ABSTRACT
The training of healthcare professionals in clinical hypnosis greatly enhances their therapeutic effectiveness across many different domains of health care. As we integrate clinical hypnosis into an increasing variety of healthcare contexts, to be effective, training must flexibly and sensitively reflect and attend to the trainees’ different personal backgrounds in culture, ethnicity, language, gender expression, communicative abilities, trauma exposure, as well as to the variety of clinical backgrounds and practice settings (e.g., in medical, behavioral, and mental health care). Traditional, “legacy”, training has tended to emphasize content delivery over process, and the “correct” execution of standard hypnotic procedures over the flexible, attuned, and collaborative development and utilization of spontaneous as well as formally invited trance states. Thus, the standard approach to clinical hypnosis training has made it unduly challenging for clinicians who value agency in their process of learning and integrating a new and powerful clinical skill set. Clinicians from diverse practices and areas of interest require and deserve flexible and applicable learning experiences. They are also entitled to emotional support as they move through the challenges of experiential learning that is integral to professional hypnosis education. Over the past decade, the author has developed a training model that advocates an approach to clinical hypnosis training informed by the tenets of interpersonal neurobiology and adult learning. It emphasizes the creation of multi-dimensional safety throughout the learning experience that benefits all trainees, and models for the trainees how to offer clinical hypnosis to their own diverse patients.
