About Us

The British Hypnosis Research and Training Association is a respected research and training organisation dedicated to teaching health professionals and students of hypnosis the theory, skills and methodology of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Originally established as a research organisation at the University of Cambridge in 1979 BHR started offering hypnotherapy training at St George’s Hospital London in 1986.

The Diploma course has been designed for students demanding an up to the minute vocational training in hypnotherapy. We currently offer a training featuring monthly weekend tutorials combined with comprehensive online tuition and optional supervision. Many Graduates find work as Hypnotherapists in private practice or utilise their hypnosis skills as an adjunct to their profession as Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Psychologists and Social Workers etc. The Association places emphasis on providing an ethical and professional vocational training for students seriously interested in developing a career in this rewarding field.

The Association was the first organisation to introduce Ericksonian Hypnotherapy courses to Europe and the combined monthly tutorials and online course has evolved from the respected training programmes taught by The British Hypnosis Research and Training Association in several British hospitals during the 1980’s and 90’s. To date we have trained over 6000 students and our unique approach has established the Association as pioneers in the hypnotherapy training field.

The Course

On the course you will learn to hypnotise patients indirectly in a non-authoritarian way utilising their beliefs, interests and personality to help them successfully enter the hypnotic state. The course covers all of the principles of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and NLP including language skills, hypnotic induction, hypnotic implication, pattern intervention and tasking as applied to a wide range of psychological, behavioural and pathological problems.

The course guarantees a practical and engaging learning experience combined with an academically challenging online training that will enable you to collaborate with other students on assignments, share ideas and evaluate each others work.

In addition there are forums where students assess and grade each other’s forum posts on their relevance and insight, as well as live chats with other students, assignments, polls, quizzes and the opportunity to upload, update and resubmit coursework and share work with the tutors and other students.

The course is taught by a team of Doctors specialising in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and the course syllabus is written by Stephen Brooks, one of the world’s leading authorities on Ericksonian hypnotherapy.

Course Structure

The Course is designed around ethical and practical skill based training modules and ensures that you will be exposed to a variety of different learning styles. Each monthly module contains a weekend tutorial where students see sessions of hypnotherapy with real patients and lectures followed by practical skill based group exercises.

The online component of the course runs in parallel with the monthly weekend tutorials. The combination is demanding and highly interactive. We believe that students need constant stimulation to feel motivated to study online which is why we have built the online component using Moodle, an advanced interactive teaching platform also used by the Open University. The online component includes 40 hours of streaming video of therapy sessions with patients followed by an in depth video analysis of the approaches, techniques, strategies and skills as seen in the video.

The Association originally introduced supervision as an adjunct to the course in 1992 and students found it very helpful, so in 2013 we are re-introducing the option for one-to-one personal supervision with course supervisors. Supervision is by phone and / or web cam or in some cases direct contact if we have a supervisor living in your area.

Although this isn’t currently obligatory it is likely to be in the future when the course becomes a Master’s degree. Some students may feel that they want to maximise their opportunity to learn by having the personal guidance of a supervisor during the course and some graduates decide to continue supervision after they have finished their training. This can be useful when first starting out in practice. As this is currently optional the fee is separate from the course fee.