AD25 Keynote 01 - The Discriminating Therapist: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Decision Making in Depressive Stress Generation - Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D.

AD25 Keynote 01 - The Discriminating Therapist: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Decision Making in Depressive Stress Generation - Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D.

Cognitive psychology, the study of how people think, has given rise to new understandings about how people gather and use information. This includes how people decide, usually at a level outside of awareness, what is salient to pay attention to in a given context and, likewise, what is essentially irrelevant. When people get sidetracked into irrelevancy, paying too much attention to what doesn’t really matter and too little attention to what does, their perceptions and responses naturally lead them astray. More important, when someone’s perspective is so global or over-general that they simply don’t know how or what to decide, they are far more likely to make poor decisions on the basis of hurt feelings, old history, misconceptions, or blind faith. There are many different ways of making key life decisions, and when one employs an ineffective one, the results can be enduringly painful. Instead of following the therapy tradition of analyzing why someone makes the choices they make, The Discriminating Therapist focuses on how people choose. Illustrative examples from client interviews will be included. We will especially focus on what they failed to either notice or discriminate in their global response to some circumstance. From this non-pathologizing and gentler perspective, we can focus on ways to use hypnosis to help people make better decisions.

Educational Objectives:

1. Identify cognitive style and its effect on experience in general and symptomatic experience in particular

2. Identify the role of global cognitions in client problems

3. Describe and model how asking “how” questions can identify the client’s experiential deficits (i.e., missing or incorrect information that work against effective decision-making)