Provocative Therapy involves using warm-hearted humour to bring light to the shadows, to illuminate the elephant in the room, and to help people to question their own assumptions – in a way that is visceral, impactful and memorable.

A provocative therapist will often play devil’s advocate, using surreal imagery and dramatisation to lampoon the client’s thinking, which allows the client to see their own patterns from the outside.

This activates the client’s psychological immune system, allowing them to immunise themselves against such unhelpful thought patterns (and behaviour patterns) in the future.

Find out more in this video…

If you’d like to get a deeper understanding of how this approach can be used to provoke rapid change, I have created a detailed, annotated transcript of one of Nick Kemp’s Provocative Change Works sessions:

Nick Kemp – Session with Laura – Annotated Transcript.pdf

About Frank Farrelly

Over the course of his life Frank Farrelly created a radically new model of therapy.

He was a tremendously experienced clinician, regularly treating people who had been institutionalised for years. With the methods he discovered, he got results where other people had failed.

Frank’s approach bypassed the normal conventions of therapy. He often took the side door to get into all the nooks and crannies of a client’s issue, coming at it from an angle they weren’t expecting.

He would use warmth and wit to provoke the client into using their own problem-solving capacities, to question their own generalisations, and to confidently assert themselves.

You can read more about Frank’s work at ProvocativeTherapy.com.

About Nick Kemp

Nick Kemp was mentored extensively by Frank. Frank was highly complimentary about Nick’s work, and Frank bequeathed his entire archive of Provocative Therapy videos and audio recordings to Nick after his death.

Nick’s model – Provocative Change Works – breaks down the patterns of Provocative Therapy, and makes them teachable and learnable (something Frank himself never did).

Nick has worked with thousands of clients, and his model is thoroughly real-world tested.

He teaches how to educate the client at the start of the session, how to incorporate hypnosis and metaphor exploration, how to structure client recordings, and how to adopt various “provocative stances” with clients to provoke rapid change.

You can find out more about PCW at ProvocativeChangeWorks.com.

Provocative Therapy and Provocative Change Works are approaches that I use within my own sessions. If you’d like to experience this way of working for yourself, you can get in touch with me here.

I’d like to share with you a technique that has reliably created profound, lasting changes for my therapy clients, and it’s something I frequently use with myself.

With practice and persistence, it has the power to completely transform how you relate to yourself and your emotions.

Here’s a review of the steps:

• Set aside some time for yourself, in a place where you can relax and focus inside.
• Choose a feeling that has been troubling for you.
• Bring to mind a time when you felt that way.

Then…
 
1. Notice where the core of the feeling is located in your body.
2. From your heart, say “welcome” to the feeling.
3. Relax with the feeling. Relax into the feeling. Relax beneath the feeling.
4. Be open, patient, and curious about how the feeling changes.
5. Visualise yourself behaving in a much more positive, resourceful way in the future.

And here’s a guided meditation to help you to learn to do this process for yourself:

You may also be interested in my meditation program: Profound Releasing

 

Powerful, heart-based meditations for welcoming and releasing
difficult emotions.

 

Find out more here…

 

The handshake interrupt is a rapid hypnosis induction created by Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP.

The technique involves interrupting a normal handshake, and thereby inducing a moment of confusion in someone, so that they don’t quite know how to respond.

You can then utilise this momentary “huh?” response to lead them into hypnosis.

However, because it’s such an odd, “martial arts-like” manoeuvre, I find students rarely put it to practical use outside of hypnosis seminars. After all, it’s pretty rude to suddenly grab a stranger’s arm when they’re just trying to say hello to you!

This video demonstrates a method I use to segue into this technique conversationally, which I find makes it much easier to use with clients, and with anyone who wants to experience “instant hypnosis”.

It’s quite an old clip, but I think it’s still a valuable demonstration if you’re at all interested in hypnosis.

If you’re new to hypnosis, just notice how “the magic” is not in the handshake interrupt itself, but in how I begin by building expectation in the student, and how I make use of her momentary confusion to create a full hypnotic response.

At the end of the clip, you can see from the student’s astonishment what an impact the arm levitation made on her. Evoking hypnotic phenomena is a great way to let people know that they are genuinely in an altered state of consciousness, and that they aren’t just pretending.

If you’re more experienced at inducing hypnosis, notice how I seed the idea of automatic, ideomotor movement before I begin the induction, and how I utilise the arm catalepsy by attaching it to feelings of enthusiasm.

Even though I am apparently only talking to the student, the suggestions for enthusiasm (e.g. “Let’s do this”) are something I am indirectly communicating to everyone in the room, in preparation for the exercise they are about to do.

NLP co-founder John Grinder would often tell his students – “You can use quotes to easily, naturally and conversationally practice any NLP pattern“.

Well, if I were to add to that suggestion, I’d say that the phrase “Now if I were to say to you…” is a very subtle way of using quotes, where you are essentially quoting yourself.

And I’ll finish with some apt words from Richard Bandler himself – “Using quotes to teach the quotes pattern has been done to death by NLP trainers worldwide. Now stop putting words in my mouth! I never said any of this!“.

I am the head scriptwriter at HypnosisDownloads.com.
 
Two downloads I’ve helped to create, which relate to this blog post are
Hand Levitation and Be More Hypnotic.