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. Reviews: Reading this book has been an invaluable opportunity to learn from Douglas Flemons. That opportunity is now yours.—Jeffrey Zeig, Ph.D., Director, The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Flemons’s wonderful book invites clients to ‘think, feel, and act in poems that dissolve boundaries…’. Flemons’s casework is interesting and effective. He is patient, modest, and inventive with people, or, as he would say, ‘metaphorical and experimental.’ The book includes clear concepts, apt and literate citations, and a keen knowledge of music, movement, and meditation. Essential reading for everyone utilizing hypnotic relatedness in therapy.—Eric Greenleaf, Ph.D., Director, The Milton H. Erickson Institute of the Bay Area, author of The Problem of Evil: Ancient Dilemmas and Modern Therapy Douglas Flemons invites the reader to join him in a fascinating journey to explore the vast potential of the collaborative and synergistic hypnotist–participant relationship to create personal transformation. Along the way, he provides valuable instruction and insights regarding not only the nitty-gritty about how to conduct hypnotherapy, but also key facets of consciousness itself. I hope this engaging book, written with flair and verve, and chock-full of examples and case illustrations, scripts, and nuggets of clinical wisdom, finds the wide audience that it deserves.—Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., ABPP, Distinguished Professor, Binghamton University (SUNY), Director, Laboratory of Consciousness, Cognition, and Psychopathology About the Author: For more than thirty years, Douglas Flemons 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. Foreword author Michael D. Yapko, PhD, is a clinical psychologist residing in southern California. The author of fifteen books, including Mindfulness and Hypnosis, which won the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH) Arthur Shapiro Award for Best Book on Hypnosis, and the 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.
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