FAST RESULTS ARE DANGEROUS

The spur to writing this was the comment I overheard at a mini-workshop run by a psychotherapist, who said '… and right there, the way she reacted to this process, has several sessions worth of exploratory work within it.'

The key to many models of psychotherapy – of which this psychotherapist will be an expert in one – is the bringing to the conscious awareness of hidden beliefs, values, internal strategies and other stuff. By bringing it to conscious awareness, and staying with it in conscious awareness, deep and lasting change occurs.

The problem with it, especially if your issues are complex, is it takes an expert psychotherapist (with the right tools) to facilitate that change AND a few years of costly sessions. This isn't to take away from the great benefits that can occur.

Please note, I can be classed as a psychotherapist myself, so the following remarks are generalisations about the majority of the profession. Your psychologist or psychotherapist or hypnotherapist may be one of the exceptions, as may the psychotherapist I met at the mini-workshop.

Thankfully for the profession, there has been a precedent set: the greater the expertise the greater the fees per hour, AND they get paid by the hourly session, and NOT on results. I’m not picking on psychotherapists specifically here, as almost every therapist of any kind has adopted the same pay structure. They also subscribe to the medical premise: there is no such thing as a cure. I’m not saying there cannot be significant progress made in a short period of time with psychoanalysis, or that it will not be a lasting change. But:

• the paid for time & not results = no incentive to reduce client’s suffering ASAP – in fact more sessions = money in the therapist’s pocket.
• the premise of ‘no cure’, means you must learn to deal with your suffering – lessening one’s expectations, and lowering the bar for ‘results’.
• the amount of time it takes to develop the client-therapist relationship and look (consciously) for those things deep in the subconscious that need to be taken out of their hiding place (possibly buried) so we can be consciously aware of them can take years – even with an excellent psychotherapist.

Anything that short-cuts this process is deemed quick & dirty, and therefore dangerous, by the profession.

Along comes Dr Roger Callaghan, who was an Associate Professor of Psychology at a University in the USA for many years, who (over thirty years ago) decided to explore techniques using the acupuncture points. He discovered a ‘cure’ for phobias that only took a few minutes to administer. From this fist discovery grew a new field in psychotherapy called Thought Field Therapy (TFT).

Along comes a number of people who developed a new set of tools for psychotherapists and others called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Within this toolbox is an effective ‘cure’ for phobias that can be facilitated within one session.

If either the NLP tools or the TFT tools are used by a competent therapist the real and lasting results are fast, yet the dangers are eliminated.

Over the last 30 years, there has been many other discoveries (or re-discoveries in some cases) of tools that work in amazing ways to quickly bring real & lasting results for clients. They do NOT need the client to be fully aware of what is happening down in the depths of the subconscious mind in order to get the required results. They do NOT need the client to fully understand their psychosis, in order to make the appropriate and beneficial changes.

These are NOT short-cuts, but a different way to get the same results, in a fraction of the time. These methods can resolve issues where the client has no idea where the problem lies (or has an idea but doesn’t want to go there!), allowing the powerful subconscious mind to do the necessary work beneath the conscious level. NO ‘several sessions to explore the issue’ required. If we then use the psychologist’s toolkit to check, we find the necessary changes have been made.

I’ve always felt uneasy with the ‘pay me for my time and let us see what happens’ fee structure, and have also continually searched for methods that would reduce peoples' suffering sooner, rather than later. This is why I am now confident in adopting a “I get paid for results!” policy for my therapy clients.

Tools I Use When Diagnosing Specific Metaphors

I’ve been asked about the diagnostic tools I use when diagnosing specific metaphors for clients with deep issues that are effecting many areas of their life.

One thing to understand about these particular clients is they do not come to me instead of their GP or before trying everything the NHS or health professionals can give them. They come to me after everything else has NOT WORKED for them.

Admittedly, my typical client in this bracket is on no drugs at all when they come and see me – having given up using them because the drugs were not curing anything, just hiding the symptoms behind a numbed mind. This might mean they are in some way more resolute than the norm. However, now they have come off the drugs that kept their mind sedated but without the symptoms, those symptoms of panic, general anxiety, worries, flashbacks, and depressingly negative thoughts have returned. But this time they want to try an alternative to drug-therapy. These clients have often tried Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) but found they were among the high percentage for whom CBT is ineffective.

It does seem the NHS may be pretty impoverished if the only choices they have for people like this is either to see a psychiatrist – who only gives drug-therapies; or a psychologist – who these days only offers CBT. See this article in the Times Online: Therapies That Help Are Being Ignored

By the way, I don’t have anything against CBT. I learned the principles of CBT over a decade ago and taught it within the Coping With Stress courses I developed. However, I found (as does everyone else who uses it with clients) not everyone is able to use the tools effectively so I continued my search for tools that would help those people.

The diagnostic tools I use with these particular clients… There are two.

One uses ideomotor responses and the other Voice Technology. An ideomotor reflex is an unconscious movement or physical response. Examples would be a nervous eye twitch, or when someone tries to look and sound happy but their sad eyes give them away. Ideomotor responses are often used in Hypnosis to gain insight from the person’s subconscious mind by asking for (or suggesting) an involuntary physical response which would indicate a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer from the subconscious mind.

I set up a suggested involuntary response while the person is completely awake and conscious and use this to get 'yes' and 'no' answers without having to put my client into any kind of trance. The results can be surprising to the conscious mind! Yet, when the client goes along with the metaphor the subconscious has indicated, then (within minutes and without the conscious mind having to believe in the metaphor) real healing and progress is made.

Such is the power of the subconscious mind. In these sessions the client's own subconscious mind takes control of what work we do and which therapeutic methods are most appropriate – making progress even quicker. There are no psychological ‘models’ to get in the way, and I find the client’s mind often creates new ways to integrate many therapeutic methods (combinations of NLP, Time Line Therapy, EMDR, etc.) to produce outstanding results.

The other diagnostic method, Voice Technology, was devised by the founder of Thought Field Therapy, Dr Roger Callaghan, so clients can get the same help over the telephone. You know that a lie detector will measure your pulse, sweating, and voice patterns (these are all ideomotor responses) to establish if you are lying or not. This is because emotions and thoughts in the subconscious often have an ideomotor effect on the body and your body cannot help but change in ways which can be measured! These ‘signals’ may be too subtle for normal detection by our eyes and ears, but if we can find a way to ‘tune in’ to them we can measure truth from deception, yes from no.

Voice Technology is a way of tuning in to those subconscious signals – via the voice over the telephone. And once calibrated, we can start the diagnosing of metaphors (and other things) via a different (but just as precise) ideomotor response mechanism.

So does that answer the question of what methods I use for diagnosing the metaphors my clients use for their own healing - or have I made it as clear as mud? Let me know.

Be well

Colin :-)

Diagnosing Your Metaphor

The use of metaphor - in the form of creative and imaginative but simple analogies, anecdotes, parables, myths or stories - can be a very powerful therapeutic tool.

Recently I’ve been wondering how to reconcile the different philosophical leanings of my friends; some of whom are pretty straight with a belief in science and psychology but feel that chakras, angels, and new-age stuff is just fluffy nonsense, and others who truly believe we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

You might think that I should just fall on one side or the other – become connected with my divine self, and communicate with my higher self and soul and wear crystals to protect myself from astral entities and pray to the Arch Angels; or only believe in the supremacy of science and nothing exists outside it.

The problem arises when science, and medical science in particular, fails to provide a remedy to a chronic condition; yet a non-scientific method based on dowsing comes up with a weird scenario of what the condition is at its core – and the prescription of visualisation and messing around with the chakras WORKS!

Of course, the psychologist will be quick to explain away the phenomenon by saying that the person must have wanted a remedy so bad that their HOPE made them suggestible and therefore their BELIEF made their subconscious mind do the back-flip it needed to cause a cure.

The problem with this kind of explanation – often said with a non-malicious but quite evident sneer – is that it totally undermines the person’s experience. The scientifically unproven tool of dowsing (in whatever form) is immediately brandished as pseudoscience and unreliable so the person is also brandished a fool (by association) by the science believing friend. After such a demolishing of the basis of the person’s cure, it is a wonder the remedy (remember it was only based on a HOPE in the first place according to the psychologists explanation) doesn’t wither and die so they end up in the same state they were previous to the remedy (possibly for many years without any help from science).

This isn’t supposed to be a blog bashing science. What I want to explore is the possibility that Metaphor is more powerful than we might imagine.

You see, one way of looking at the concepts of the soul, chakras, angels, entities and other things that are unseen but some people believe in strongly, is to say: maybe they are metaphors.

In Hypnotherapy, we use metaphors a lot. The subconscious mind somehow gets the message and does the necessary work. One such metaphor is to imagine that a vacuum cleaner made of light is driving through our blood vessels and sucking up any viral infection or unwanted (diseased or cancerous) cells. Of course, there is not REALLY a tiny vacuum cleaner, so we say the subconscious mind activates our white blood cells or other mechanisms that science can agree to, and thus our blood is cleansed.

So we use a metaphor the subconscious mind can utilise as a catalyst for change and every psychologist will agree that this is how it works.

Back to the person with the dowsing, or other diagnostic method, that comes up with some weird and wonderful explanation for our malady. Maybe what they are diagnosing is the best metaphor for our circumstances? Maybe the mind uses metaphor to a much greater extent than we previously thought?

Some of my friends are going to be upset with me for ‘explaining away’ their hard-held beliefs as metaphors, but I think this is actually a really exciting possibility. If Angels, for instance, are not real in the scientific sense, but metaphorical, then we do not have to PROVE their existence. However, being USEFUL metaphors, they play an important role in being a catalyst for change.

The mind is exceptionally powerful, and it can not only cure us of chronic disease (having been given a metaphor to work with) but it can also change our personality – making us more confident, assertive, dynamic, positive, and even charismatic – when it takes the message from a metaphor.

I have been experimenting with diagnostic techniques lately (although more sophisticated than dowsing) and finding it extremely useful to explore weird and wonderful metaphors so as to find one that really works for individual clients. At the end of the day, I could fall on the side of my science based friends and say I’m too much of a professional coach and therapist to use such metaphors – and limit the healing of clients – but my compassion is too strong to do this. It looks like I’ll just have to stay on that metaphorical fence.

Be well

Colin :-)