All About Cognitive Hypnotherapy
- Kirsty Macdonald
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Cognitive Hypnotherapy - A Powerful Foundational Modality
This is the first in a short series on the different modalities that I use when I work with my clients. Overall my work includes many different aspects, but I'm starting with Cognitive Hypnotherapy, as this is where my work with clients began many, many years ago, and the elements of this work (using hypnosis and so much more) are so foundational to everything else that I do.
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You can find out more at www.kirstymacdoanld.co.uk and use this link to book a free confidential conversation with Kirsty to find out more about how this wonderful modality can help you: https://calendly.com/kirstymacdonald/free-discovery-call.
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Cognitive Hypnotherapy (QCH) is almost an umbrella term for a wonderful bunch of tools and techniques that work in freeing the unconscious mind, and are in complete flow with the systemic nature of what it is to be a human being in this world.
When people first come to see me and experience Cognitive Hypnotherapy, they often say something like: “I'm not sure what this is… I just know I can’t keep feeling like this.”
And I find that’s the perfect place to begin.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy isn’t about fixing something that’s broken, but instead it’s about understanding how your mind and nervous system have been trying to protect you and then gently teaching them a new way.
So, what is Cognitive Hypnotherapy?
At its heart, Cognitive Hypnotherapy brings together modern neuroscience, psychology and hypnosis in a practical, grounded way. It isn’t stage hypnosis. You're always conscious and in control of your experience. In fact, you may find that you become more aware and more focused. This is about unlocking any unhelpful trance states (unwanted habits, behaviours, beliefs and old ways of being) rather than working hard to create new ones.
We work with the way your brain already learns and adapts.
Our learnt thoughts, behaviours and emotional responses are patterns that were formed to help you cope, succeed, survive, and achieve. The problem is that sometimes those patterns get stuck long after they’re useful. Stress can feel like your baseline. Anxiety, born of some of these stressors, becomes more frequent. Burnout can creep in quietly until you don’t recognise yourself anymore.
Perhaps you find yourself stuck or blocked somehow. Perhaps you already know why that is and would like to become free of it, or perhaps you would love to find out and get support through this.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy allows us to update patterns at the level they were created - not just talk about them, but become truly free.
Nervous System Resetting
So much of what I do is really about the nervous system. Many high-achieving, capable, intelligent people I work with are living in a low-level state of fight-or-flight. Tightened bodies and minds, often braced in some way, their minds are scanning and often are overwhelmed. Their sleep is less nourishing than it used to be. Rest no longer feels restorative.
You might look fine on the outside, but internally, your system is tired and life becomes compromised.
Through deep relaxation trance work and specifically designed techniques, I help your nervous system to experience something different. Something closer to safety, steadiness, and regulation.
When your body learns that it doesn’t have to stay on high alert, everything changes:
Stress and anxiety are reduced.
Thinking becomes clearer.
Decisions feel less overwhelming.
You respond rather than react.
The changes that people notice first start with a felt experience of difference. And with these positive changes, when you know, you can't unknow. It's as if the cells in your body and mind start to respond differently and learn a new way of being.
Things We Want More of and The Things We Want to Let Go
As Cognitive Hypnotherapy is all about freeing those things that are created by your unconscious mind, and 95% of your conscious experience is ruled by this part of you, this modality can help with an almost exhaustive list of things.
These can include:
Limiting beliefs.
Your relationship to your thinking.
Personal and professional relationships.
Parenting.
Your ability to achieve what you want to be doing.
All aspects of movement and health.
Emotional states that you may want to change, such as anxiety and stress, or a negative outlook on life.
Create more of the uplifting good stuff, such as happiness, joy and positivity.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy has also helped thousands with performance-related issues.
Cognitive Hypnotherapy for Performance
My original training was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and for years I have worked with by performers of all kinds and with people who want to enhance their ability to communicate. I have worked with opera singers who want to free up emotion stored in their throat, with CEOs who want to stop emitting "I don't feel good enough" vibes, with people who need to deliver a message and struggle with public speaking and with actors who get stage-fright.
In a relatively short period of time freedom is gained and then we work on how to integrate these positive changes into what my clients want to achieve. One of the things I love most about this approach is that it’s not only for when something feels wrong. It’s equally powerful for enhancing all the positive things needed for whatever performance means to you.
Performance in business. Performance as an actor, Performance in Leadership, Performance in sport. Performance as a musician. Even performance in relationships.
When your nervous system is regulated and your mind isn’t stuck in old patterns and wasting energy on fears, self-doubt, hypervigilance or internal criticism, your natural ability has room to come through and even to be enhanced.
Using Cognitive Hypnotherapy, we can:
Strengthen focus.
Reduce feelings of imposter-syndrome.
Build calm confidence.
Access flow states more consistently.
Remove unconscious blocks that are quietly (or sometimes loudly!) limiting you.
I see in my clients that most often the things that holds someone back isn't skill, but a pattern that formed years ago that is still running the show.
And the great news is that patterns can change.
What It Feels Like to Work With Me
My approach is confidential, warm, direct and deeply respectful. I don’t believe in pathologising people. I don’t see you as a collection of symptoms. I see you as someone whose system has been doing its best.
Sessions are conversational, reflective and then more focused as we move into the change work. You are always in control. You can speak, move and stop at any time. Most people describe it as feeling deeply relaxed but mentally clear, and most often people tell me they feel a sense of deep relaxation, relief, and release at the end of a session.
We work collaboratively. This isn’t something being “done” to you, it’s something we create together.
And often, the shifts happen faster than people expect. Not because it’s magic, but because we’re working at the level where change actually occurs.
A Final Thought
If you’re ready to change - if it's time to be free from something that's holding you back, or have a sense that difference is possible, if your body and mind feel more stressed than you would like, if burnout has dulled something that used to feel alive, or if you simply know you’re capable of more but something invisible keeps getting in the way…
Cognitive Hypnotherapy might be the doorway.
Not to becoming someone else, but in coming back to yourself - calmer, clearer, more aligned and fulfilled, your unconscious and conscious mind aligned. Your body relaxed and feeling connected to the whole of YOU.
And from there, everything else becomes possible.
Kirsty Macdonald offers sessions both online and in-person. You can make an enquiry via this contact form on her website: https://www.kirstymacdonald.co.uk/contact or book a free conversation to find out more here: https://calendly.com/kirstymacdonald/free-discovery-call
Kirsty Macdonald
(HPD, DipCHyp. NLPMprac, MCHNC),
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