Rob's Blog

I think one of the most dysfunctional and disturbed, not to mention disturbing, groups of people I know are therapists. In their various forms and shapes we have a strange collection of therapy types out there, and equally varied therapists to go with each one. One client came to me recently who had been seeing a therapist elsewhere. They had stopped seeing the therapist after showing up to their office to find it had closed, and that the therapist had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. While I would be the first to admit that my own stress levels sometimes get up there a bit, I don't think things have got quite that bad, yet. The psychiatrist in the great 1983 movie, Local Hero, is not so far from being true to life. Coincidentally, he should also have been locked up. You can watch the entire movie above. It's worth every minute. When I look through the feeds on my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts I can see a diversity of humanity that is truly...

Many times I see postings on forums asking if people have as script for - and then an obscure issue gets listed. It's as if the common issues are all contained in a giant book of scripts and anything else one can go out and ask the community of hypnotherapists at large and someone will have it. Every time I see this I am forced to wonder, is this really serving the client, and is it the correct approach to hypnotherapy? There's no doubt, if one has nowhere else to start from, a script is better than nothing. However, that is virtually never the case. When training therapists I always hammer home the things that helped me as I was learning my craft. hief among those things is asking questions. A one does so one realises swiftly that in almost all cases one is not working with 'arthritis' or 'depression', one is working with Josephine Smith, or Danny Demitrio.  I don't know where those names popped up from, but they are quite suggestive and to the poin...

So, if you read to the last blog I wrote, you'll see I am in the midst of talking about healthcare, the need for reformation of the system, and how alternative healthcare has a very important role to play in the future of our health delivery systems. Six hundred years ago, when people began to question their priests about what was in the bible that they heard read every Sunday, they were often told not to be concerned about it, the safety of their immortal souls was safe in the hands of the church. These smiling and helpful priests that read the mystical words were there to look after them, after all. Oh, And don't forget to pay your tithe on your way out of the vestry door. Being largely illiterate, unable to read or write in Latin  and essentially without education, one had to defer to the wisdom of the priest. Sound familiar? The reformation in the 16th century led to wars throughout Europe, and the great ecclesiastical schism that later resulted in thriving ch...

There's a quote one of my staff mentioned to me recently which stuck in my mind. 'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' Jiddu Krishnamurti It is not dissimilar to something my son said recently after returning from Germany where he had visited Dachau concentration camp. 'Anyone who was not a terrorist in Nazi Germany was guilty.' Lance Hadley There is something very unforgiving about the wisdom of the young. Regardless of whether this is a matter with which you agree, the fact is society plays a massive role in what we consider healthy. When Maria, one of our therapists, recently attended a first-nations healing gathering, she described some of the situations she worked with. She talked about working with clients from her own community - something she has done for several years. The manner in which some problems were managed was radically different to what one might expect. In describing the situation it b...