Encourage Creativity in Hypnotherapy
I have been teaching therapists, particularly hypnotherapists since 1993 and over the years I have come to certain conclusions about how to train therapists who are going to survive the long term. After all, for most hypnotherapists they will be working in private practice, so they will need something which sets them apart in order to survive commercially. My view is that hypnotherapy trainers are far more prescriptive than they need to be. This is particularly true when it comes to the use of scripts for interventions.
Many years ago I was teaching at a conference in Dublin, and I made the point in the first few minutes of my talk that it was time to throw away the script books and embrace creativity. A coffee break was called almost immediately at which point the host of the conference asked me to recant what I just said when the delegates returned for the rest of my talk. This, of course, I refused to do, because then as now I believe that the best therapists are the creative ones. Not the ones who go on line to hypnosis fora asking for a script to work with this or that. Trainers must celebrate that their students have creative potential and it is essential that it is not crushed in their initial training. Only through creativity does any therapist survive in the real world of commercial therapy.
