Ivan Tyrrell

Ivan Tyrrell worked for many years as a psychotherapist (specialising in brief therapy for depression and anxiety). He now spends most of his time lecturing and writing.

As a Director of Human Givens College, editorial director of the Human Givens Journal, and board member of the Human Givens Institute, his influence in (and knowledge of) the field of psychotherapy and counselling is considerable.

In 1992 he and a group of psychologists and psychotherapists established the European Therapy Studies Institute (ETSI), whose aim was to discover why some psychotherapy approaches appeared to work and others didn’t. ETSI quickly gained several hundred members from a wide variety of professions whose support enabled them to publish a journal, The Therapist, the forerunner of the Human Givens journal.

The human givens approach to psychotherapy and psychology developed out of the work and research of this group as they endeavoured to bring greater clarity to the way people who become depressed, anxious, traumatised or addicted are helped, as well as making such help more reliably effective.

Ivan is also co-author with Joe Griffin of numerous, influential titles, including:

• Human Givens: the new approach to emotional health and clear thinking
• How to lift depression… fast
• Why we dream: the definitive answer
• Freedom from Addiction: The secret behind successful addiction busting
• How to Master Anxiety
• An Idea in Practice: Using the human givens approach
• Release from Anger: Practical help for controlling unreasonable rage
• Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang – the explosive origin of creativity, mysticism and mental illness

and five ground-breaking monographs on psychology and counselling including The APET model: patterns in the brain, which brings cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and SFBT approaches into line with new scientific discoveries about how the brain works, and The Shackled Brain: how to release locked-in patterns of trauma and Hypnosis and Trance States which gave the first psychobiological explanation for hypnosis.

Other titles include: The Survival Option, published by Jonathan Cape and Back from the Brink: Coping with stress, published by Virgin Books, which he co-wrote with Nick Leeson.

He is a founder member of The Conciliators Guild.

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