I recently had the great pleasure of attending the 2009 Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis conference in Reno, Nevada. My primary purpose in attending was to serve on the faculty for the Introductory Workshop in Clinical Hypnosis. I had spent the previous weeks helping workshop co-chair Dr. Edward Frischholz in preparing an updated curriculum for the workshop. Dr. Frischholz’ vision for the new training model is to enhance the workshop’s focus on empirically validated methods of assessment, treatment, and training.
As a faculty member I was in the esteemed company of Dolores Bjorkman, Dabney Ewin, Ed Frischholz, Hedy Howard, Steve Kahn, Rick Kluft, Dave Patterson, Steve Pauker, and Eric Willmarth. My role as a faculty member was to provide supervision during each of the five supervised small group practice sessions, and to assist in the scheduled demonstrations of hypnotic induction and hypnotic phenomena.
As the least experienced member of the faculty, I did not present any didactic material. However, I received 22 CEU credit for my attendance at these workshop sessions and am now competent in the provision of introductory clinical hypnosis training. There are plans for the Chicago Society of Clinical Hypnosis to offer a basic workshop this winter, and I will be on faculty for this event as well.
Outside of workshop hours, I also had an opportunity to attend a few presentations and one scientific paper session. I was excited to see Dave Wark present on alert, eyes-open hypnosis. I am very interested in the potential use of alert hypnosis, particularly in performance-enhancement and coaching scenarios.
I also has the pleasure of seeing Ron Pekala present his ideas on the conceptualization and measurement of the phenomenology of consciousness. I was trained in provision of the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory Hypnotic Assessment Procedure (PCI-HAP) during my own introductory hypnosis training under Dr. Ian Wickramesekera II.
