Alastair Dobbin Biography 2022 for ESH conference in Istanbul
I am a UK qualified family doctor and have worked in London, Australia and Edinburgh. As a young
man of 16 I read Freud ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ and was so fascinated as to what was going on
between him and his patients that I decided to pursue a career in medicine. I moved away from the
idea of psychiatry and became a GP to broaden my general life experience. I was always very
interested in how my patients dealt with stress, and I was always looking for tools that might help
them. I attended a course in hypnotherapy in 1990. After attending several workshops and
conferences and using NLP psychotherapy and hypnotherapy for my own patients I ran an NHS
mental health clinic for 10 years from 1995, taking referrals from other GPs and using a variety of
psychotherapeutic and hypnotherapeutic techniques to help patients, ego state therapy, NLP,
coaching and psychotherapy.
I became very interested in research in the 1990s and teamed up with different groups in primary
care to work out not just how effective hypnotherapy and NLP might be as tools in Primary care,
but not only if it worked, but how it worked. One of the techniques I used frequently in my clinics
was age regression. After attending ego state therapy workshops with Clare Frederick and Maggie
Phillips, and using their techniques I found many cases where treatment would uncover memories
that had been long ignored. I continued doing face to face work for over 10 years. Then in 2010
Sheila (by now a psychotherapist also using hypnosis) and I came across a paper by a lecturer in
motivation in McGill university that had many resonances for our practice and experiences, and we
embarked on a programme of research which has many resonances for hypnosis practice and the
general science of memory and neuroscience and the mind. At the same time we developed a
series of recordings for our clients/patients based on an NLP Olympic Sports Coaching programme.
We have used these in our research since 2002 and these are now found in the ‘Feeling Good’ app.
In my keynote address I shall outline the findings of our research which will I am sure be of great
interest to users of hypnotherapy, NLP and neuroscientists as well. Later in a workshop Sheila and I
will discuss with attendees how this might inform our current hypnotherapy practices and suggest
new directions for research.
For our research look at https://www.feelinggood.app/research/. There are also videos that can give an
idea about what we do