Contact: Mike Houghton, telephone 01244 378276 or e-mail Mike@chestermesh.org.uk

John Hoyle-Wood’s talk

3rd February 1996

After obtaining a degree in Psychology, John used to do group psychotherapy and discovered he was hypnotising people by mistake. This was why he subsequently went on to qualify in hypnotherapy and whilst in his private practice he still used various forms of psychotherapy, he has predominately become a hypnotherapist as he found that this gets quicker results.

Hypnosis is the delivery of suggestions to an individual’s unconscious mind and this includes everything about a person that they are unaware of ­ both the body and the memory. The unconscious state copes with millions of things per second unlike thought processes which are one at a time and the hypnotherapist communicates with the unconscious by putting information into it by suggestion or getting information out of it.

To deliver suggestion successfully, it has been discovered that people must be deeply relaxed but completely conscious. People don’t realise that they’ve actually been hypnotised as they are fully aware of what is going on. Hypnosis relies heavily on repetition and getting someone to imagine themselves doing what they want to do. Often people are anxious so a hypnotherapist will talk to people about being calm, relaxed and confident and back this up with the use of audio tape. Another aspect of hypnosis is that if you access a memory that someone has reacted to emotionally, the emotional memory is lost and the trauma disappears.

The latest approach in psychotherapy is neuro linguistic programming. This is the study of the structure of subjective experience to change our perspective completely e.g. if you are depressed, imagine yourself in bright sun and sky, travelling down a road towards becoming better and you will actually feel less depressed. If you change the environment in your mind surrounding your illness, you will actually get better.

John described a seminar that he runs where he demonstrates how you can hypnotise yourself to deeply relax which is simple to do and relies on the use of direct suggestion and repetition.

Whilst all statements are given in good faith they are for information only. Any mention of treatments or products does not imply that they have been tested or endorsed by Chester MESH