Professor Donald Meichenbaum chairs our Senior Advisory Board — and here is what that actually means

Some announcements are easy to make. You write a headline, paste in a bio, and move on. This is not one of those. Not because it is complicated, but because I want to make sure it is understood properly, not just consumed as a name-drop.

Professor Donald Meichenbaum, one of the founders of cognitive behavioural therapy, chairs the Senior Advisory Board of the UK College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy. That is the headline. What follows is the substance.

Who he is

Don Meichenbaum created two of the foundational approaches in CBT: Self-Instructional Training and Stress Inoculation Training. Together with Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, he is recognised as one of the architects of the field. In 1982, a survey of American Psychological Association clinicians voted him the tenth most influential psychotherapist of the twentieth century. His clinical handbook on Stress Inoculation Training is still cited by the US Department of Veterans Affairs as an empirically validated treatment for PTSD. He is now in his mid-eighties, still working, and still, in my view, the sharpest critical mind in the room.

Why his involvement means what it means

Don is not someone who lends his name casually. He is, with the late Scott Lilienfeld, the co-author of “How to Spot Hype in the Field of Psychotherapy: A 19-Item Checklist” — a paper that named hypnosis as one of the fields where exaggerated claims have done real damage, alongside energy therapies, recovered memory work, and a good deal of what passes for innovation in our industry. That paper won the award for best contribution to the field of psychotherapy in 2018.

I pursued Don partly because of that paper. I had been using his teaching in our courses for years, and I had grown increasingly tired of the hype that surrounds both hypnosis and trauma treatment. When I finally wrote to him, he replied warmly and immediately. The basis of our connection, from the first conversation, was a shared frustration with overclaiming and a shared commitment to what the evidence actually supports.

His involvement is therefore not a rubber stamp or a reputation loan. It is a signal that this College applies the standard he would apply. That is what makes it meaningful, and that is why I value it so much more than I would value an endorsement from someone with a bigger following but less rigour.

In Don's own words: “What persuaded me is that the version of hypnosis this College teaches does not rest on those assumptions” — the assumptions about special states, recovered memories, and miracle cures that have given hypnosis a bad name.

The intellectual connection

The relationship is not only professional; it is theoretical. Don has long argued that we are Homo narrans, the storytelling animal. The stories we tell ourselves, the words we use, the meaning we make — these are not mere descriptions of experience. They shape experience. That is the heart of his constructive narrative approach, and it is the heart of Hypno-CBT®.

His work on self-instruction traces back through Vygotsky: that we learn to regulate ourselves through inner speech, through the things we say to ourselves in the moments that matter. Hypno-CBT® takes that insight and extends it: the reason focused, purposeful, believed-in self-talk works is that it is a form of autosuggestion. It is self-hypnosis in its most natural expression. The boundary between Meichenbaum's self-instruction and therapeutic suggestion is thinner than either field has traditionally been willing to admit.

Don has described Hypno-CBT® as “a transdiagnostic, process-based approach that takes seriously the factors the outcome research tells us matter most, including the cultivation of expectancy and hope.” That is a precise and generous summary of what we are trying to do.

The partnership so far, and where it goes next

Our work together has been going since 2021, longer than this announcement might suggest. We ran a workshop with him on treating PTSD and building resilience. We ran it again as a COVID fundraiser. Then he asked whether we could help him produce a legacy course — a distillation of fifty-five years of clinical and academic wisdom, for future generations of therapists. We said yes. We recorded thirty lectures, rebuilt his legendary handouts, and produced The Essence of Psychotherapy course series, which is now available through the College. We also built and host his website at donaldmeichenbaum.com.

The advisory board chair is the formal expression of a partnership that was already real.

Where it goes next: Don is focused on his legacy reaching as many practitioners as possible. So are we. We are developing plans to make his work available to a wider range of learners, including those in NHS training pathways. And The Essence of Psychotherapy is becoming a recognised component of the College's accredited training pathway. The announcement you are reading is the first public step in that broader programme.

What this means if you are a student or practitioner

It means the foundation you are learning from has been examined by someone with no incentive to be polite about it, and found to meet the standard. It means the theory behind Hypno-CBT® — the way it accounts for how self-talk works, how stories shape experience, how focused imagining produces genuine change — connects to the deepest and most carefully tested strands of CBT, not to a parallel tradition that happens to use similar language.

And it means, I hope, that you can study and practise with a degree of confidence in the intellectual grounding that many training programmes in this field cannot offer.