We believe passionately that high quality hypnosis training, offers trainees the chance to be much more successful in the field of psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. For more than 30 years we have made a commitment to training people from all over the world in these skills and techniques and to date we have trained over 6000 people from 40 countries. This unique approach developed by the British Hypnosis Research and Training Institute has established us as pioneers in the hypnotherapy training field.

The British Hypnosis Research and Training Institute was originally founded at the University of Cambridge in 1979 as a research association. In 1986 we decided there was a need to provide an ethical and professional vocational training and qualification to people seriously interested in training in this rewarding field and we were the first organisation to teach Ericksonian Hypnosis courses in Europe. Our combined International ‘Hypnosis University Summer School’ and online distance learning training and has evolved from the respected training courses established by us in many British hospitals and universities over this time.

British Hypnosis Research and Training Institute courses take place in central London at Birkbeck College in the University of London and are dedicated to teaching international health professionals and new students of hypnosis, psychotherapy and personal development, the theory, skills and methodology of Indirect Hypnosis combined with Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Our comprehensive BHRTI course curriculum is based on the unique combination of these three leading edge disciplines and leads to the award of the International BHRTI Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling and an Online Diploma in the Theory and Principles of Hypnotherapy and Counselling.

Our trainees come from a wide variety of backgrounds and fly into London each August to attend our international 9 day ‘Ericksonian Hypnosis University Summer School’ held at Birkbeck College in the University of London. After qualifying with the award of the international ‘Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling’ trainees can then return home to study our optional free online distance learning course. This combined training integrates practical hands-on skills and techniques with the theory and principles.

The summer school has been designed for people demanding a practical skill based fast track training in Ericksonian hypnosis and on graduation many graduates then utilise their course skills in their profession as psychologists, doctors, nurses, counsellors and social workers etc. or establish successful hypnotherapy practices in their home country.

We designed the international fast track ‘Ericksonian Hypnosis University Summer School’ specifically to meet the needs people unable to commit to attending classes over a one year period. So this is your opportunity to receive hands-on training in indirect hypnosis, Ericksonian psychotherapy and NLP over a 9 day period in August in central London.

There are real benefits for people outside the UK when joining the summer school in London.

1. The course is a recognised qualification held at a UK University.
2. It is only 9 days (Sat – Sun), so can be achieved with minimal time off work.
3. There is low cost student accommodation at the university, despite it being in the middle of London in the peak tourist season.
4. It includes a one year follow up distance learning course so students can continue studying when they get home.
5. Because the UK is leaving the EU, the exchange rate is now very favorable for people buying UK services or products from abroad – everything is 15 – 18% cheaper.

Inexpensive student accommodation is available for students traveling into London from abroad and elsewhere in the UK and as the accommodation and course is located in central London there is ample opportunity for sight-seeing at weekends and in the evenings.

During the summer school you will watch live therapy demonstrations of the skills and techniques being taught and then practice these with other students. Our goal is that by the end of the summer school you will be able to recognise the skills and techniques being applied during the sessions and be able to apply them yourself.

On graduating from the summer school you will receive the Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling. A further diploma in the Theory and Principles of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling is awarded on successful completion of the optional free online distance learning course.

Once you have graduated from the summer school you may attend as many times as you like free of charge, this being an excellent way of keeping in touch with new and previous students.

After completing your 9 day summer school in London you will have the option to continue your academic studies online for free. The online training requires about 3 hours study a week and can be completed in one year or less, but you have three years to complete it should you need more time.

Most online distance learning courses are based on a linear series of uninspiring static web pages. Our online course is not like this, our online course is highly interactive. We believe that people need constant stimulation to feel motivated to study online which is why we have built our course using the same interactive software as the UK’s Open University. We were the first institute to create such an in depth hypnosis training online and we are still the most comprehensive distance learning hypnosis training in the world.

Your course online course guarantees an engaging online learning experience that will enable you to collaborate with your fellow students from the summer school and others from around the world who are doing all of their training online. Your online training features a unique combination 40 hours of therapy sessions with patients and an in depth video analysis of each session, combined with over 120 lessons, video lectures, quizzes and forums where you can rate other students posts on their relevance or insight, as well as chats with students from previous summer schools, assignments, polls and the opportunity to upload, update and resubmit coursework. If your online study is interrupted at any time you can catch up later by completing missed course lessons when it is more convenient. 

The online course is only free for summer school students. It is available to non attending students as a complete distance learning course for a fee of £1975.00.

On graduation from the summer school you will receive a Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling, and if you decide to take our optional free online distance learning course as well, you will receive an Online Diploma in the Theory and Principles of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Counselling. The online course is only free for summer school students. It is available to non attending students as a complete distance learning course for a fee of £1975.00.

Indirect Hypnosis combined with Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP is recognised as one of the most effective and rapid ways of helping people achieve desired change in their behaviour and lives. This unique approach was developed by the British Hypnosis Research and Training Institute from the work of Milton H Erickson, an American Psychiatrist recognised as the world’s leading authority on hypnosis and innovative psychotherapy. Because of the BHRTI’s outstanding contribution to the field, few courses today can offer the same degree of expertise regarding Erickson’s work. Throughout the training, we constantly place emphasis on the ethical and practical application of the skills. Unlike many training courses in hypnosis, this is not a purely theoretical course, the course has been designed to teach you effective practical skills that you can apply in an immediate and powerful way to help patients.

Indirect Hypnosis

On the BHRTI course you will learn to hypnotise patients indirectly in a non-authoritarian way utilising their beliefs, interests and personality to help them successfully enter the hypnotic state. The course covers all of the principles of Indirect Hypnosis including language skills, hypnotic induction, hypnotic implication, pattern intervention and tasking as applied to a wide range of psychological, behavioural and pathological problems.

Learning to experience hypnosis for yourself will also open up the creativity of your unconscious mind and help you to resolve any life long issues that have stopped you from realising your full potential.

Ericksonian Psychotherapy

Erickson’s contribution to psychotherapy is well documented and his approaches are now being used throughout the caring professions world wide. We have continued to refine and update Erickson’s approach to match the changing needs of therapists and patients in the 21st century and our course is at the cutting edge of hypnotherapy training both academically and as a practical skill based training.

Neuro Linguistic Programming

NLP was originally developed from detailed observations of innovative therapists such as Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls. By studying these therapists, NLP identified communication techniques, strategies and skills that could be re-packaged and taught to others. NLP today is taught to a wide range of professions such as therapy, business, sales, education, sport, law and personal development.

Because of this broad spectrum of applications, many NLP courses do not specialise in teaching NLP specifically to therapists. Students of these courses often feel unequipped to actually work therapeutically with patients. The BHRTI specialises in teaching NLP to therapists and health professionals. For those students already trained in NLP, our course represents an opportunity to considerably deepen their experience of NLP within the specific context of hypnosis and psychotherapy.

The training has been designed to help students work with a wide range of problems usually seen in a hypnotherapy practice including: Smoking, Phobias, Stuttering, Anxiety, Relaxation, Confidence, Sexual Dysfunction, Eating Disorders, Substance Abuse, Sports Performance, Relationship Problems, Family Therapy, Pain Control, etc.

The international ‘Ericksonian Hypnosis University Summer School’ course is a postgraduate level training and open to doctors, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, dentists, counsellors, therapists and other members of the caring professions wishing to train as hypnotherapists or use hypnosis in their work. Applications are also considered from applicants without formal entry requirements if they have appropriate work experience or motivation. A number of places are made available for such applicants.

If you are involved in any kind of work where effective communication is essential you will find the BHRTI training course invaluable. Many students study with us as part of their own personal development and our students to date come from a broad cross section of career backgrounds.

If you are considering setting up in private practice and becoming a practising hypnotherapist or NLP practitioner, the BHRTI offers you the most comprehensive and practical training for responsible hypnotherapy currently available today. You will find that indirect hypnosis combined with Ericksonian psychotherapy and NLP is persuasive and successful in achieving outcomes in patients and will allow you to reach new goals in your area of expertise.

Entry Requirements

Applicants should normally have one of the following:

1. A first degree as demonstration of academic achievement.
2. A professional qualification in one of the caring professions or in your chosen field.
3. Experience or employment in an area related to the course or a high degree of interest and motivation to study hypnotherapy and NLP

A few places are available for applicants without formal qualifications and acceptance is contingent upon the degree of motivation and interest in the subject. Please state your interest on the application form. Thank you.

All of our courses are based on course modules drawn from the following curriculum:

Linguistic Behavioral Filters:
Therapy demonstrations can often be complex and knowing which parts to pay attention to can be confusing, especially at the beginning of your studies. This Unit looks at the linguistic and behavioral filters that separate the approaches, techniques, strategies and skills of therapy so that you can learn the steps more easily.

Structuring the Indirect Hypnosis Session:
This Unit breaks down the basic format of a typical indirect hypnosis therapy session into a series of linear yet overlapping steps. You will learn how these steps are both interdependent and independent while following a loose yet structured format.

Trance Maps:
By learning how to map the human experience of hypnotic trance and analogous states you will develop a better understanding of how, when and why people enter trance. This Unit presents a way of mapping mutually supportive yet fluctuating interdependent and independent sensory based trance experiences.

Non-verbal Dynamics of Speech:
Some therapists have a natural hypnotic personality. This Unit looks at the first step in developing this personality – developing a hypnotic voice. The Unit looks at tonality, volume, timbre, pace, rhythm, pitch and voice locus and how we can best use these non-verbal components of speech to create a hypnotic personality.

Observation and Utilization Strategies:
In therapy it is crucial that you know what to do and when, and your ability to make decisions in real time as you work is contingent upon two fundamentally important principles. This Unit looks at these two principles of Observation and Utilization and teaches you how to apply these in your future therapy sessions of Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP.

How to use Indirect Approaches to Pain Control and Anaesthesia:
This Unit will teach you how and when it is appropriate to induce anaesthesia to reduce organic and psychosomatic pain. Techniques include: Utilisation of Analgesia and Anaesthesia, Displacement of Pain, Substitution of Pain.

Recognizing and Utilizing Response Attentiveness as a Pre-Requisite to Trance:
People vary in their ability to enter trance naturally. Natural hypnotic subjects display a pre trance state called Response Attentiveness. This Unit teaches how to recognise this state and then encourage it so that trance develops naturally as part of the patient’s ongoing changing reality.

How to Create Time Distortion:
This Unit will teach you how to distort someone’s perception of time as an adjunct to pain control, accelerated learning, memory recall and integration of unconscious processes.

Fixing and Narrowing Attention Indirectly with Personally Motivating Stories:
Patients are often distracted when they enter therapy, making hypnotic induction difficult for inexperienced therapists. In this Unit you will learn how to induce Response Attentiveness with personally absorbing stories that narrow the patient’s focus of attention and interest as a pre-requisite to Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP.

Learn about Future Pacing:
This Unit will teach you how to check out the appropriateness of your therapeutic work by getting the person to test the treatment in a future visualised scenario.

Minimal Cue Observation and Utilization:
People drift in and out of altered states of awareness throughout each day. As this happens, their physiology changes noticeably. These changes are called Minimal Cues. In this Unit you will learn how to recognise and utilize Minimal Cues as an indicator of trance potential and as an indicator of trance depth. The Unit is based on the major Minimal Cues associated with trance.

How to use the Spatial Dissociation Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to help someone to gain new insights into choices available by teaching them dissociation, double and triple dissociation.

Post-hypnotic Suggestions:
Post-hypnotic Suggestion is the term used to describe a class of suggestion, given during trance, that later initiates a post-hypnotic behaviour or cognitive process. This Unit looks at the nature and character of post-hypnotic behaviour, the application of serial post-hypnotic suggestion and the setting up of post-hypnotic cues and how the disciplines of Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP can utilize post-hypnotic phenomena. The Unit covers: Setting up post-hypnotic cues, Nature and Character of Posthypnotic Behaviour and Serial Post Hypnotic Suggestion.

Learn the Procedure for Inducing Catalepsy:
This Unit will teach you how to induce Catalepsy in limbs and eye muscles as hypnotic, therapeutic and ratifying tasks.

Trance Ratification:
Subjective experience of trance varies from person to person. Many people can enter trance and accept its validity at face value, trusting that a genuine hypnotic experience has occurred, while many others need proof and validation before trusting their hypnotic experience. This Unit teaches you how to ratify trance for the patient, during and after hypnosis, to encourage acceptance of the hypnotic experience and to prevent patients from sabotaging the therapy by doubting its validity.

Learn How to do Indirect Hypnotic Letter Writing:
This Unit will teach you how to write compelling and therapeutic letters based on indirect hypnotic language patterns.

Anchoring, Triggering and Frustrating Hypnotic Experience:
Therapists using Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP need to have many ways of indirectly controlling the patient’s hypnotherapeutic experience. One of these ways is anchoring, triggering and frustrating trance states, behaviors and tasks. This Unit teaches you how to do this covertly to make trance, new behaviors and tasks more compelling. The Unit includes Indirectly Anchoring Trance, Behavior and Tasks, Triggering Trance, Behavior and Tasks and Frustrating Trance, Behavior and Tasks.

How to use Deep Trance VAK Dissociation Phobia treatment:
This Unit will teach you how to treat traumatic experiences such as phobias easily and quickly.

Collapsing and Integrating Contrasting Trance States:
There are two basic classes of trance; downtime trance normally associated with daydreaming and reverie, and uptime trance normally associated with heightened awareness in activities such as sport. This Unit will teach you how to utilize both of these trance states using Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP and integrate them in a new and novel way.

Indirect Hypnotic Eye Contact:
Direct prolonged eye contact has long been used as a tool of traditional hypnotic induction, and hypnotists often claimed that they were able to hypnotise with their eyes because of some kind of personal power. This Unit will demonstrate the real reasons why it can work and when and how to use it indirectly.

Accelerated Learning with Hypnosis:
This Unit will teach you how to use hypnosis for learning faster, revising, absorbing new ideas and applying new learning.

Visualisation:
The imagination is a powerful ally in hypnotherapy. We tend to think in pictures, and we fill our pictures with sounds, smells, tastes and feelings. All of these past and future representations of sensory experiences are part of what we call Visualization. This Unit will teach you how to help patients overcome problems and achieve goals by using Visualization in Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP.

How to use Classic Self Hypnosis Techniques:
This Unit will teach you how to use and teach simple therapeutic self-hypnosis techniques to help clients reinforce their success between therapy sessions.

The Concept of Conscious, Sub-conscious, Unconscious and the Non-conscious:
Psychology has a number of labels and models that describe consciousness. Most labels and models are characteristic of particular schools of psychotherapy. The label “Non-conscious” is specific to Indirect Hypnosis and this Unit contrasts the differences between these models and discusses how these differences have evolved.

How to Indirectly Respond to Resistant Patients with Paradoxical Intervention:
This Unit will teach you how to utilize resistance to obtain cooperation and therapeutic outcomes.

The Therapeutic Application of Anchoring and Conditioning:
This Unit discusses the therapeutic use of anchoring and conditioning in therapy. The Unit integrates the concept of post-hypnotic suggestions with the concept of anchoring in NLP and conditioning in behavioral psychology. The Unit looks at the utilization of punishment and reward, repetition, subliminal and covert conditioning, the application of resources and motivation strategies as therapeutic tools.

How to use the Multiple Mirror Regression Dissociation Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to apply this powerful Ericksonian style therapy technique that combines trance induction, age regression and dissociation.

The Therapeutic Application of Dissociation:
Many patients are unable to resolve their problems because they lack the psychological ability to stand back and view their problems objectively. For this reason the phenomena of disassociation is a valuable therapeutic tool and this Unit teaches how to induce states of dissociation in a therapeutic setting.

How to Perform Pseudo Orientation in Time:
This Unit will teach you how to apply Erickson’s classic rehearsal/ratification technique to help people create resolutions to their own problems.

Indirect Physiological Rapport Building Skills:
Therapists often have limited time with patients and this time needs to be utilized productively. To do this we need to build rapport very quickly. This Unit will teach you indirect ways to build a trusting relationship with patients very quickly. The Unit includes: Matching, Mirroring, Cross Matching, Miss-Matching, Pacing and Leading, Body posture , Matching Respiratory Rhythm, Matching Movements, Matching Predicates.

How to Perform Past Life Therapy:
This Unit will teach you how to use regression to previous lives as a model for therapy.

Acceptance Sets and Positively Framed Suggestions:
Information gathering is essential before beginning psychotherapy. This Unit is based on a simple questioning approach that not only evokes high quality information but also builds rapport rapidly. The information gathering application is covered more fully in the Information Gathering Modules however because this Unit looks at the approach as a means of gaining rapport and agreement.

How to Induce Trance in One Person While Talking to Another:
This Unit will teach you how to induce trance in several people simultaneously using analogue marking.

Indirect Reverse Frame Suggestions and Tag Questions:
This Unit looks at how overuse of positively framed suggestions can cause resistance. So here we discuss how to build rapport by using reverse frame suggestions and negative tags that neutralize and balance the rapport building process.

How to Use Indirect Open Ended Suggestions:
This Unit will teach you how to construct suggestions for spontaneous random hypnotic phenomena.

Sensory Based Vocabulary:
Everyone uses a unique vocabulary and therapists can build rapport quickly by learning to recognise each patient’s unique sensory based language patterns and then feeding them back discreetly. This Unit teaches the best way to achieve this and how therapists can use this approach to help identify patients’ resources and limitations. The Unit includes: problem related vocabulary, career related vocabulary, culturally related vocabulary.

Inclusive Suggestions (Covering all Possibilities of Response):
This Unit will teach you how to include all classes of response as acceptable hypnotic behavior for trance induction and therapy.

Epigenetics and Hypnosis:
Early life experiences affect the way people feel and behave as adults. This Unit looks at how Genetic research is revealing the molecular cause and affect relationships in problem formation and how Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP can be used to encourage Gene expression as a treatment modality.

How to Use Reality Restructuring Suggestions (Indirect Serial Suggestions):
This Unit will teach you how to re-create a remembered event in a compelling way by re-structuring a detailed visualisation.

Mind-Body Feedback Loops:
People exacerbate problems by focusing on them. This creates Mind-Body Feedback Loops that cycle and intensify the severity of symptoms. This Unit studies how these loops develop and how you can break or reverse the process with Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP at a non-conscious level.

How to Indirectly Prescribe the Symptom as a Therapeutic Intervention:
This Unit will teach you how to prescribe and encourage unwanted behaviours and symptoms so that they cancel each other out.

Self Generating / Self Regulating Feedback Loops:
This Unit looks at the concept of Feedback Loops as a mapping model to analyze problems and behavior. By using the model you will be able to map out cause and affect relationships in problem formation and patient / context relationships.

How to Plan Your Client’s Future:
This Unit will teach you how to map-out a 10 year, independent, self-sufficient future plan for clients when they finish therapy.

How to use Symptom Substitution and Resolution:
This Unit will teach you how to prescribe replacement symptoms, move existing symptoms and finally resolve symptoms while identifying and satisfying secondary gains.

Irrationality and Framing in Psychotherapy:
People make decisions believing that their decisions are rational. This Unit looks at the myth of subjective rational decision making and teaches how a patient’s commitment to illusionary rational thinking leads to problem formation and inability to resolve.

Cause and Symptom Relationships:
Learn how problems evolve over time and how to tackle a problem with Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP by studying the relationship between its cause and affect.

Sensory Dependent Problems:
The cause and potential resolution of problems is cognitively embedded in our sensory systems. This Unit explores this model and looks at how we can resolve problems by utilizing a patient’s unique way of processing their experience at a sensory level.

The Evolution of Secondary Gains:
When people have problems they learn to cope by creating benefits that are contingent upon the continuation of the problem. This Unit explores this concept and teaches how we can transform or accommodate the benefits so that problems can be treated more easily.

Non-conscious Anchoring, Imprinting and Conditioning:
We are all programmed by our life experiences to respond non-consciously to cognitive and contextual triggers. These non-conscious programs maintain habitual patterns of thought and behavior regardless of whether these patterns are beneficial or not. This Unit looks at this phenomena and how by using Indirect Hypnosis, Ericksonian Psychotherapy and NLP we can re-program people to respond more appropriately. The Unit looks at different models of conditioning including Visual Anchoring, Auditory Anchoring and Kinaesthetic Anchoring.

How to Deal with Abreactions and Trauma:
This Unit will teach you how to handle and utilise spontaneous abreactions during any stage of therapy.

Presented Versus Undisclosed Problems:
When patients enter therapy they present their problem and symptoms to the therapist, however in some cases the presenting problem may not be the actual problem that requires treatment. This Unit looks at the difference between presenting and undisclosed problems, patient awareness of problems, the complexities of problems and how several problems may compound each other.

How to Use the Mental Rehearsal of Objectives:
This Unit will teach you how to take people through the mental rehearsal of new behaviors and strategies as a visual class of post-hypnotic suggestion.

Non-verbal Communications:
We communicate simultaneously on two levels, verbal and non-verbal. Usually the patient is unaware of their own non-verbal communications. This Unit will teach you how to notice and interpret the patient’s unique non-verbal communications within the context of their therapy session. The Unit includes learning how to recognize and interpret muscle tension, repeated fidgeting, hesitation, blocking movements, metaphorical movements, fight flight response, heel digging, avoided dates, key words, patient analogue marking and content avoiding.

Indirect Age Revivification, Regression and Progression:
This Unit will teach you how to get people to recall forgotten memories in a disassociated state. You will learn how to make someone gradually regress to childhood to access resources and uncover possible repressed experiences.

Change or Improvement:
Therapy is based on either change in the hear and now or gradual improvement over time and your decision about which to chose for a patient depends on their motivation, the dynamics of the problem and the context in which the patient experiences his problem. This Unit will teach you how to make this important decision.

How to Use Erickson’s Crystal Gazing Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to reorganise someone’s unconscious processes by getting them to review their earlier life experiences in hallucinated crystal balls.

Accessing and Utilizing Resources:
Usually the answer to a patient’s problem lies within the patient, yet patients are unaware that by using their current psychological and behavioral resources they can help themselves. This Unit will teach you how to identify a patient’s strengths and resources for conjoint problem solving.

Therapeutic Unconscious Questioning Skills:
Therapists need to ask high quality questions and the quality of a patient’s response is based on the quality of these questions. This Unit teaches you how to ask questions that evoke hidden unconscious attitudes and beliefs about a person’s problem.

How to Re-write Traumatic Memories with Sub-modalities:
This Unit will teach you how to alter the memory of trauma by changing someone’s perception of their memory to neutralise their feelings.

Complaining Positively, Establishing Positive Outcomes and Achieving Secondary Goals:
Patients will not always accept at face value what a therapist says. This Unit teaches you strategies for compelling patients to agree with therapeutic exercises and tasks while simultaneously achieving the patient’s secondary goals.

Pause, Anticipation and Hesitation:
This Unit will teach you how to apply deliberate pauses and hesitation to indirectly suggest ideas or new ways of thinking.

Positive and Negative Response Cues:
When patients communicate non-verbally they demonstrate physiological changes related to agreement and disagreement. It is important that therapists recognise these crucial minimal cues. This Unit will teach you how to recognise when patients are thinking yes or no and how to interpret positive and negative minimal cues, including changes in muscle tone and other non-verbal behaviour.

How to Indirectly Use Confusion Restructuring Techniques (Overloading):
This Unit will teach you how to create acceptance and induce trance by using confusion and re-structuring realities. Inducing Confusion with Ambiguity.

Open Questions and Sharing:
Information gathering is an important stage in the therapy session and it is also an ideal time to build rapport and build trust. This Unit will teach you how to do this by using open ended questions and sharing. You will quickly evoke appropriate answers to questions while building a trusting relationship with your patients.

How to Indirectly Anchor Positive Feelings, States and Resources:
This Unit will teach you how to access and anchor positive resources for problem solving.

Challenging Negative Nominalizations:
Patients often use vague, negative non-specific language when describing a problem or symptom. There are several reasons why they do this. This Unit teaches how to recognise these negative patterns, help patients to communicate more clearly about their problem, and avoid self sabotage.

How to Scramble Symptoms:
This Unit will teach you how to identify the steps in a symptom, scramble and re-programme your patient with new sequences of steps so that the symptom ceases to exist.

Patient Metaphors:
When patients enter therapy they have both a conscious and an unconscious understanding of their problem. Their conscious understanding is usually limited but they give hints about the reasons for their problem at an unconscious level with metaphoric communication. This Unit teaches you how to recognise metaphoric communication such as mismatching gestures, non-verbal metaphors, verbal slips and blocking movements.

How to use the New Strategy Installation Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to use this technique for installing new strategies for overcoming habits, smoking, overeating and other problems that are strategy based.

Subjective Conscious Interpretations:
Patients have a limited conscious understanding of their own problems so they often rationalise their problem by creating false reasons and causes. This Unit will teach you how to recognize the excuses and interpretations that people make that unconsciously sabotage their success in therapy.

How to Design Indirect Therapeutic Tasks for People:
This Unit will teach you how to create tasks based on a patient’s unconscious responses that utilise their symptoms as a pivot for therapeutic change.

Challenging Subjective Interpretations:
If patients are allowed to continue rationalising inappropriately about the reasons and causes of problems, they will never truly overcome their problems. This Unit will teach you how to cast doubt, challenge and reframe the consciously held irrational beliefs that many patients have about the causes of their problems.

How to Indirectly Overcome a Patient’s Objections to Tasks:
This Unit will teach you how to make your suggested tasks compelling while dealing with objections.

Video Descriptions:
When patients give a subjective account of their problem they often only give an interpretation of their symptoms or behaviours rather than an actual factual account of what happens. Many therapists take this account at face value but then find themselves not knowing what to do. Using the concept and skills of Video Descriptions and other similar techniques, his Unit teaches you how to get specific factual data related to the formation and maintenance of problems, behaviours and patterns.

How to Create Ambiguous Task Assignments:
This Unit will teach you how to create open-ended tasks for people, to initiate new resources or information for creating further therapeutic interventions.

How to use Behaviour Orientated Questioning Skills:
Every behaviour and symptom has an identifiable structure in the same way that every journey has a beginning, middle and end. This Unit will teach you how to ask questions that evoke specific answers related to the structure of experience. It will teach you how to ask questions that directly evoke sensory specific behavioural information about the frequency and duration of someone’s problem and symptom.

How to Perform Cellular Healing Therapy:
This Unit will teach you how to work with terminal illness at the cellular level and access someone’s own healing resources.

How to Identify a Patient’s Values and Criteria:
Patient motivation is often ignored by therapists, yet we need to motivate patients to follow therapy. This Unit will teach you how to track a patient’s criteria and values and then use this information to help motivate them to empower, and heal themselves.

The Four Seasons Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to expand your patient’s ability to creatively resolve their problems with this therapeutic and metaphoric visualisation induction that also deepens hypnosis.

How to Indirectly Identify a Patient’s Decision Making Strategies:
People make decisions moment by moment and usually without any awareness of how they are doing it. This Unit will teach you how to recognize a patient’s decision making strategies and then utilize those strategies in therapy.

The Old Master Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to apply this dissociation and deepening induction to help people float out of their body and deeper into trance.

How to Indirectly use Facial Calibration:
People communicate on many levels both consciously and unconsciously and this affects a person’s physiology. This Unit will teach you to recognize the physiology of congruity and incongruity, and then interpret and re-balance hemispheres through the process of calibrating facial symmetry.

Matching Trance Indicators as an Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to mimic the minimal cues of trance as a trance induction.

How to Identify Mental Strategies:
This Unit will demonstrate how people process their problems cognitively using strategies that can then maintain problems. It will also teach you how to disrupt the patient’s strategies to free them from habitual thought processes.

How to Use the Insertive Eye Contact Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to implant suggestions indirectly into your patient’s unconscious mind using this advanced technique developed by Stephen Brooks.

How to Indirectly Evoke Ideo-motor Finger Signalling:
Many times in therapy we need to communicate directly with the non-conscious mind. Hypnosis is an ideal tool for this. This Unit will teach you how to communicate directly with a patient’s non-conscious mind, out of their conscious awareness, and by using finger signalling.

How to Use Indirect Compound / Adjunctive Suggestions:
This Unit will teach you how to shift someone’s awareness from external to internal reality by embedding stacked Adjunctive Suggestions and truisms within an Ericksonian trance induction.

How to Use Automatic Writing and Drawing:
Like Ideo-motor Signalling, Automatic Writing and Drawing is another means of communicating successfully with the non-conscious mind. This Unit will teach you how to communicate directly utilising the ideo-motor responses of automatic writing and drawing.

How to Use Indirect Contingent / Dependent Suggestions:
This Unit will teach you how to apply pacing and leading to create interlocking chains of associated hypnotic suggestions to produce a network of mutually compounding directives.

Well Formed Questions:
How does a therapist know what to ask when beginning therapy? This Unit teaches you how to structure your questions very carefully into well formed questions that uncover attitude and beliefs.

How to Use Indirect Positive Nominalizations:
This Unit will teach you how to create and apply non-specific therapeutic language that meets needs at an unconscious level.

How to Use the Hemispheric Question Insertion Technique:
Many people do not realise that certain classes of question appeal more to the right hemisphere than to the left, and visa versa. This Unit will teach you how to construct these hemispheric orientated questions effectively.

Standard / Classic Inductions:
This Unit will teach some of the classic inductions and although we do not use these inductions directly in Indirect Hypnosis, we still use some of the principles behind many of these inductions. Inductions covered are: Progressive Relaxation, Sensations of Heaviness, Eye Fixation, Counting Forwards V Counting Backwards, Therapist Counting V Patient Counting, Counting in Steps, Blocks or Units, Visual Counting, Auditory Counting and Visualisation Inductions.

How to use Indirect Passive Response Suggestions (Not Doing and Not Knowing):
This Unit will teach you how to play down the importance of the conscious mind while opening the potential of the unconscious mind.

The Staircase Induction:
This Unit will expand upon one of the simple classic inductions and teach you how to embed indirect techniques into a traditional hypnotic induction.

Developing Response Attentiveness:
When patients enter therapy they are sometimes apprehensive and they have various expectations. This Unit will teach you how to utilize and build these expectations as a hypnotic and therapeutic tool.

How to Use Indirect Eye Fixation and Distraction Inductions:
In this Unit you will learn how to induce trance using only your eye movements. The Unit covers how to focus, direct and re-direct focus of attention directly and indirectly.

How to Use Indirect Non-verbal Inductions:
This Unit will teach you how to induce hypnosis non-verbally by replicating trance in yourself, using pantomime techniques and trance anchoring.

How to use Favorite Leisure Activity Inductions:
When people are enjoying themselves they are often in trance but don’t know it. This Unit will teach you how to use various leisure interests as trance inductions. Contexts used as trance inductions include: Creative absorption: listening / playing music, painting, listening to a lecture, watching a film, watching television). Conscious focus: playing sports, exercise, dancing. Daydreaming as trance experience, Thinking as trance experience.

How to Indirectly Evoke Previous Trance Experiences:
One of the quickest and most effective ways of inducing trance is to re-induce a previous trance. This Unit will teach you how to re-induce previous trance states from your own sessions and from those of other therapists.

How to Match Breathing and Offer Progressive Relaxation:
This Unit will teach you how to utilise the sensory experiential approach of relaxation, visualisation and counting to induce hypnosis.

How to Use Classes of Double Bind:
This Unit will teach you how to create a compelling illusionary choice by creating binds and double binds that motivate people and lead to therapeutic benefits. Binds covered include: Binds, Double Binds, Conscious-Unconscious Double Bind, Dissociation Double Bind, Double Dissociation Double Bind, Non Sequitur Double Bind, Reverse Set Double Bind, Bind and Double Bind Questions and Time Binds.

The Hand Shake Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to induce hypnosis by shaking hands, creating confusion and restructuring new realities.

How to Use the Uptime Downtime Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to utilise the extremes of altered states of consciousness and eye fatigue to induce hypnosis.

How to use the Self Suggestion Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to induce hypnosis through a process of self-observation and self-suggestion that tie up all the senses.

How to perform an Indirect Arm Levitation Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to induce and deepen trance with arm levitation techniques based on the apposition of opposites.

How to Use Surprise Techniques:
This Unit will teach you how to induce hypnosis with surprise, shock and disorientation.

How to Use Early Learning Set Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to use Erickson’s classic induction with people to evoke their early learning strategies for exploring hidden potential.

How to Create Positive and Negative Hallucinations:
This Unit will teach you how to alter someone’s visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory awareness so that they believe something or someone exists when in reality it doesn’t. It will also teach you how to alter someone’s visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory awareness so that they believe something or someone does not exist when in reality it does. Areas covered include: Visual Hallucinations, Auditory Hallucinations, and Kinasethic Hallucinations.

The My Friend John Induction:
This Unit will teach you how to utilise your patient’s minimal cues of impending hypnotic trance as part of an analogy about hypnotising another person.

How to Use Indirect Behavioural Emphasis (Analogue Marking, Interspersal Technique) and Embedded Commands:
This Unit will teach you how to induce trance indirectly by covertly placing emphasis on selective parts of your communication.

Artful Language Patterns:
This Unit will teach you how to use Fractured Semantics (Partial Remarks and Dangling Phrases). The Unit includes: Implication (Implied Directive), Double Meaning, Stacking Realities, Inter-contextual Cues and Suggestions and Conscious Incompetence Suggestions (Losing Abilities).

How to Use Stacking Hypnotic Potential, Multiple Tasks and Indirect Overloading Techniques:
This Unit will teach you how to offer simultaneous tasks that create conscious confusion and an acceptance for ensuing trance.

How to Use the Multiple Screen Technique:
This Unit will teach you how to apply this forerunner of Time Line TherapyTM where Erickson would get people to travel backwards and forwards in time in hallucinated movie screens.

How to Construct Therapeutic Metaphors:
This Unit will teach you how to construct and deliver therapeutic metaphors to bring about profound change in people. Subjects include: Metaphorical Communication, Structure of metaphors, Stories, Analogies, Jokes, Puns, and Folk Language.

Learn Approaches to Inducing Post Hypnotic Amnesia:
This Unit will teach you how to indirectly induce amnesia for all or part of your communication with people. Including: Constructive Amnesia (when people forget information that is unimportant) and Destructive Amnesia (when people forget information that is important).

Course Dates, Fees and Enrolment

9 Day Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy & Counselling (including free optional one year online distance learning course)

Dates: Every August and April

Location: University of London

Duration: 9 days (Saturday to the following Sunday)

Fee: £2600.00. A deposit of £300.00 will secure your place once your application has been accepted. The course fee balance is due one month before the course starts.

Your course fee covers all of your tuition. If travelling from afar you will need to cover your own travel and accommodation costs. If you wish to stay in student accommodation at the university there is inexpensive student accommodation at the university. To guarantee a room please visit the university rooms website and book a room in either ‘College Hall’ or ‘International Hall Bloomsbury’ as these are closest to the College.

Enrolment: Acceptance on the course is subject to your application being approved and how many places are available when you apply as the course only runs twice a year.

To apply please complete the application form on the course page and we will be able to confirm if you have secured a place.

If you any questions please email us here.

_____________________________

9 Day MASTER Practitioner Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy & Counselling with BHRTI Founder Stephen Brooks.

Dates: January each year.

Location: Chiang Mai Thailand

Duration: 9 days (Saturday to the following Sunday)

Fee: £2750.00 (includes hotel accommodation). A deposit of £250.00 will secure your place once your application has been accepted. The course fee balance is due one month before the course starts.

Your course fee covers all of your tuition. 4 star accommodation is included but you will need to cover your own travel costs. 

Enrolment: Acceptance on the course is subject to your application being approved and how many places are available when you apply as the course only runs once a year.

To apply please complete the application form on the course page and we will be able to confirm if you have secured a place.

If you any questions please email us here.

_____________________________

1 Year Online Diploma in the Theory and Principles of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy & Counselling 

Dates: Starts every month

Location: Online

Duration: 1 Year (can be completed sooner)

Fee: £1975.00 due when you enrol and after your application has been accepted.

Enrolment: Acceptance on the course is subject to your application being approved.

To apply please complete the application form on the course page and we will be able to confirm if you have secured a place.

If you any questions please email us here.

_______________________

Weekend Workshops (Self Hypnosis / Ericksonian Hypnosis / Master Classes)

Dates: Please check the latest course listing

Location: University of London

Duration: 2 days

Fee: £285.00 payable on application by clicking a link on the relevant course page. See the latest course listings here.

If you any questions please email us here.