How EMDR transformed my London hypnotherapy practice forever

Before I trained in EMDR I was a fairly traditional clinical hypnotherapist. I enjoyed helping people while practicing the art of hypnosis. However, if I’m completely honest with myself, I was feeling somewhat disconcerted by a sad truth - you can’t expect to help everybody, no single strategy fits all. That was explained by my trainers while studying hypnotherapy and I guess it’s common sense. That’s why like many other schools the Institute of Clinical Hypnosis also includes CBT, NLP and other modalities within the curriculum. Even combining multiple treatment modalities, during my early career I’d estimate I was significantly helping maybe 70% of my clients which is actually pretty respectable if you look at industry bench marks. However, I began obsessing about the 30% who weren’t much improved following treatment. Whenever I met a new client I found myself wondering whether they would be a good responder or not.

Eventually I began to introduce EMDR and other bilateral stimulation techniques into my sessions, and encouraged by initial results I found myself progressively using them more and more intensively  as I experienced a dramatic improvement in success rates and my confidence grew accordingly. I began to understand that there is a powerful synergy between hypnosis and EMDR. Hypnosis excels at generating something new -  new conditioning, new beliefs new feelings. It’s perhaps not the best tool for removing something negative such as trauma / negative conditioning and beliefs. Used in isolation one is typically just recording new positive conditioning over the top of the existing negative conditioning which does not necessarily get rid of it. I like to use the gardening analogy of laying down a new lawn without having cleared the weed roots first. The results can still appear amazing in the beginning however this may not persist over time.

Over the years I have introduced other similar techniques and variants such as Flash technique and I have developed and refined my own protocols to work in a more efficient and agile way, cutting short the time it takes to address a single point of conditioning and so increasing the amount of conditioning we can address within the limited time. This makes it practical to include what I call a full emotional conditioning reset for almost every client. This entails going through and clearing a lifetime’s worth of accumulated unhelpful conditioning in a relatively short time frame. From the client’s perspective we undo the effect of all the unpleasant life experiences that have contributed to their current predicament and all the maintaining factors that have kept them stuck in it. For many the effect is like an untangling of emotional undergrowth replacing confusion and procrastination with a state of clarity and an ease of action. This process serves as the initial foundation to virtually every therapeutic intervention I do whatever the presenting issue, from anxiety to unhealthy cravings and urges.

I call this unique approach Conditioning Reset Therapy (CRT) and it really has transformed the results I’m achieving. According to a survey I conducted in 2020 95% of respondents experienced improvement, 87.5% achieved more than 70% of their goals and 90% were satisfied overall (worth mentioning that some of the respondents were from my early career which would have dragged down the average) . While there is still a small percentage of clients who remain unresponsive, I now have great confidence when I meet a new client that I will be able to help and I look forward to hearing their progress on the follow-up session.

I’m currently coaching other therapists in the Conditioning Reset Therapy protocol and in the future will be creating a curriculum for a more formalised training and educational program. If you are a qualified therapist and interested in training and coaching on Conditioning Reset Therapy please email me on info@growthypnosis.co.uk