The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy: Inviting Connection, Inventing Change

Explains and demonstrates how to create and utilize mind-body connections for unknotting vexing problems.

In the popular imagination, hypnosis is misconstrued as something done to people, as if the hypnotist hypnotizes them. And hypnotherapy is similarly misconceived as something done to clients’ problems, as if the therapist could unilaterally counter or cure them. In a refreshing departure from conception-as-usual, Douglas Flemons offers another view, articulating relational ideas about how minds and bodies communicate and learn.

In his characteristically casual and concise way, Flemons explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unraveling of knotted strands of problematic experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labeled afflictions. The therapist gets in sync with clients so they can, together, extemporaneously facilitate changes to undesired thoughts, urges, emotions, sensations, or behaviors. This book takes you to the heart of hypnotherapy, to the respectful, playful practice of utilizing clients’ flow experience to collaboratively discover and create opportunities for embodied learning and therapeutic change. 6 tables; 2 figures

Douglas Flemons, PhD, LMFT, is Co-Director of Context Consultants, Professor Emeritus of Family Therapy and Former Co-Director of the Office of Suicide and Violence Prevention at Nova Southeastern University. and a Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). For more than thirty years, he has devoted himself to developing―through his practice, research, teaching, supervision, and writing―a relational approach to hypnotherapy and brief therapy. Currently in private practice in Asheville, North Carolina, he regularly offers hypnotherapy workshops and international trainings.

Michael D. Yapko, PhD, is a clinical psychologist residing in southern California. The author of fifteen books, including Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH) Arthur Shapiro Award for Best Book on Hypnosis winners Process-Oriented Hypnosis and Mindfulness and Hypnosis, as well as leading hypnosis textbook Trancework (now in its 5th edition), Dr. Yapko has taught in more than thirty countries and received numerous awards for his contributions. He has also received lifetime achievement awards from the International Society of Hypnosis and The Milton H. Erickson Foundation.