Your brain has not evolved to make you happy, it's evolved to keep you safe.

The limbic system, deep in the mid-brain, is responsible for “lower order emotional processing”, essentially operating on templates. In other words, if an action appeared to ensure your survival today, the limbic system will roll it out it again tomorrow. Unfortunately that response may be anger, OCD, anxiety, addiction or worse. That's because the limbic system is essentially void of intellect or long term consequence; it's interested in your survival, and that's all. Worse still, to achieve that, it has to be ever-vigilant, negatively-skewed and obsessive.

The prefrontal cortex on the other hand, is a solutions powerhouse and in 2 million years the human skull itself has more than doubled its capacity to house its expansion. So these days, via mechanisms like REM and ‘sleep spindles’ that occur in deeper sleep, the brain has been shown to move lower order short term memories and problems from the limbic system to what are known as narrative memories and solutions in the prefrontal cortex. Essentially the memories are moved from safety-focused templates to solutions-focused processes.

“Solutions-Focused Therapy (SFT) utilises this remarkable conversion process; not in REM, but in various simulated versions of the process"

It’s this ‘executive function’ in the prefrontal cortex that has allowed us to become the innovative, complex species that we are and is responsible for planning, intricate cognitive behaviour, personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behaviour. Solutions-Focused Therapy (SFT) utilises this remarkable conversion process; not in REM, but in various simulated versions of the process like hypnosis; visualisations; and other trance like states. Moreover, unlike every day trance states like sleep or daydreaming, we inject that state with positively-charged, solution-oriented ideas and language patterns to accelerate the process even further. Consequently clients regularly leave the sessions feeling deeply energised and motivated as though awakening from a great night’s sleep.

Traditional therapy, by repeatedly rehashing past traumas or experiences, risks embedding them even further... If this has been your experience of traditional therapy, SFT may be for you.

Traditional therapy on the other hand, we believe, can often do the opposite. By repeatedly rehashing past traumas or experiences, one risks embedding them even further. If you constantly draw the mind’s attention to something you’re essentially asking it to prioritise that very thing. If this has been your experience of traditional therapy, SFT may be for you. Much like the Serenity Prayer which asks: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”, SFT embodies the wisdom that knows; the one thing we cannot change is the past.

So unlike traditional therapy, a typical SFT session will involve:

• The therapists acknowledging and respecting the client’s past because these life-shaping events are integral to a client’s personality, but, the emphasis will be on the present first, the future second, and the past last.

• The session will be grounded in collaboration with the client and concentrate on finding their solutions, not ours. This is achieved by means of powerful and strictly objective questioning that facilitate the breakdown of limiting beliefs and unearth subconscious solutions, in a deeply personalised form.

• Thus we develop goals in partnership with the client, rather than imposing 'appropriate' treatment objectives, because we know that self-prescribed actions are substantially more likely to be acted upon.

• Lastly, where trance, visualisation or hypnotherapy are used in conjunction with solutions-focused language patterns, most clients experience an almost inexplicable uplift in mood and energy.