Brain-based Hypnotherapy for Rapid and Lasting Change

What if you could immediately transform your clients’ lives in just a few sessions rather than spending months on end talking about the same problem? With new neuroscience advances, you can use Brain-based Hypnotherapy, which differs in many ways from the hypnosis used in Traditional Hypnotherapy, to facilitate quick and transformative life change for clients.

Your brain is where all the action happens- down at the neuronal level where brain cells fire and wire. You have over 86 billion cells in your brain, and they all have stories to tell. Together, they reveal the secret of everything—how you feel about who you are and how good or bad life has been for you so far. How you think or feel about anything has a brain basis. It’s where self-experience forms, memories are stored, decisions are made, and how we change habits. If you change what goes on inside your brain, everything outside will follow suit. Relationships will improve; old patterns will become less prevalent; chronic stress and anxiety will be alleviated; performance levels at work will rise. Your clients could finally be living life with a stronger sense of self, clarity, and focus. And no matter what challenges come along, they won’t seem insurmountable; once the brain is tuned-up, it’s optimized; the mind can work for you.

There’s a new, holistic, and scientific way to reduce and, in many cases, resolve distressing symptoms for good: Brain-based Hypnotherapy.

In the past, Traditional Hypnotherapy focused solely on our subconscious minds. Hypnosis is a way to access the unconscious by inducing a state of consciousness shift, then directing and making suggestions. But new technological advances have changed that, so instead of focusing on minds–wherever they reside– we’re interested in what scientists can observe and study about what the brain does under experimental conditions such as in hypnosis as the brain receives and processes information, responds, and adapts. Today we understand much more about the brain at work and the neurophysiology of hypnosis than in the 1950s when hypnosis initially became hypnotherapy, the technique used in psychotherapy.

With Brain-based Hypnotherapy you have a neuroscientific approach to hypnotherapy as a powerful tool for brain change. This approach improves mental health by utilizing hypnosis with neuroeducation to enhance brain function, eliminate unwanted habits, and improve well-being. Miraculously, you have options to influence the negative emotions, so there’s more room for growth, comfort, relaxation, and joy!

Brain-based Hypnotherapy taps into neuroscientific knowledge of brain networks and systems, allowing people to change some of these important but often problematic patterns through conversation alone combined with revising the troublesome meanings of prior experiences.

Engaging the conscious mind for change: Brain-based Hypnotherapy includes neuro-education on the brain and nervous system as the first step in a brain-changing conversation.

This is a new way of doing hypnotherapy with the whole brain in mind, guided by evidence of what works in hypnotherapy. Instead of solely targeting the subconscious mind, Brain-based Hypnotherapy includes novel conversations about the brain and nervous system for a whole brain approach that targets both the subconscious and conscious. The offering of a new whole-brain perspective of what’s underlying all emotion, thought, and behavior is all based on neuroscience research. It’s the brain we will target in this brand of hypnotherapy to get a mind that works for your client. And that brain-based tune-up can significantly affect how your client feels, thinks and acts.

Brain-based hypnotherapists share a heuristic model of the brain’s key systems understood by neuroscientists to produce patterns of emotional pain, chronic stress, and unhealthy habits, further complicated by trauma trigger processing. It only takes a few minutes of your time to explain the brain, which can explain what’s going on in someone’s head and body. The type of neuro-education used in Brain-based Hypnotherapy is informative, gives hopeful expectancy, and is solution-focused. Plus, it is innovative, perspective-changing, entertaining, and fun!

Neuro-education on the brain and nervous system becomes the basis for having brain-changing conversations. You explain the brain to clients in a simple way that sticks and stays with them so they can use this new model and language to form credible explanations for emotional problems and alter problematic patterns. From a brain-based perspective, the individual understands rewiring neurons is key to targeting old, irrelevant response patterns; through evidence-based conditioning, deconditioning, and reconditioning, they learn to UN-ring Pavlov’s bell and break the harmful habits.

Working with the subconscious: Brain-Based hypnotherapy inductions and experiential components to brain-based hypnotherapy.

Brain-based Hypnotherapy expands the old views of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) with Polyvagal theory, updating Cannon’s 1920s research on the “acute stress response” sympathetic fight/flight nervous system to a Poly-vagal-informed approach.

A poly-vagal informed Hypnotherapy involves identifying activation (fight/flight) and deactivation (freeze/flop) brain-body states and then facilitating brain-body communication to include specific reference to a brain-heart connection via the vagus nerve. The inclusion of Poly-vagal understanding of the ventral vagal social engagement is also the experiential doorway to embodied self-compassion.

In brain-based hypnotherapy inductions, one finds a peaceful core self-experience, referred to as neuroception by Poly-vagal theorists. But, for simplicity, think of it as a brain-body calm or feeling of internal safety. Hypnotic inductions are evidence-based neuro-intervention that includes Non-sleep Deep Relaxation techniques ideal for neuroplastic healing to create a new emotional state shift to enhance the availability of the calm-optimal target state.

After the neuro-education on the brain and vagus nerve, the next step is to do some experiential exercises, beginning with simple breath inductions. Attentional focus on the vagus nerve and diaphragmic breath work helps unburden the nervous system from the automatic triggering of an Emotional Pain Response (EPR), specifically; fight/flight/freeze/flop nervous system survival responses. With vagus nerve activation as part of an induction, you can show clients how to gain access to non-conscious brain operating systems associated with feelings and memories. This is a shift into hypnotherapeutic rest, digest, and heal mode that intentionally evokes the Parasympathetic Nervous System.

An induction can become a brain tune-up for improved emotional regulation, as peaceful states of neuroceptive internal safety and enhanced social connection get played in the session. As the experiential self, clients are free of what the brain has been doing with processing information and engaging the brain’s automatic danger and threat survival systems. An attuned, neuroceptive, “I’m ok and safe in this present moment experience” of higher consciousness can be found with Brain-based Hypnotherapy. This allows emotional memories to be reprocessed and updated. The whole-brain gets a tune-up out of survival reactivity states into thrive mode, maximizing flow, productivity, creativity, social connection, healing, and wellness.

Other experiential components of Brain-based hypnotherapy include neuroplastic metaphors and suggestions as well as interventions for skilled use of awareness, improving meta-cognition with cognitive de-fusion techniques. Strengthening observational awareness and understanding of what’s at play, we divide and conquer the components of what the brain is processing and responding to, altering neural patterns involving sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, memories, cravings, habits, and other behaviors. In addition, we teach self-hypnosis to help clients become skilled in emotional regulation, easily resetting to calm states, and opening the brain for change. All of these interventions are integrated along with brain-based therapeutic common factors including the whole brain to brain therapeutic alliance, non-conscious empathy, attunement, mirror neurons, gaining agreement on tasks and goals of the meeting, and resolving conflict before any actual change processes.

Brain-based hypnotherapy is collaborative.

Instead of putting the hypnotherapist as the primary change agent, Brain-based Hypnotherapy shares with the client an approach for how to keep the whole brain in mind. It conveys the neuroplasticity promise as to why we can change brain responses and prior learning. This empowers the client to be a curious and willing brain changer. Each individual has an amazingly adaptive, malleable organ in the brain and nervous system capable of change/transformation and can learn skills to play the brain for that change.

Clients learn how to do something to alter the emotional state, shift quickly, move into a state of calm-optimal, find a sense of inner peace, and influence key brain networks. Hence, the mind is not busy processing thought data and replaying patterns of worry, guilt, resentment, shame, etc. Brain-based hypnotherapy is a great way to unburden the nervous system from an emotional pain or survival pattern to be here now, in the present.

Targeting the client’s unconscious patterns and promoting brain change with hypnotherapy can set you apart from other psychotherapists.

Empower yourself to feel confident about your work and use neuroplasticity science to rewire brains and transform lives by integrating hypnotherapy into your practice.

For more information on how you can get training and certification in this approach (Click Here)