Our 2021 Annual Conference

Thanks for joining us for
our 2021
Annual Conference

featuring

Dr. Douglas Flemons

November 5-6, 2021

It was awesome!

The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy

The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy, Course #3839, is approved by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program to be offered by North Carolina Society of Clinical Hypnosis as an individual course. Individual courses, not providers, are approved at the course level. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. ACE course approval period: 11/04/2021 - 11/04/2023. Social workers completing this course receive 12 Clinical continuing education credits.

This two-day advanced workshop will go to the heart of hypnotherapy, in both senses of the word. Gregory Bateson’s systemic ideas about mind and communication will help illuminate core principles and practices of hypnosis and its application to a therapeutic context. But we’ll also delve into the beating heart of this way of working—the use of empathy, the invitation of hypnosis, and the facilitation of therapeutic change. All discussion and learning will be guided by a deep respect for and understanding of the mindfulness of the body and the embodiment of mind, both intra- and inter-personally. This sensibility will weave through an exploration and application of meditation, Ericksonian utilization, and metaphoric communication, and it will inspire the experiential structuring of the workshop. Participants will have ongoing opportunities for trying out new ideas and skills, receiving feedback, asking questions, and incorporating (< L. in- “into” + corpus, “body”: “unite into one body”) new learning—for getting it into their bones.

Educational Objectives:

After the first day of the workshop, participants will be able to—

define hypnosis in terms of flow experience.
compare self-hypnosis and meditation.
distinguish between empathy and sympathy.
state the mind-body connections essential to hypnosis.
identify principles of improvisation in the invitation of hypnosis.
describe the role of expectancy and context-setting in the hypnotic process.
define the importance of utilization and permissive language in hypnosis.
identify the importance of avolitional responsiveness in hypnotic experience.

After the second day of the workshop, participants will be able to—

formulate treatable problem definitions.
translate diagnostic abstractions into symptomatic patterns.
define addiction in terms of short-circuit solutions.
articulate the self-referential spiraling inherent in anxiety, panic, and depression.
distinguish an encountering approach to hypnotherapeutic change.
identify principles of improvisation in the invitation of hypnotherapeutic change.
describe the role of metaphor, stories, and avolitional emulation in hypnotherapy.
define hypnotherapy as a context for play and learning.

About Dr. Douglas Flemons

Douglas Flemons, Ph.D., LMFT, is Professor Emeritus of Family Therapy at Nova Southeastern University, where, for over 30 years, he offered team-based live supervision and taught graduate courses on hypnosis and meditation, systems thinking, brief therapy, writing, suicide, and sex therapy. A licensed MFT and an AAMFT Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor, Flemons is the author of two books on hypnosis (Of One Mind and the forthcoming The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy); co-editor of Quickies: The Handbook of Brief Sex Therapy (3rd ed.); and co-author of Relational Suicide Assessment. In 2021, he won the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis’s Milton H. Erickson Award for Scientific Excellence in Writing on Clinical Hypnosis for his article, “Toward a Relational Theory of Hypnosis” in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. He presents nationally and internationally on a variety of topics, and since 1993, he has been offering an (almost) annual 7-day (50-hour) intensive, Florida-Board-approved hypnosis workshop in Fort Lauderdale. He has now relocated to Asheville, where he maintains a private practice, writes, and hikes.

About Dr. Flemons' Upcoming Book

The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy:
Inviting Connection, Inventing Change
(W. W. Norton, 2021)

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 but concise way, he 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 avolitional shifts in unbidden and 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—to invent—opportunities for embodied learning and therapeutic change.

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