Hypnotherapy has long been a source of intrigue, raising eyebrows, and capturing the imagination. But what if there were a form of hypnotherapy that focuses not on delving into the depths of the unconscious mind, but on unlocking the innate potential and strengths within us? That’s what solution focused hypnotherapy provides. It’s an innovative approach that is changing the landscape of therapeutic interventions.
Solution-focused hypnotherapy, as the name suggests, aims to empower individuals by emphasizing the solutions rather than dwelling on the problems. This approach draws on a combination of techniques from solution focused brief therapy (SFBT) and hypnosis, creating a powerful tool to address a range of mental, emotional, and behavioural challenges. It also borrows from neurolinguistic programming (NLP), the work of Milton Erickson, and positive psychology.
At the heart of solution-focused hypnotherapy is the belief that every individual has within them the necessary resources and abilities to overcome their difficulties. It is not about digging deep into past traumas or analysing the origins of issues. Instead, the focus is on identifying and amplifying strengths and positive changes that can lead to meaningful results.
So, how does solution-focused hypnotherapy work? The therapist leads an individual into a state of deep relaxation, commonly known as trance. In this relaxed state, the individual’s mind becomes highly receptive to positive suggestions and imagery, enabling them to tap into their subconscious mind with greater ease.
During the session, the therapist guides the individual to picture their goal – how they would like things to be. By ‘seeing’ themselves behaving ‘normally’ without the problem affecting them, they become aware that they are a person who currently is dealing with issue x, they are not defined by the problem. And that way it becomes easier to take the necessary small steps to achieve their final goal. These goals are framed in a way that reinforces positive changes and encourages progress. By visualizing these solutions, the mind begins to form new neurological pathways, reshaping thoughts, emotions, and behaviours towards the desired outcome.
One of the remarkable aspects of solution-focused hypnotherapy is its time-efficient nature. Unlike other traditional forms of therapy that can require numerous sessions, this approach is often brief and focused, providing people with practical tools and strategies to implement positive changes in their lives.
Another key advantage of solution-focused hypnotherapy is its versatility. It can be effectively applied to various areas, including anxiety, phobias, smoking cessation, weight management, as well as performance enhancement. By harnessing the power of their mind, people can tap into their own inner resources, paving the way for transformation and self-empowerment.
Additionally, solution-focused hypnotherapy stands out for its collaborative nature. Therapists work in partnership with their clients, guiding them to explore their own solutions and empowering them to make significant changes. It creates a sense of autonomy and resilience, because individuals take ownership of their personal growth journey.
In recent years, solution-focused hypnotherapy has gained recognition and popularity for its innovative and results-driven approach. Research has shown promising outcomes, highlighting its effectiveness in producing positive changes and improving overall wellbeing.
As with any therapy, it is crucial to choose a qualified and experienced practitioner who specializes in solution-focused hypnotherapy. Ensure they are qualified, insured, and affiliated with reputable organizations to guarantee the highest standards of practice and ethics.
Unlocking the vast potential of the human mind is a captivating concept. Solution-focused hypnotherapy offers a fresh perspective, one that highlights the power of positive change and resilience. By focusing on solutions rather than problems, individuals find the strength and confidence to overcome challenges and create the life they desire. So, dare to explore the depths of your mind, for within lies the key to unlocking your extraordinary potential!
The brain
One of the first things that many solution-focused hypnotherapists do is tell clients about the brain. The information is based on the latest neuroscience understanding of how the brain works, and helps clients to understand what’s going on in their mind. It also helps them to feel less isolated with their problem when they realize that it is quite common and easily explained.
The brain weighs around 3lbs and is composed mainly of neurons and glial cells. When you look at it, its surface isn’t smooth. And that’s because it’s like a big sheet of paper that’s had to be squashed up to fit inside the skull. The first thing people notice is that there are clearly left and right sides.
People used to think that the left side is logical and contains the language centres of the brain. The right side is more ‘big picture’ in its way of working. In fact, language is usually left-lateralized, and some visuospatial functions are more right-sided, but logical thinking uses extensive networks across both hemispheres. There’s a massive ‘motorway’ connecting the two halves together called the corpus callosum.
Although modern neuroscience recognizes that brain evolution was considerably more complex than the triune brain model suggests, many therapists still find it a useful educational metaphor for explaining emotional and rational processing. The brain stem is the oldest part of the brain in terms of evolution and is responsible for the most basic functions such as telling the heart to beat, the lungs to breathe, the gut to squeeze food along its length, and the iris to change size depending on the amount of light entering it.
The next area is pretty much the limbic system. This is referred to as the emotional brain. This has some well-defined structures in it, such as the thalamus, hypothalamus, left and right amygdalae, and left and right hippocampi. All sensory messages from the body (except smell) pass into the thalamus before passing to other parts of the brain. An estimated 13 million messages a second arrive and many are deleted before being passed on. Smell sensations go to the olfactory bulb.
Some messages are sent to the amygdalae and the intellectual brain (more later). If the amygdalae think the message matches a dangerous pattern, it will send a message to the hypothalamus. And it can do this very quickly – before the rational part of the brain can respond. The hypothalamus produces hormones that cause the pituitary gland to produce hormones that stimulate the adrenal gland to produce cortisol. Sympathetic nerves stimulate the adrenal gland to produce adrenalin and noradrenalin. The acronyms for this are HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis and SAM (sympathomedullary) pathway. They get invoked when a person feels threatened or excited or worried about a forthcoming event.
The hypothalamus is a small area that’s found underneath the thalamus. Its job is to keep everything in the body working properly. It does this by maintaining levels (homeostasis). So, when we’re hot it causes us to sweat. When we’re cold, it causes us to shiver, etc. It can also raise the levels (allostasis). So, if we were running a marathon, the normal levels would be set differently from when we were sitting watching TV.
The amygdalae look after simple emotions – particularly fear. That’s what keeps us alive by speedily making the body move away from danger. It’s also associated with fearful memories, salience, threat detection, reward, novelty, and emotional learning.
The hippocampi are associated with memory and spatial awareness. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep appears to play an important role in integrating emotional experiences into longer-term autobiographical memory. London taxi drivers, who need to learn all the streets in London (‘the knowledge’) have been found to have longer hippocampi than ordinary people. People with Alzheimer’s have been found to have much shorter hippocampi – and this is associated with their inability to form new memories. One of the few brain regions where adult neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons appears to occur is the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus.
These are the components of the emotional brain. Overall, their function can be described as the four Fs – feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproductive behaviour. You could think of the emotional brain as your inner child or, perhaps, even your inner chimp!
The rational brain corresponds to the cerebral cortex. This is the part of your brain that can have original ideas. It can be innovative rather than simply following existing patterns of behaviour. In many ways, you can think of the intellectual brain as a boy (mahout) riding an elephant (the emotional brain). Most of the time, the boy can control what the elephant does and where it goes. But when the elephant is frightened, the boy has no control over it or its actions. Executive functions (such as problem solving, maintaining attention, and controlling emotional impulses from the emotional brain) are handled by the intellectual brain.
The rational part of the brain is also very predictive. It recognizes patterns and predicts what will happen next. The advantage of that is someone can be ready to respond to an event before the event has actually happened – which is great as a survival mechanism. It can be a problem if a person is expecting ‘danger’ in a situation where there is no danger. Their response may seem inappropriate.
At the very front of the brain are the left and right prefrontal cortices. Again, the left prefrontal cortex was thought to be where we come up with positive solutions and look at things positively. This was because the more you use an area of the brain, the more neurons that can be found there. Thinking positive thoughts can cause this area of the brain to expand.
The right prefrontal cortex was thought to work on negative introspection and negative prediction. It’s a useful part of the brain for looking at how things could be done better next time. Unfortunately, some people dwell on events and spend a lot of time in their right-prefrontal cortex. Although the brain can distinguish imagination from reality, imagination activates many of the same neural networks and physiological responses can be very similar. So, constant brooding on an event can seem like the event occurring over and over again, and lead to more-and-more stress being experienced.
The right prefrontal cortex can also create (imagine) worries such as “did I lock the back door?” or “did I leave the gas on?”. It’s important to spend as much time as possible in the positive left prefrontal cortex and avoid long periods in the right prefrontal cortex.
Nowadays, there is some research linking greater left frontal activity with approach behaviour and right frontal activity with withdrawal, but the distinction is not as clear as people used to think.
People used to think that they had a fixed number of brain cells, and as they got older, brain cells would be die, and they’d gradually lose cognitive function. It’s now understood that that idea isn’t true. Exercise can stimulate the growth on new neurons. This is called neurogenesis. The other clever thing about the brain is that it can reorganize itself and form new neural connections – that’s how people learn new things. This is called neuroplasticity. And means that you can teach new tricks to an old dog! It’s worth noting that neuroplasticity occurs throughout life but tends to become slower with age rather than disappearing.
Although the brain has clearly recognizable areas (like the amygdalae), they do not work independently. Many brain regions are connected into networks that work together in a coordinated manner to perform complex cognitive, behavioural, and sensory tasks. Examples would be the default mode network (DMN), which becomes highly active during introspection and imagining the future. It deactivates when you focus on external tasks; the central executive network (CEN), which handles working memory, critical decision-making, and goal-directed problem solving; and the salience network, which detects important external stimuli and switches between the DMN and the CEN. Hypnotherapy may help shift activity away from excessive self-focused rumination (DMN) towards more adaptive cognitive control (CEN).
Going back to stress, there’s stress that you can cope with. There’s stress that makes you stronger (like training to run a half marathon). And there’s stress that wears you down. Some stress results in the HPA axis and SAM being invoked, but prolonged stress increases the risk of the emotional brain taking control and trying to protect you by making you angry, anxious, or depressed. Ways to reduce stress include: exercise, setting aside time to have fun or indulge yourself, learning a new skill, sharing how you feel, and having some time away from distractions.
It’s worth noting that aerobic exercise consistently improves BDNF, hippocampal function, mood, and sleep. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) promotes neurogenesis, enhances synaptic plasticity, protects existing brain cells, and regulates the body’s metabolism.
You can picture this stress being poured into a metaphorical bucket in your head. And you can perhaps imagine that people have different sizes of stress bucket. Each day the level of stress goes up, and each night during REM sleep, the levels go down – as if a metaphorical tap opens to let the stress out. The problem for many people is that they are not getting enough sleep – for whatever reason, but often associated with stress. And that means they start the day with some stress still in their stress bucket. And each day the level goes up and up until it reaches the top of their bucket. And that usually results in a panic attack or a meltdown of some kind.
Closely linked to the stress response is the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which regulates many bodily functions outside conscious control, such as heart rate, breathing, digestion, and blood pressure. During periods of perceived threat, the sympathetic nervous system (part of the ANS) prepares the body for action by increasing alertness and mobilizing energy. Once the threat has passed, the parasympathetic nervous system (the other part of the ANS) helps restore a calmer state, slowing the heart rate and supporting rest, recovery, and digestion. Relaxation techniques, controlled breathing, and hypnosis all encourage this restorative state, making it easier to think clearly, solve problems, and sleep well.
Now every characteristic or behaviour that everyone does must give them an evolutionary advantage. It must make them better adapted to survive. One influential evolutionary theory suggests the following theory. If you think about our caveman ancestors, being angry when other cavemen turned up in their cave meant that they were better able to fight them off and protect their food and family, and means that their genes were passed on to the next generation. It’s the same with anxiety. In a dangerous world, keeping an eye out for movement in the bushes means that you’ll more quickly spot something that you could eat, or, more importantly, something that might eat you, and you could then take steps to stay alive. Thirdly, with depression, if you look out of your cave at the snow and can’t see any source of food, you might choose to go to the back of the cave and do some magic dancing or cave painting in order to encourage food animals to come your way. Or you might just go back to bed and lie there inert until the next day. And the next day, things might be the same – and the day after that. On the fourth day, a herd of woolly rhinos come into view in the distance. The caveman who had slept in a depressed inert state still has plenty of energy to go hunting, whereas the more active caveman has burned all the spare calories he had stored and won’t be able to hunt the woolly rhino and won’t eat, and won’t pass on his genes to the next generation. The problem is that these three strategies may not be the most effective today in downtown Chippenham. The good news is that solution-focused hypnotherapy can help people with anger, anxiety, and depression.
Inside the brain, apart from the neurons, messages can be sent using hormones, factors, and neurotransmitters. An example of a hormone is oxytocin, which acts on other parts of the body as well as the brain. Factors are things like BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which is important in memory and the creation of new brain cells. Neurotransmitters include serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenalin. Although best known as neurotransmitters, they can act as neuromodulators. Neuromodulation is where an individual neuron uses one or more chemicals to regulate other neurons.
Many scientists think that brains evolved to budget the energy coming into the organism against the energy it was using up. It allowed the creature to predict what it was going to do – eg swim away from a predator – rather than simply react. It gave those simple animals an advantage. If they predicted correctly or learned from their mistakes, they were more likely to pass on their genes. This budgeting process is called allostasis.
Allostasis can be defined as the process of maintaining homeostasis through the adaptive change of an organism’s internal environment to meet perceived and anticipated demands. Homeostasis is where an organism tends to maintain stable internal conditions.
As animals’ bodies got bigger, there was more budgeting to be done, which required bigger and more complex brains. The fact that human brains can reason logically, feel emotions, be creative, etc, is a consequence of it being able to budget its energy requirements by predicting how it operates in the world around it.
One of the easiest ways for people to stay in their rational brain (and be relaxed and in control) and not be continually using their emotional brain (and be reactive and experiencing anger, anxiety, or depression) is to remember the 4Ps. That means they need to have Positive thoughts. They need to perform Positive actions. And they need to have Positive interactions with other people. Loneliness and social isolation significantly increase the risk of premature death. The fourth P is that life needs to have a Purpose.
John Ratey, in his book A User’s guide to the Brain, pictured the brain as having three main functional areas. He thought of the prefrontal cortex as the CEO or the boss. The anterior cingulate (an area between the intellectual brain and the emotional brain) as the secretary or PA. The amygdala is like a fire and safety officer. If there’s an emergency, the fire and safety officer will take control and follow pre-determined procedures. The Boss will probably go along with this although they will have the ability to take back overall command (although this can be difficult). Most of the time, the brain can run on automatic, and the secretary runs things because she knows what was done previously in similar situations.
When messages arrive from the senses, most go to the thalamus and then the amygdala, where they are pattern matched. A message is then sent to the secretary (using dopamine) suggesting what type of message it is (fear, joy, disgust, etc). The secretary will check against a library of previous events (hippocampus) to see what’s best to do. Now it may be that the library shows the requested behaviour is ‘good’ and the secretary will add its own dopamine to the message and pass it on to the boss who will then authorize the appropriate action. This is what happens with smokers and other addicts because the rose-tinted memory in the library recalls smoking as cool. The boss has to be quite firm that being a non-smoker is a priority for the secretary to not carry out the library search and refuse the request.
Solution-focused hypnotherapy uses techniques such as scaling, miracle question, exception questions, and coping questions from SFBT. It gets people in a positive frame of mind by asking about what’s been good. It also incorporates ideas and techniques from positive psychology, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). It provides a model of treatment where the therapist doesn’t even need to know the problem that has brought a client to see them, in order to help the client achieve their goal.
Conclusion
The techniques used from SFBT, such as the miracle question, are very powerful. The use of hypnotherapy to help clients make the changes in their life that they want is very powerful. Helping clients to understand how their brain works gives them a huge insight into why certain things are happening to them, and helps them realize that these can be changed. Putting the three together gives a very powerful way to help clients. And that’s what solution-focused hypnotherapy does.