Saying The Unsayable For Hypnotherapy Training
Today’s post has been on my mind for the past 18 months, I have not written it until now, because I fully expect a backlash from some in the profession, but having ranted about inadequacies in the profession now for over a year I think the time has come to get a few things off my chest.
First and foremost schools in general are not doing a good enough job training and graduating solid therapists. Yes, there are exceptions, but in reality the problem lies in two distinct areas. First training courses are too short and second trainers are not qualified to teach. The first issue is something the profession really needs to think about. How is it possible that people with approximately 450 hours of basic training of which 120 is face to face able to deal with many of the complex issues that they claim to treat in their marketing. The truth is it is not possible. The basic hypnotherapy training is a technician’s course not a practitioner’s course as it lacks many of the factors which will make a practitioner good at their work. I propose that all basic hypnotherapy diploma courses should be two years in length, 900 hours in total with at least 240 hours face to face tuition.
The time has come to stop believing that a person’s proprietary approach to therapy is the same as a genuine therapeutic philosophy. What I mean is approaches created by the owner of a school and given a whizzy or even a scientific name which it does not deserve. Or using a recognised therapeutic approach and hyphenating it with the word hypno, to make it sound more legitimate.
Often even the schools which claim to follow one school of thought or another, have no real idea of what the basis of the philosophy is and gives students the “Janet and John” version of it. This does not prepare a student to work with real people who are often in distress. Along with this is the vexed question of own therapy during training. Having trained both hypnotherapists and psychotherapists, I have come to the conclusion that own therapy is a must for good therapeutic practice in either discipline. I know this is not popular with my colleagues but there it is.
My second and final point is that people teaching therapists are not qualified to do so. Just because you are good at something does not mean that you can teach it. Indeed, some of the best practitioners in the world are the lousiest teachers. I believe that for a school to be putting out graduates, the senior people in the organisation (eg Principal, Director of Training etc) should be qualified teachers of adults themselves. Again I know this is not popular, but we owe it to the profession and to the public to start making our trainings more legitimate and better organised and academically sound.
Ok folks, feel free to burn me in effigy.
