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Uncommon Ideas for Therapists.
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People aren’t usually willing to abandon their ideas or habits just because you say so. Learn how you can easily help people become more open to therapeutic suggestions for change.
When I first started out as a therapist I would sometimes run into ‘difficult’ clients – people who just didn’t give the ‘right’ answers to my therapeutic questions. I remember one man I saw who had recently lost his job, and was suffering from depression and anxiety. The more I pressed him to consider what he wanted for his future, to imagine what he would be doing when he was feeling better, the more he shrugged, sighed and said “I just don’t know!”
Read full article here.
If you already use hypnosis in your practice, or are just an avid student of the art, our online course Precision Hypnosis will take your skills to a whole new level.
The next course starts November 9th which may seem like a long way off, but this course usually sells out way ahead of the start date.
Read more about Precision Hypnosis here.
I hope I’ll meet you on the course.
Mark Tyrrell
Co-Founder
Uncommon Knowledge
Psychology trainers since 1998
This newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF.
Published by mark.tyrrell July 1st, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
Limiting beliefs can be a serious roadblock to effective therapy. Learn a tried-and-tested model to overcome them, clearing the way for rapid change.
Sometimes a client’s limiting beliefs can get in the way of doing good therapeutic work with them. Someone who can’t even begin to imagine themselves as a non-smoker, a confident public speaker, or looking slim and healthy, or who constantly tells themselves “It’s impossible!” needs your help to clear that barrier.
Read the full article here.
If you’re not trained how to use hypnosis your work as a therapist or counsellor, it can be hard to see just how useful it is. Below are links to a few of the many articles Uncommon Knowledge have published on hypnosis so you can get an idea of why we’re so committed to it.
Articles on hypnosis by Uncommon Knowledge
And if these articles pique your interest, you can train online with Mark Tyrrell on our course ‘Hypnosis Unwrapped’ to understand what exactly hypnosis is and how to use it flexibly with clients.
Our next course starts on 23 September which means there’s still plenty of time to benefit from our 25% early bird discount (but not all the time in the world as we only have 25 places available).
Here’s where to sign up for Hypnosis Unwrapped. There, I hope you enjoyed that! See you again in 2 weeks.
Mark Tyrrell
Co-Founder
Uncommon Knowledge
Psychology trainers since 1998
This newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF.
Published by mark.tyrrell June 16th, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
The rewind technique is in itself an amazingly quick, comfortable and safe way to lift debilitating phobias and trauma. But the language you use when using the rewind technique is vital for both its effectiveness and your client’s comfort.
Phobic or traumatized people often find that the slightest trigger ‘sets them off’. And words can be powerful triggers. The very word ‘spider’ may spark terror in an arachnophobe. So sprinkling that word about while you work on a rewind with them can make the job of lifting the phobia harder than it need be.
Full article: How to avoid client discomfort in the Rewind Technique
You can learn to help people get rid of the most frightening phobias and recover from severe traumatic distress quickly and easily by signing up for our online course in the Rewind Technique.
But if you want to join us for the next course, get your skates on, because we’re starting on Thursday 4 June and there’s only a few places left!
The rewind technique is so powerful that most clients report huge relief after even a single session, and for many clients one session is enough to effectively erase the problem.
Here’s where to sign up for Rewind Technique and get the answers to all your questions.
Hello
I’m almost fanatical about the rewind technique – even a party bore about it (so my wife says – everybody else is too polite)! But this has got to be one of the most amazing developments in effective psychotherapy in my time. Dealing with phobias and the after effects of traumatic experience used to be one of the most difficult and frustrating areas to work in. A few people got better, but many, many people found that all the counselling and psychoanalysis and CBT and whatever else they got did very little to really help relieve their distress.
In contrast, the rewind technique is often effective in a SINGLE session, even with very longstanding and severe PTSD or phobia. And the sufferer, far from reliving the trauma all over again, remains comfortable and relaxed throughout the process.
All right, I’ll stop there. But do sign up!
All the best
Mark Tyrrell
Creative Director
Uncommon Knowledge LLP
This newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF.
Published by mark.tyrrell June 2nd, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
Discover how splitting the person from the problem can really help you help people stop smoking more quickly and easily
Smokers often feel deeply entwined with their smoking – “It’s who I am”. This makes any threat to their smoking (“You should stop smoking!”) feel like a very personal threat. To help them quit, they need to be helped to extract the smoking from their core identity.
Full article: How to get more smokers to really want to quit
If you want to dramatically improve your power to help people stop smoking quickly, sign up to train with me on our new online Smoking Cessation course right now.
This key new course for therapists working to help people quit smoking launches on Wednesday 27 May and you can be among the first to benefit from the wealth of information, insight and sheer know-how we have put together to help smoking cessation practitioners become even better at what they do.
Here’s where to sign up for How to stop anyone smoking and get the answers to all your questions.
Well, what do you think so far? I’m lining up a whole series of short, sharp pieces like the ones you’ve seen here. The idea is to take a single angle on an issue that’s important to therapists and focus in on highly practical ways to become more effective from that angle.
Of course, any issue has its complexities and subtleties, and no single angle will provide the whole answer to anyone’s problems (if only that were possible!). But honing your skills in this way is like a golfer working with their coach and focusing in on a single aspect of their play – the stance, the swing, the grip, or whatever it may be – and making that aspect absolutely as good as it can be. That’s bound to automatically improve the level of play overall. And that’s my aim.
All the best
Mark Tyrrell
Creative Director
Uncommon Knowledge LLP
This newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF.
Published by mark.tyrrell May 19th, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
Discover a fundamental principle of human behaviour that makes treating smoking and all addiction so much easier
Sometimes when you talk about quitting smoking to a smoker, you see a look of terror (or defiance!) flit across their features – even if they have explicitly asked for help in quitting.
Full article: How a clever wee boy can help you help people quit smoking
If you want to learn more powerful and effective ways to help people stop smoking quickly, sign up to train with me on our new online Smoking Cessation course right now.
This key new course for therapists working to help people quit smoking launches on Wednesday 27 May and you can be one of the first to benefit from the wealth of information, insight and sheer know-how we have put together to help smoking cessation practitioners become even better at what they do.
And if you book your place (only 25 available) before the end of the day tomorrow, you’ll get 25% off the course fee.
Here’s where to sign up for how to stop anyone smoking and get the answers to all your questions.
Clear Thinking has changed. It will now come every 2 weeks with one article packed with psychological know-how that you can put to use right away. If this doesn’t appeal any more, you can bid us farewell by using the Update your details link at the bottom. Do give me a chance to impress you though 
All the best
Mark Tyrrell
Creative Director
Uncommon Knowledge LLP
This newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF.
Published by mark.tyrrell May 5th, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
I was fascinated - but ultimately unsurprised - to read of a study conducted in the 1970s that showed that insomniacs given placebo relaxants stayed awake while those who were given placebo stimulants were more likely to fall asleep.
What?
Many insomniacs obsessively ‘self monitor’ what is happening as they lie in bed with their eyes shut (or open). “Am I asleep yet?” “How alert am I right now?” and so on. It seems that the insomniacs in the study who were given the fake sugar pill ‘relaxants’ ascribed any alertness they noticed in themselves to their insomnia. If they were still alert even after taking the ‘relaxant’, then the insomnia must be really bad. And, as a result, the vicious cycle of alertness leading to yet more alertness would accelerate. But those given the dummy stimulants were able to ascribe any alertness they noticed not to their insomnia but to the ‘drug’ they had supposedly been given - so they could relax, because they were supposed to be alert. And therefore they were much more likely to fall asleep!
This kind of ‘paradoxical affect’ applies far beyond the bedroom, of course. Milton Erickson was famous for his intuitive understanding of the subtle shades and seeming contradictions of human motivation and how to use this to good effect when treating troubled patients, and paradoxical psychological problem solving is an important aspect of many of the Uncommon Knowledge therapy training courses.
But back to the research: all real, non-placebo, drugs will have psycho-physical effects above and beyond their chemical impact. Makes you wonder whether sleeping pills stop working for some people because it encourages more self monitoring: “Has this pill worked yet? No? Then my insomnia must be really powerful!”
Sleep well.
Mark
Published by mark.tyrrell April 27th, 2009
in Hypnotherapy training links and psychology-research.
The old nature/nurture debate has been applied to just about every facet of human experience. Are we ‘born’ the way we are, or are we ‘shaped’ by experience? Of course, it doesn’t have to be either/or. It can equally well be both/and.
It seems there is a set of universals or ‘human givens’ that make us identifiably human, and then there are cultural specifics which make us interestingly different from one another. Confusion arises because we often muddle these up, and assume that what is really environmental learning is fixed and ‘pre-programmed’, and that what are really innate characteristics have been shaped by culture.
For example, psychologist Paul Ekman famously demonstrated that facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined but universal. He studied isolated tribes who had had no contact with the wider world and found that expressions of sadness, anger, fear and so forth were expressed through the same facial muscular networks (expressions) as anywhere else. These findings contradicted some theories of emotional expression current at the time.
In a fascinating study which echoes Ekman, Thomas Fritz led a team of researchers to Cameroon in Africa, where they found evidence that similar combinations of musical notes provoke similar emotions in the people listening to them, and these responses do not appear to be culturally determined. It is true that musical appreciation is more strongly influenced by culture, but human beings appear to process music emotionally in fundamentally the same way.
That’s more evidence to make us even more cautious about jumping to conclusions about nature/nurture distinctions – a controversy which (speaking of emotions) is still holding up progress in dealing with depression, for instance. Sadness is a universal human experience – a direct emotion. But depression is much more akin to ‘musical appreciation’ – that is, depression is what we make of the emotion of sadness. And we learn what to make of it from those around us. In other words, depression can be socially learned.
Published by mark.tyrrell April 14th, 2009
in psychology-research.
Which comes first? Are you smiling because you’re feeling happy, or do you feel happy because you’re smiling? Do you frown because you’re feeling cross, or do you feel cross because you’re frowning?
We like simple cause and effect. Crossness causes frowns. Happiness causes smiles. But facial expressions are not always and invariably a consequence of emotion. Facial expressions can also generate emotion.
We often think of actors as ‘temperamental’ – but what if constantly adopting the expressions of anger, sadness, aggression, etc actually makes you feel that way? Method acting emotions could end up giving you the real thing. Facial expression don’t just reflect but also form the way that we feel. Botox anyone?
An intriguing study shows that Botox injections can help make you feel happier because you cannot frown while the Botox is paralyzing your facial muscles. Frowning sends signals to the brain which can make you feel irritable or sad. Not only that, but frowning sends signals to other people that you are not in a good mood, and they tend to frown in response – which, in a feedback loop, can also make you feel down, and isolated.
Obviously, if someone is really depressed then it’s likely that many of their basic needs are not being satisfied, and Botox alone could only ever be a partial solution, but it’s conceivable that such a treatment could at least get the ball rolling by lifting their mood enough for them to start getting their emotional and physical needs properly met.
Mind you, I’m not particularly advocating Botox as a depression treatment, but there is a wider point here. Therapeutic interventions which may look as if they are only addressing a small part of the problem (like setting behavioral tasks as part of the recovery program) can have a much greater impact through ‘ripple effect’ than is necessarily immediately obvious.
Which is something to smile about.
Published by mark.tyrrell April 2nd, 2009
in psychology-research.
Good old cognitive dissonance.
We just can’t bear it. But nor will we face up to it. Having a bad conscience about lying or cheating or stealing won’t necessarily stop us from doing it. Instead, we’ll go to extraordinary lengths to ‘make it OK’. We’ll square off that conscience somehow, no matter how much self-deception it involves.
Watching Dan Ariely explain why we think it’s OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)reminded me that an explanation – any explanation, whether it’s ‘Aryan supremacy’ or ‘selling sub-prime mortgages will free the poor’ - can make good people do bad and/or stupid things. Create a convincing explanation and slap a label on it and away you go.
Of course, real psychopaths don’t actually need to waste their time coming up with explanations to make it OK for them to do bad stuff. They don’t have a conscience in the first place.
Mark
Published by mark.tyrrell March 20th, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
Psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell (my father) coined the term ‘one track thinking’ to describe the typical thinking style of people who are ‘context blind’, such as individuals with autistic traits. Autism is not a condition like epilepsy, where you either have it or you don’t. It’s more of a continuum, and we are all somewhere on that continuum. The spectrum ranges from severe autism at one end – where meaningful social interaction and independent living are practically impossible – to what is considered ‘normal’ social functioning at the other. And there’s everything in between.
Two key features in autism are inability to prioritize in accordance with context, and inability to see things from another person’s point of view. An interesting consequence of this is that people with autistic traits tend not to lie. This is because the act of lying requires a clear understanding that another person has differing perceptions and viewpoints to you. Being truthful might be regarded as a positive aspect of autistic thinking, but there are also downsides. Autistic thinking tends to be ‘one track’ and woefully literal. So the question: ‘Can you open the window?’ may be answered with a simple ‘yes’, while its wider context (Open the window, then!) can be totally missed.
I once worked with a colleague who has the milder level of autism known as Asperger Syndrome (AS). I was giving a lecture to two hundred people about self esteem. My colleague had been asked to find out whether there were enough biscuits for the break. He went off to the kitchens of the hotel where we were giving the workshop to find out. Meanwhile, I was talking about the sensitive subject of child abuse to a hushed audience. My colleague rushed back in and called to me from the back of the conference room, at the top of his voice, “It’s okay! We’ve got biscuits!”
One track thinking leads to simple, unalterable, context blind rules and procedures. It’s normal to look for clarity and certainty in life, and we all do it, but the further along the autistic spectrum you go, the more terrifying ambiguity and uncertainty become. Fixed rules and rituals offer a way of negotiating and easing the chaos of life. Whatever happens, the rules won’t change.
Barry Schwartz points out that much of the social and economic crisis we are now facing is due to an apparent loss of ability to know when to step outside the rules – even when the rules are, on the face of it, good.
Schwartz’s account of the boy who was quite unnecessarily separated from his family for two weeks by the state authorities clearly shows that autistic thinking is not just a problem for individuals.
Autistic red tape
Can it be that whole societies can, to a greater or lesser degree, be autistic? Certainly, the crippling red tape, stifling bureaucracy and inflexible rule-following despite wider context that now seems endemic in the UK looks awfully like a plague of ‘one track thinking’. In individuals, it is recognized that autism and AS do not automatically preclude high levels of intelligence, but intelligence and wisdom can be worlds apart. And this is even more so at the societal level.
Context blindness can make life extremely difficult for the individual who suffers from it. But, at least sometimes, other people around them may come to their aid and provide the missing contextual information. When context blindness is endemic in society, embedded in rules and procedures which everybody has to follow – who is going to come to our aid?
Mark
Published by mark.tyrrell March 19th, 2009
in hypnotherapy-training.
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