shared by many, so every person who overeats, or smokes, or lacks confidence, or fears spiders or dogs, needs a different sequence of techniques, connected together by a pattern of hypnotic suggestions based on their way of thinking.
Here’s a handy explainer video:
Working as a team
Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a team effort: you don’t just fall asleep and then wake up later on to find that your problem has gone. [In fact, when you’re in a trance you are fully aware and in control at all times.] So this is an interactive therapy where the therapist acts as a guide.
We believe that each client has all the resources that they need to resolve their problem, and we act as a skilled assistant, or a ‘tour guide’ to help the client to identify these resources within them. It does not involve the therapist as a ‘controlling’ agent, or someone who dictates what is ‘best’ for the client.
We find the most effective approach is for the therapist to work within the client’s “model of the world”, not force the client into the therapist’s.
With our approach, the client is actively involved in the change that we are producing together, not a passive recipient. We often set tasks to the client to carry out in-between sessions, and during therapy sessions the client will be answering sometimes quite challenging questions about themselves, testing different approaches, imagining things, working with feelings and doing quite a lot of work.
You as the client are responsible for your change and you have to work at it!
So working in this way involves a higher level of skill than many traditional Hypnotherapy approaches, which depend mainly on using standard scripts to treat a problem – where if you have apparently the same problem as another person you’ll get the same script. The content for these scripts will be the therapist’s ideas about what you need to hear.
Well, we think there’s a better way:
We start with a blank sheet of paper
Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapists use WordweavingTM, a unique approach to hypnotic language developed by Trevor Silvester from the Quest Institute, that frees us from the need to use standard scripts by incorporating the client’s own words and ideas into a pattern of creative suggestion.
We create suggestions that are uniquely tailored to each client to tune their mind to what is useful, and to tune out what is not. Treating each new client as a unique experience, rather than ‘another smoker’, or ‘another phobia’ increases our success and makes this a truly fascinating and challenging profession!
NLP and much more
An integral part of Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy is the practice of NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) which was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s. NLP looks at the building blocks of our thought processes – images, sounds, feelings etc – and studies how these thought processes can be modified to produce better results for people, whether this means improving someone’s golf swing or helping them to leave depression behind or relieve long-term pain.
NLP looks at how people ‘do’ their problem, the mental processes and sequences of thoughts that they go through to create and maintain their behaviour, and over the years a whole range of techniques have been developed that can be spectacularly successful.
So, doing something well, consistently, is not an accident, it is a process, and doing something badly, consistently, is not an accident: it is a process. NLP provides tools that we can use to understand these processes and develop a client’s ability to adapt whatever they do that does not bring them the results they want, into processes that do bring them the results they want, if that makes sense!
So Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy is a supremely flexible system, a perfect blend of modern hypnosis, the latest understanding from neuroscience, NLP and a whole raft of useful methods and approaches, like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), Time Line Reconsolidation, Positive Psychology and Gestalt, a system that adapts perfectly to each client’s problem, providing them with exactly what they need to release their problems and get on with their lives.