Ethos
Our Unique Ethos
The National Hypnotherapy Society is a Not for Profit organisation formed by hypnotherapists, counsellors and psychotherapists. We believe that hypnotherapy is a vocation and we want your professional association to feel like a ‘home' which allows trainers to feel they are working in partnership with their professional association.
The National Hypnotherapy Society is unique in that it explicitly understands hypnotherapy to be, neither a "stand alone" profession in its own right, nor a "complementary therapy" such as aromatherapy or reflexology. Hypnotherapy is a psychological therapy – a type of psychotherapy or counselling.
Hypnotherapy can't "stand alone" because our clients present with a wide variety of psychological, emotional and mental health issues which require a broader knowledge, on behalf of the hypnotherapist, of psychotherapeutic and psychological models of human behaviour – a context in which to apply hypnotherapeutic techniques. Without this deeper grounding and training, hypnotherapy is very limited in scope and would be unsafe when applied to more complex issues.
Hypnotherapy isn't a "complementary therapy" because without exception, other complementary therapies do not require in depth knowledge of psychology or mental health issues for safe or effective practice, nor is their primary aim to treat such issues. Branding hypnotherapy a "complementary therapy" not only sidelines the efficacy of hypnotherapeutic treatment and labels it alongside many unproven or unprovable modalities, but it also risks seeing hypnotherapy as something in which it is safe to dabble without a foundation in psychological models.
Instead, we view hypnotherapy as a psychological therapy – a type of psychotherapy or counselling. We encourage all members to complement their hypnotherapy training with counselling or psychotherapy training and reserve our highest membership grades for those practitioners who have a foundation in psychological therapies.
Trainers should be respected for their original approach and insight, and treated equally whatever the model they employ or develop in working with clients.
National Hypnotherapy Society training school membership is intended to support you, the trainer; helping you to achieve good results for your students.
We aim to create an open, fair, transparent learning culture. The function of training accreditation is to avow to the public that the trainer is, in the opinion of the Society, safe, competent, and ethical to train hypnotherapists to see clients.
We recognise that there are a great variety of training courses available. If you offer short, foundation, or distance learning courses or individual workshops that are not designed to take the student to professional practitioner level we can still approve your course. Individual workshops can be approved for CPD purposes on an individual basis.
Your application will be personally assessed by an officer of the Society. Should we not be able to offer you membership, you will be told in what areas we felt you did not succeed, and offer advice and assistance to help you reach your goal.