What problems do I work with?

Is your issue likely to respond well to hypnosis or hypnotherapy?

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Fees and Availability

What does it cost?
Where are you based?

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Health

Have you been saying you need to lose weight for health reasons?
Do you keep telling yourself you need to stop smoking?
Is there a part of you which isn’t happy with your drinking?
Do you need help with any of these?

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Specific Anxiety

Do you get specific triggers?
Maybe things are basically okay — but there’s an issue making your life awkward or miserable.
What’s the trigger for you? What’s the cue?

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About Hypnosis...

What is it? How does it work?
Experience effective hypnosis safely with a fully qualified clinical hypnotist, hypnotherapist, and healthcare professional

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The things hypnosis and hypnotherapy are good for

Hi, do you need help with a problem that you’re not quite sure who to turn to, but you think hypnosis and hypnotherapy might help?Kelly had been to see her GP who told her she needed a camera (gastroscopy) to look down her throat. All her life she got major distress about being physically sick and the thought of swallowing a camera was too much; she’d forced herself as far as the hospital department waiting room but ran out before she was called. We worked online, the problem is called emetophobia, and it took six sessions, but it helped her go back and have the investigation. She remembered everything we’d done in hypnosis and it all kicked in beautifully when it needed to, and the hospital staff were actually wonderful to her. The relief at getting it sorted!There are many problems like this: you would not see your GP for this fear because the fear is not a medical problem. You realise the problem is somehow “in your head” but you don’t need a mental health expert like a clinical psychologist to fix it, and because there is no risk of self-harm you’re not likely to get a referral anyway. You’re just expected to get on with it.These problems, “not-medical, not mental-health,” are what hypnotherapy is especially good at helping and they are my speciality.
Other examples include:
Performing, singing, playing guitar. You can do it, but not in front of an audience. If only you could.
Intimacy: You get pain, and/or anxiety when you seek physical intimacy; you may even have stopped all intimacy because of the issue. If only there was a way of getting past the problem.
Phobias and fears. Everything from wasps or spiders to avoiding medical investigations because you can’t bear the thought of a camera making you gag, or being trapped in an MRI tunnel. It seems impossible to get beyond, but hypnosis can help because the problem is not with the MRI tunnel or camera, (or even the b* spider!).
Eating behaviours. You know how to eat sensibly all day but every night it’s like another part of your brain takes over and ruins everything. Over and over.I am qualified to deliver hypnosis in the NHS. If you are at a point where you’ve tried everything, and your health & wellbeing are affected, contact me. A discovery call is free. Let's see what's possible.
Contact me for further information.

Training & Experience

Oliver Hollis MSc, BSc, BA, DipHypMSc in Hypnosis in Research, Medicine, & Clinical Practice.I am a Clinical Hypnotist (HPD) and HCPC Registered Physiotherapist.I learned hypnosis from a retired GP years ago, I studied it at Master’s level in the psychology lab of of one of the UK’s leading hypnosis researchers, and I’ve used it clinically with patients and clients in the NHS and my private practice for those who can’t access hypnosis on the NHS. I am simultaneously science-based and holistic.I look for what you are seeking. Hypnosis happens where mind and body meet. Self-care should move you toward a life you don’t need to run away from. Or you might just want to get over a difficulty and move on.
Main clinical areas:
• Weight (usually but not always weight loss)
• Anxiety
• Dependency
• Pain
• Sexual issuesPersonal experience: Like many of us I know what it is to be overly dependent on alcohol. I don’t miss it at all; your solution might be different. With you, I simply offer a chance of clarity. Learn to take or reject suggestions to help you focus and make the changes you need to feel better physically, mentally, socially, and with your sense who you are and want to be.More Training and Qualifications
Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma (HPD), gold standard hypnotherapy qualification in the UK, plus ongoing clinical supervision
Active member of British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis (BSCAH). BSCAH membership is exclusively limited to medical doctors, qualified healthcare professionals, and academic hypnosis researchers.
Registered with the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) and abide by their strict code of ethics for hypnotherapists.
State registered physiotherapist (Health & Care Professions Council, HCPC). Clear, stringent ethics for patient protection. Fully qualified and insured.The main branch of the “psychological tree” I’ve trained in has the behavioural approaches of:
• ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy)
• CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) — which I often use in conjunction with hypnosis. I qualified in CBT for pain at master’s level at the University of Hertfordshire. I also use
• REBT (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy) which has distinctive features useful for overcoming obstacles to change.Contact me for further information.

Fees and Availability

How much does it cost?£75.00 - £100.00 per sessionI know it sounds corny but don’t look at the cost, think of the value. You want to get this sorted. It's not a life-threatening problem but it's really annoying and possibly it's sucking the joy from your life. What would getting it sorted mean to you?Additional information
Most of my sessions are £75. I like to help you in 2-3 sessions; 6 at the most. (Emetophobia, I'm looking at you!)Can problems you've had for years be sorted that quickly?
Well, how long does it take to open the curtains and let the light in? A lot of the problems I work with are like that: seeing things clearly, deeply, and profoundly differently. When it's not like this I won't pretend it is either -- but there's always something to be done.Smoking cessation is a £300 package. It's a heavy first session because we know exactly the result we're after and you likely won't need sessions 2 or 3 but they're paid upfront and they are there as your safety net for a whole year.Contact me

Where do you work?

Do you only work online?Yes, and I'd like to suggest why it's better.
Hypnosis takes place in your head, not in my therapy room.
When you are having the real-world experience of walking onstage; or standing on the runway waiting for take off; or looking at the spider in the bedroom -- it’s your head which will be important for coping with real life. You want to be able to cope any place, any where – not just in a comfy therapy chair with the sound of whale music playing in the background. (I don’t really play whale music btw.)All we need is a good internet connection and no disturbance from pets.
I mostly use Google Meet, or we can use Zoom.And if you prefer Linux and FOSS, we can use Signal or JitSi Meet.Here's the contact if you would like more information.

Background to this work

I used to be a smoker and like so many, I had a phase in my life where I became overly dependent on alcohol. These habits which once controlled my life no longer bother me but it was not easy getting to this point. Likewise, I was heavy but I had health problems from being big. Now, I am my preferred weight (BMI 22-23) and I’m happier being lighter. I honestly do not have enough will power to be a non-smoker, control alcohol, and maintain my weight.To change your life like this you almost certainly need to change your perspective — but when that happens these issues are no longer a struggle. Can you imagine what that would feel like for you? But this is the basis of my work with patients and clients and it’s actually the reason why I do this work. I want to help you take the better path on a consistent basis in a way that feels natural and normal for you.

Weight

First, the emphasis is always on health. Having a lot of body fat does not automatically make you unhealthy. Fat people can be healthy and often are; slim people can be unhealthy, and often are.I work with anyone who wants to change their behaviour around diet and exercise. This means I’m quite happy if your agenda is to stay whatever size you are but you also want to change something about the way you eat. A common reason is wanting to manage diabetes.If you want to change weight there can be many reasons why it never seems to work so we explore true barriers because they are important. For most of my clients it’s not through lack of trying.In addition to managing diabetes I see people who have been told they need to achieve a target weight for a hip or knee surgery, OR to avoid having that surgery. Weight reduction can also be useful to reduce the mechanical loading on the spine as part of pain management.

Smoking

With smoking the only acceptable outcome is to stop and stay stopped. Ethically, I do not believe it’s right to offer you any other outcome.If you’re concerned that stopping smoking would increase your anxiety, or your weight we will deal with all of that in the session(s).You are not going to fall apart because you quit. In fact you’ll become stronger and cope better. Book an appointment to stop. Let’s just be done with it.

Alcohol

With alcohol it’s often tricky because you might be in two minds about what you want. Quite possibly you might wonder how you can feel so determined to stop or cut down only to have it fall apart hours, days, or weeks later. This is the problem with alcohol.Honestly, I don’t think hypnosis alone helps much with controlling alcohol in the long run. BUT…
There are things which make hypnotherapy highly likely to help you achieve the long run of your choice:- A break from drinking — in order to begin to think clearly
- Working through what you want to do — how do you want to drink? Do you want to drink? Why do you want to drink?
- How to cope with the big white space of life without alcohol whether it’s for short term, medium term, or long term.Hypnotherapy can help with all of those so that’s why I’m happy to work with people who want to do something about their drinking. I also have experience with what does work for the long run (and it’s different things for different people). My approach is let's see what works best for you and we can use hypnotherapy, and whatever is useful, to help get you there.You might want to try 30-90 days alcohol free. Hypnotherapy can help with that.
You might just want to talk to someone who isn’t your family or your doctor and who isn’t going to tell you what to do or judge you.
If you want to talk, you’re welcome — book a session.

"I only have this problem when..."

Some anxiety only appears in specific situations.
You may find yourself adjusting your life to avoid these situations.Examples include:
- Speaking to groups, or avoiding going out
- Playing or performing in front of people
- Driving on slip roads or certain types of roads
- Difficulty peeing in some situations
- Avoiding lifts
- Avoiding MRI scanners
- Avoiding dentists
- Avoiding needles
- Feeling disgust when noticing… anything from buttons, to beards, to spiders
- Exam nerves
- “Appearances” (if you are in London and doing The Knowledge)

A new life...

My experience with this type of work began years ago when a musician asked if hypnotherapy could help with their Performance Anxiety - commonly referred to as “stage fright”. Hypnotherapy is a treatment of choice with these situations and I am proud to offer this service in addition to health-related work. There are massive improvements that it can make to a person's quality of life, especially in terms of decreased stress and anxiety.Hypnotherapy is effective with all sorts of specific anxiety. Even though these anxieties look so different on the surface they tend to share a few common underlying structures. Hypnosis allows you learn new responses to the old distressing triggers. Take the structure away and the anxiety goes.Contact me if you would like more information.

About hypnosis...

hypnotherapy, and how it works...

About Hypnosis

It’s probably a good idea to have some idea about hypnosis and hypnotherapy. It will also help to know how I approach the specific kind of work I do for health-related issues.What hypnosis is not
It is not sleep, trance, or letting your mind be controlled by the hypnotist. It is not about being “put under” or being reprogrammed. Hypnosis is not a magic sleep and it will not turn you into a pain-free, teetotal, non-smoking, diet-following zombie. Nobody wants that. Really.So what is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is essentially a way to divert and control the attention in a specific way. When you do this you can experience some useful changes of perception — specifically with regard to pain, cravings, and other attention grabbing thoughts and feelings.Doing hypnosis is often easier to experience than to describe. It’s a bit like how simply experiencing the beauty of a sunset is different to analysing it. Yes, you can analyse a sunset, but sometimes you just want to appreciate it .

Hypnotherapy

The word “therapy” can give the wrong idea but we are probably stuck with it — the sort of therapy I practice tends to be very solution focused.Hypnotherapy (let’s call it that for now) is ideal for working with issues which are not quite medical enough for your doctor, and not so threatening that you need a clinical psychologist. It’s a flexible approach that can work regardless of whether or not someone has mental health issues.Issues which fall between medicine and clinical psychology are exactly the things that hypnotherapists deal with.

How I work

You do not have to tell me the details and history of everything that brings you to me if you prefer not to. We don’t disregard the past but the focus is more on the present and how to respond differently.The bit many people wonder about is the hypnotherapy component. Are there “magic” words or how does it work? It honestly is exactly what I’ve said: it’s a specific way to divert and control your attention and I’ll help you do that. We do all this over Zoom. Hypnosis takes place in your head and you don’t actually need to be in a therapy room — you might as well be comfortable Zooming from home. For all the types of work I do, online sessions are just as effective as f2f sessions.Most people are seeking personal change and don’t know what’s holding them back. Hypnotherapy doesn’t force change on you. It clarifies what you want to do; it lets you get out of your own way and stay out of your own way.Find out more

Referral for treatments using hypnosis

Reading time: approx 2.5 minutes for essential, (6 minutes for full 870 words)This is a brief guide to help you decide if it’s worth recommending this type of hypnotherapy for a patient with chronic pain or health-related lifestyle issues, how it works, and who benefits most.If you have patients who have asked if there are “other options” for chronic pain or problems with eating, smoking, drinking — these are the important criteria which would help you to recommend this kind of hypnotherapy with confidence.The easiest place to start is with a practitioner who is a member of BSCAH -- only medical doctors and allied healthcare professionals are eligible for membership. (Dentists and academic researchers too but you are not going to send your patient to them.)These are not absolutes but relative guides:- Full-fluency in the same language as the therapist
- GAD-7 any score up to about 16, there is some flexibility
- PHQ-9 <18
- For fibromyalgia and chronic widespread pain: High pain scores on pain-specific outcome measures are not a barrier when working with an experienced pain therapist. We know that chronic pain is truly biopsychosocial and each component needs consideration. Note: Two factors which are positively correlated with favourable outcomes are lower levels of negative affect, (e.g. PHQ-9 >18), and a lack of rigid biomedical focus on pathology. Psychological flexibility is the thing to consider: If the patient can only engage with biomedical explanations of organic, structural aetiology then they are unlikely to benefit from a biopsychosocial approach. (They will likely ask you for another MRI.)
- For behavioural, lifestyle modification the patient should have moved from a Pre-contemplation stage to at least a Contemplation stage.The commonest issues I work with are:
- Chronic pain (including neuropathic pain)
- Dietary adherence with DM2
- Weight reduction to meet surgical BMI target
- Smoking cessation refractory to standard advice and treatment
- Alcohol awareness secondary to non-physiological addiction, (usually stress is the primary driver)The ideal patient for this kind of psychologically-informed therapy using hypnosis is someone who needs more than biomedical interventions alone, and who is struggling with emotional distress and dysfunctional behaviour but is not at risk or requiring referral to a clinical psychologist. If recommending me: I work in a jargon-free way in the therapeutic sessions but all the work uses science-based and evidence-based techniques. My analytical approach is broadly behaviourist and I favour principles of operant conditioning in session and as post-hypnotic cues. My therapy style is person-centred.How does hypnosis work for pain and behavioural change?
Hypnosis is essentially a way to divert and control the attention. All that’s required for it to be therapeutically effective is to divert and control the attention for long enough for suggestions delivered in hypnosis to feel automatic and natural in learned carry over. Delivered correctly, hypnotic suggestions feel believable and coherent. They act as intrinsic positive reinforcers of behaviour which subjectively for the patient is felt as “motivation”.Hypnosis in pain research has arrived at a consensus model showing that hypnotic pain control is essentially the ability to perform a top-down modulation of the perception of nociception. The ability is normally distributed across all tested populations. In the lab all but the lowest rated subjects can generally achieve statistically significant pain reduction, with the highest rated subjects often achieving impressive analgesia. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that this ability is not a static trait as was once believed and the skill can be enhanced by training.Clinically, “hypnotherapy” harnesses other factors in addition to hypnosis itself. With real patients who want real relief the best functional outcomes are achieved not by merely focusing on nociception but also by addressing the way chronic pain has an impact on every domain of the patient’s life. The insights of the last two decades of pain research using non-pharmacological methods show the importance of reducing psychological distress and suffering. These insights can be brought into hypnotherapy through teaching patients cognitive skills and behavioural modification. The most effective way of doing this is to use the type of resources found in pain management programmes where the material is drawn from CBT and ACT. The psychological therapy is doing the heavy lifting but hypnosis makes adherence feel coherent and achievable.Feel free to contact me for further details regarding hypnosis, clinical suitability etc.
I am available for presentations to doctors, nurses, allied healthcare professionals, and patient groups.Note
“Hypnotherapy” is not a titled or licenced profession so doctors can be understandably wary about recommending a hypnotherapist. If considering me, I am an active member of the British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis (BSCAH) whose membership is limited to doctors, researchers, and allied healthcare professionals. I still work in the NHS and I hold a full, current registration with HCPC (physiotherapy register). I am qualified to use hypnosis as a non-pharmacalogical method of pain management and behavioural modification. I am fully compliant with all ethical, GDPR, and CPD requirements for registration. On the academic side, I have conducted hypnosis research at Bournemouth University which required both academic and NHS ethics committee approval. I am fully insured to practice.I have extensive experience working with chronic pain patients in hospital based pain clinics, pain management programmes, and a track record for producing positive objective outcomes even with difficult cases. When working with all clients, but especially those who have come via GP recommendation, I always note the wider supporting network of medical professionals who may be involved. Assessment in hypnotherapy sessions is always ongoing with an awareness for signs and symptoms which would require the attention of a medical professional.

Are you interested to learn more about what I can do for you?If you have any questions please write using the form provided and I will do my best to get back to you as fast as possible. If you don't see a reply within a day check your SPAM folder tomorrow.I am located in London and nr. Glastonbury, England. Using Zoom we can work together from anywhere in the world.

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