Subjects and skills covered

The subjects and skills you learn on Part 1 of the Diploma are consolidated, added to and expanded upon during the intensive Part 2 training through a stimulating variety of lectures, discussions, extensive course manual, practical exercises and the observation of therapy sessions given by HG tutors with real clients.

You will learn the following:

• Constructing effective psychological interventions using RIGAAR™
• Quick rapport building skills – verbal and non-verbal
• Fast, effective information gathering
• How to avoid getting sucked into the patient’s subjective world
• Listening skills, observing verbal and non-verbal cues
• Reflective reframing (active listening with a twist)
• Using language to build expectation and initiate change
• How to establish clear goals with patients and agree strategies for achieving them
• How to discover the client’s psychological and behavioural resources
• Working with the ‘The Observing Self’ concept
• Anxiety management, including how to deal with panic attacks, PTSD, agoraphobia and OCD
• The role of timing in therapy
• Understanding and using the body’s natural relaxation response
• The beneficial effects of relaxation on all forms of harmful emotional arousal
• How to teach patients deep relaxation – a variety of techniques
• Neutralising sub-threshold traumas and ‘molar memories’
• Separating the patient’s core identity from their problem
• Releasing locked-in patterns of trauma and dealing with abreaction
• Further practise in the rewind technique for treating trauma and phobias
• Dissociation and the freeze response – less common reactions to trauma
• Pattern matching: how unconscious processes work
• Key insights from neuroscience – and their practical therapeutic applications
• How to avoid creating false memories
• Stimulating mental and physical healing – the power of attention, information and laughter
• How to teach missing social skills
• The importance of volition, clients have a need to take control of their lives
• How to separate belief and opinion from fact and look directly at people and their situations
• Understanding perception – why most therapy models unwittingly bias how patients are viewed
• Stress and the mind/body system – an holistic view of physical health
• How to stimulate the immune system – language, physiology and healing
• Orienting questions and pattern interventions
• Suicide: assessing the risks and the next steps to take
• Analysis of live demonstrations of psychotherapy
• Transforming the intensity of a patient’s experience
• Depathologising and changing labels
• Using direct and indirect language for therapeutic change
• The metaphorical mind: Why the brain evolved to work with stories – the search for analogy

continued below…

• How to create and tell healing stories
• The role of suggestibility in mind/body healing
• Guided imagery to rehearse new behaviours
• Sleep disorders
• Why people get depressed – the cycle of depression
• How to lift depression quickly and encourage permanent change
• Working with people who self-harm
• Psychological techniques for pain management
• Useful cognitive behavioural (CBT) approaches made even more effective with the APET™ model
• Dealing with difficult relationships and sexual problems
• How to help those who have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused
• Interpersonal relationships – what can go wrong between colleagues, friends and family members and how best to help
• Understanding why we evolved to dream, and the implications for our mental health
• The relationship between dreaming and psychosis
• Creativity, problem solving and brain function
• Treating alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders and other compulsive behaviours
• Addiction and the stages of quitting: mobilising motivation – how to free yourself and others from addictive behaviour
• Counter conditioning
• Identifying and working with Asperger’s syndrome
• Left- and right-brained caetextia – what to look out for, the problems it can cause and how best to help
• The importance of empowering clients through psycho-education and teaching missing life skills
• Ethics and professional conduct, including: sexual/relationship issues – discernment; the sick and dying; intractable illness
• Finding the spare capacity in yourself to be effective
• Using outcome measurement as part of effective practice
• The importance of regular supervision

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3  

Your route to a professional accredited register