Cognitive Behaviour

Do you want to change your life in 6 hours?

If the answer is yes, then this is the therapy for you. Read on ……….

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (Thinking and Behaviour) is a combination of psychotherapy and behavioural therapy. Cognitive behaviour therapy uncovers your unhealthy beliefs. Your beliefs influence the way you run your life and affects how you react to situations.

You are not consciously aware of your beliefs as they are in the subconscious mind. This therapy uncovers your unhealthy beliefs and brings them into conscious awareness and it is only when you become consciously aware of your unhealthy beliefs that they can be challenged and changed

Beliefs that are healthy lead to healthy thoughts, feelings and behaviour and lead you to being psychologically healthy. Unhealthy beliefs lead to unhealthy thoughts, feelings and behaviour and lead you to being psychologically unhealthy.

Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy

In Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy, hypnosis adds a new powerful dimension. Hypnosis is used to integrate healthy beliefs into your belief system. Hypnosis seeks to strengthens healthy beliefs and weaken unhealthy beliefs. Hypnotherapy makes this therapy 70% more effective than Cognitive Behavioural Therapy alone.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is based on the principle that we are for the most part responsible for our emotions and behaviours.

It is not the situation that causes our emotions, but it is our reaction to the situation. The situation is the trigger and how we respond depends on our beliefs.

This principle is demonstrated here.

You are asked to do a presentation at work infront of 100 colleagues

Possible reactions might be:

Wow, I would love to do that.
I will probably feel a bit apprehensive but I will do it.
I would be absolutely terrified and will never do that. What if I make a complete fool of myself?

As you can see the situation is the same, but our beliefs about that situation will cause our reaction to it

Similarly you could use the example above but change the situation to being asked to be best man at a wedding, talk to people or you could change it to a situation about which you are currently anxious, depressed ,angry etc.

Again it is not the situation that causes our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It is our beliefs about the situation that causes our thoughts feelings and behaviours.

Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy uncovers the subconscious unhealthy beliefs, challenges them and changes them to healthier beliefs and this leads to the individual becoming emotionally healthy.

Cognitive behaviour theory states that healthy negative emotions stem from healthy beliefs. Unhealthy negative emotions stem from unhealthy beliefs.

Emotions can be healthily negative - we can be healthily concerned about a situation. Emotions can be unhealthily negative- we can be anxious about a situation.

For example A person who is going to sit an exam and has the belief that they absolutely must pass the exam, or it would be the end of the world is going to disturb themselves. The resulting emotion would be anxiety.

Whereas a person who has the more rational belief that they strongly desire to pass the exam or it would be bad, but not the end of the world if they didn’t pass, would not psychologically disturb themselves. Their healthy negative emotion would be concern

The process of Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy is structured and involves tasks between sessions. This will involve practical work, thinking assignments, written assignments, imagery assignments and behavioural assignments.

In Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy, hypnosis is used to install healthy beliefs into your belief system. Hypnosis also strengthens healthy beliefs and weaken unhealthy beliefs.

According to Kirsch , 1995, in a meta analysis on 18 studies comparing cognitive therapy with and without hypnosis, it was found that those people who received cognitive behaviour therapy combined with hypnotherapy showed some improvement over 70% of those receiving cognitive behaviour therapy only.