What a week it has been.
Last weekend I was in Hamilton (that is, Hamilton, New Zealand, not Hamilton, Victoria) attending a memorial service for one of the most remarkable people I’ve had the privilege to know, and someone who has had a profound impact on my professional life.
That person is Mr Raymond Parker, hypnotherapist, teacher, activist, and a valued colleague and mentor.
I first met Raymond when I started my hypnotherapy training, as he was the Governing Director and co-founder of the New Zealand School of Clinical Hypnotherapy, and while at the time he was in his mid-70’s, he was still actively involved in teaching and supporting the students of the school.
I remember very well my first student meeting, nervously going up the stairs, not really having a clue of what I was going to be walking into. It wasn’t long before I was introduced to Mr Parker, and I don’t think that it was more than a minute before I knew that I was listening to someone who was well worth listening to.
(That’s not to say that I’m the sort of person who just accepts what they hear without question, because I’m not. I want to see the evidence, and if I start hearing things that don’t quite add up, that’s when alarm bells start ringing.)
Towards the end of that student meeting, Raymond was making his usual address to the group, and I remember him talking about his goal of having a school that was in his words, “second to none.”
I remember at the time thinking that that was a really big claim to make. So I started doing a bit more research about hypnotherapy schools in other parts of the world and what they taught. And it didn’t take long to realise that Raymond was probably right. Not only was his course at 2450 hours (yes, two thousand, four hundred and fifty hours) longer than any other programme that I could find, it was totally focused on hypnotherapy; both the techniques and skills associated with the hypno- part, and the understanding of counselling and psychology associated with the -therapy part.
(To put this into perspective, the equivalent qualification in the UK is HPD, or Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma. This can be completed in roughly 450 hours, and includes not only hypnosis, but other not-particularly-effective approaches such as Ericksonian therapy and NLP.)
Over the coming months, working my way through a curriculum that made an awful lot of sense, I came to learn more about how the school came to be. In New Zealand in the late 1970’s, there was a school operating that had a grossy unethical approach to therapy that included giving clients suggestions during hypnosis that they had been sexually abused as children. In response to this, and controversy that has tainted the image of hypnotherapy to this day, Raymond Parker and his then-business partner committed to set up a school that would provide decent training for clinical hypnotherapists. That sent Mr Parker and his wife off around the world for six months, looking at how hypnotherapy was taught and practised around the world. The techniques and approaches he learned were brought back to New Zealand where he spent the next three years sorting through them in the clinic, discarding the approaches that didn’t work at all, didn’t work consistently, had ethical or client safety issues, or were just too difficult or impractical to use.
So more than 25 years later, I came to enjoy and appreciate the approach to hypnotherapy that Raymond used and taught, stripping away the mumbo-jumbo, the mixed-modality, ahem, bullshit, using an approach to hypnotherapy that is not only ethical, explainable, and efficient, but one that can achieve truly remarkable results for willing and engaged clients.
I’ve sometimes wondered how Raymond Parker navigated his way through the bullshit and mumbo-jumbo to get to this result, where so many practitioners and teachers have been distracted by ideology and fashion, preferring to advocate improbable and sometimes nonsensical approaches that create (and I’ve seen this in the clinic myself) some bizarre and fundamentally unsatisfactory outcomes for their clients. I think that the answer lies somewhere in Raymond Parker’s tenacity, unstoppable enthusiasm, and an unyielding commitment to doing the right thing.
During the service his daughter Donna spoke about how her father was such a fixture in the school, of a sense that while he was obviously not immortal, that he would always be there.
And in many respects, immortality is exactly what Raymond Parker achieved. Through the thousands of lives he has helped to change for the better as a therapist, through the school he set up and managed for over thirty years, and through the students he has taught to use those same techniques to help further generations of clients, his work over more than three decades continues on.
And that is a type of immortality that very few people can ever hope to achieve.
Everybody Loves Hypnobear 