by Mark R. Davis
First published 4th April 2026
I want to tell this story accurately, because it hasn’t been told properly anywhere — including on our own website. That’s partly my fault. I’ve been too busy building the thing to stop and document how it came to be. But the story matters, and not just for the record. It matters because Hypno-CBT® is now a genuinely distinct model of integrative psychotherapy, with its own theoretical architecture and clinical methods, and the people who train in and practise that model deserve to know where it came from and who is responsible for it.
So here it is.
The Name: 2005–2008
The trademark Hypno-CBT® was registered in 2005 by The UK College of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, then owned and directed by Donald Robertson. The first public web page using the name appeared on ukhypnosis.com in June 2006. At that point Hypno-CBT® was framed primarily as a philosophically-grounded system — Robertson’s particular interest was in the connections between Stoic philosophy and cognitive therapy, and the early model reflected that.
What is important to understand about those early years is that the Hypno-CBT® name existed on the website and in the trademark, but not in the actual training materials. The College’s course manuals — the Certificate, Advanced Certificate, and Diploma — were titled and authored as Cognitive-Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) throughout Robertson’s tenure. They were his intellectual property, carrying his name and copyright. They were rigorous and well-built. But they were CBH manuals, not Hypno-CBT® manuals. The brand and the curriculum were not the same thing.
I trained with Donald Robertson at the College in 2006–2007. It was an excellent training — evidence-based, intellectually serious, unlike anything else available in the field at the time. Donald had built something genuinely solid.
But two things happened during that training that would define everything that followed.
The first was Edmund Jacobson. His Progressive Muscle Relaxation — which appeared in Robertson’s Stage 2 curriculum — produced something I recognised immediately from twenty-five years of yoga and meditation practice: stillness. Not the stillness arrived at through years of concentrated practice, but stillness reached quickly, reliably, through the body. Relax the jaw. Relax the voice into silence. Thinking stops. In Jacobson’s deepest states of relaxation, even the startle reflex disappears. No knee jerk. No pain reflex. The organism is simply present, prior to all reaction. Yoga philosophy describes the goal of practice as the stilling of the modifications of the mind. Jacobson showed that you can arrive at the same place from below, through the muscles, in a single session. I recognised where it led because I had been there before, by a different route.
The second was Andrew Salter. His 1949 book Conditioned Reflex Therapy — also in the Stage 2 curriculum — was something else entirely. Cited as the book “that blazed the trail that become CBT”, Salter argued that most psychological suffering is the result of inhibition: the learned suppression of natural emotional expression, spontaneity, and aliveness. Therapy’s primary task is disinhibition — not adding new techniques to an already-constricted system, but freeing the natural response that inhibition has blocked.
I had spent years in contemplative traditions that proposed, in theory, that the self is fundamentally free and luminous — but whose practice often amounted to progressive control, progressive suppression, progressive constraint, with liberation promised at some distant future point. Salter answered the question I had been sitting with. You don’t get to freedom through more control. You get there by learning to trust the spontaneous response — to act from feeling rather than from the edited, managed version of feeling that inhibition produces. You learn to drive properly, with the accelerator and the brake doing their separate jobs cleanly, instead of riding both simultaneously while the engine fights itself.
That is not a technique. That is a therapeutic philosophy. And it is fundamentally at odds with a model that treats cognition as the primary site of intervention.
I remember sitting with these two insights — Jacobson’s stillness and Salter’s liberation — and thinking: this is what the model needs to be built on. Not thought management. Physiological release and expressive freedom. Everything else follows from those.
In March 2007, while still a student and newly-qualified therapist, I emailed Donald suggesting he register the hypno-cbt.com and related domains. I had already started using Hypno-CBT as the identity for my own practice. By April 2007 I had business cards printed. By September 2007 I was proposing what would eventually become the Register for Evidence-Based Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy — a professional register built around the Hypno-CBT® standard.
Also in 2008, drawing on Jacobson’s physiological principles, Salter’s emphasis on doing less and releasing rather than controlling, and breathing techniques from the course, I developed Davis Tension Release Breathing (D-TRB). The method combined respiratory relief breathing with body-awareness and tension release in a sequence designed to bring about rapid, deep physiological relaxation and — crucially — to orient the client toward their own felt sense of simply being, prior to doing. The closing instruction of the D-TRB script points directly at this: “Do less… do less… do nothing… rest in being… rest in the feeling of being you when you are doing nothing.” That instruction is not a relaxation suggestion. It is a clinical gesture toward something that the contemplative traditions call the ground of being — and that ACT would later call self-as-context — accessed through the body rather than through meditation or cognitive technique.
Donald wrote his one formal defining article on Hypno-CBT® in 2008. It was published on the College website in 2009. After that, his attention moved elsewhere — to Stoicism, to James Braid scholarship, to the CBH textbook, The Practice of Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Hypnosis, he was writing. In his own work he returned consistently to the term “cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy.” By 2012, his platform ukcognitive.com carried no mention of Hypno-CBT® at all, and neither did his book.
The Handover: 2008–2013
I joined the College formally as Vice-Principal in 2008. Donald and I co-founded the Register for Evidence-Based Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy (REBHP) that same year. From that point I began developing new curriculum materials and took on more of the teaching and day-to-day running of the College.
By 2012 Donald was preparing to emigrate to Canada. He asked if I wanted to take over the College. I said yes.
The formal transfer of The UK College of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy and the Hypno-CBT® trademark to MindEase Limited — the company I had founded with my wife Fabienne — completed in 2013.
I want to be honest about what I inherited. Robertson’s CBH manuals — his copyright, his authorship — were in use at the point of transfer. They were titled and structured as CBH. They were rigorous and substantive. The Hypno-CBT® name was on the trademark and the website; it was not in the curriculum. The model that existed at transfer was Robertson’s model with my name on the door.
The work ahead was the interesting part. I have always been drawn to the intellectual rockface, where new thought is formed: where one breaks new ground, makes fresh connections, joins things up, and discovers the underlying principles that can hold a model together.
Building the Model: 2013 onwards
I reviewed Robertson’s full corpus of manuals — all three stages, all versions — made curatorial judgments about what to keep, what to develop, and what to replace entirely, and produced my own first versions of the manuals in 2013 and 2014. Those first Davis-era manuals were already titled and branded as Hypno-CBT®, already under Mindease Limited copyright, already different in emphasis and content from what had come before. They were not a finished product. They were a starting point. New materials arrived in successive iterations through 2015, 2016, 2021, and 2023.
The direction of development was determined by the two insights I had carried since 2007.
On the body: Jacobson and Salter, present in Robertson’s Stage 2 curriculum but progressively sidelined as his focus shifted toward CBT and Stoicism, were moved to the centre. Not preserved as historical curiosities but substantially deepened. The Jacobson section of the current Stage 2 manual runs to over ten pages of primary source material, theoretical analysis, and clinical implication. Salter receives his own module: Conditioned Reflex Therapy, his six excitatory exercises, their clinical application, and his fundamental claim that inhibition — not distorted cognition — is the primary mechanism of psychological suffering. `Moreover his idea, presented in the book, The Conditioning Therapies, that “inhibition of the orienting reflex is the root cause of neurosis” – became formative in my development of Overcoming Self-Consciousness and not experiencing oneself as an object for others.
The deepest reorientation in the model is the Salter claim, fully understood: the problem is not how you think but how you hold your body, and the holding is what generates the thinking. Fix the holding — release the chronic inhibition — and the cognitive content changes as a consequence, not as a cause. This is a different therapeutic anthropology from Robertson’s CBH, which was built on the premise that changing cognition drives emotional and behavioural change.
(Moreover there was clearly a link between tension and believability of thoughts – something that Tom Borkovec had nodded towards but never really developed. However there was a clear relationship between physical tension and psychological inflexibility which Borkovec had noted.
On the self: I came to Robertson’s CBH carrying twenty-five years of yoga and meditation practice, years in ashrams in India and the United States, and a deep engagement with the Indian philosophical understanding that the self is fundamentally free, luminous, and prior to all the content it appears to contain. The problem was always: how do you integrate that understanding with a rigorous CBT-based clinical model? Robertson’s CBH had no framework for it.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provided the bridge. Steven Hayes’s Self-as-Context — the non-conceptual, open sense of self as the perspective from which experience is observed, rather than the content of that experience — was recognisable – and clearly drew from Buddhist ideas. There's also no doubt that in some ways CBT has connections with Buddhist ideas too. It was also incomplete from where I stood: ACT’s self-as-context is primarily a cognitive defusion move, a useful platform, but not warm, not alive, not the luminous ground that contemplative experience points to. What it gave me was a clinically respectable Western psychological language for something I had been experiencing and teaching around for decades. Once that foothold existed, the integration became possible.
D-TRB (Davis Tension Release Breathing) was already oriented toward this territory since 2008. The Core Self practice — the simple, wordless, positively-charged “I am” that underlies all the doing and narrating — became an explicit and central element of the model: not ACT’s cool, slightly detached observer, but something warmer, more substantial, more akin to what the Vedantic traditions call sat-chit-ananda — being, awareness, and delight — expressed as a clinical practice accessible in a single session.
By 2015, when the Mindease Limited copyright appears explicitly on the clinical tools — the Hypno-CBT® Thought Form, the Identify Negative Cognitions protocol, the Overcoming Self-Consciousness Script, the full Armamentarium of 22 named techniques — the rebuild was substantially documented. By October 2016, when the Hypno-CBT® Toolbox was published, the model had its first comprehensive public documentation as a distinct methodology.
The International Years: 2015–2019
In August 2015 I received an invitation that confirmed the model was ready for a larger stage. I was asked to present at the 9th Annual Chinese Psychology Conference and Applied Psychology Summit in Beijing — alongside Dr Assen Alladin and Professor E. Thomas Dowd, who can fairly be called the founders of the field of Cognitive Hypnotherapy internationally. The conference drew approximately 1,500 psychologists from across China and Taiwan. My subforum presentation was explicitly titled and branded as Hypno-CBT®. I stayed on to deliver a three-day workshop under the same name — the first international delivery of the model outside the UK.
I returned to China in 2016 to deliver a full 14-day Diploma programme, again under the Hypno-CBT® brand.
In 2019 the Chinese Psychological Society formally certified the Hypno-CBT® Diploma — the first private psychotherapy training programme to receive CPS certification. That same year, PhD researchers began approaching the College for permission to cite the Hypno-CBT® Toolbox as a reference work in their dissertations.
I had written in my introduction to the new edition of Salter’s Conditioned Reflex Therapy that his ideas “are considered a return to Lao Tzu’s naturalism and emphasis on being at one with oneself and nature” by Chinese practitioners. That response was not incidental. It pointed at something the model had been oriented toward from the beginning.
Why Hypno-CBT® Is Trademarked
Some people are uneasy about trademarked therapy names, and rightly so. In psychotherapy there is always a risk that branding becomes hype: a way of making something sound more novel, proprietary, or inflated than it really is. Don Meichenbaum has himself warned against that tendency. So it is worth being clear about why Hypno-CBT® is trademarked.
The purpose is not to claim ownership over every idea that contributes to the model. Hypno-CBT® draws on many sources: hypnosis research, CBT, ACT, relaxation training, Salter, Jacobson, predictive processing, contemplative traditions, and more. Nor is the purpose to suggest that a trademark creates scientific legitimacy. It does not.
The purpose is simpler and more practical. A trademark protects the connection between a name and a specific body of work: a developed model, a defined training, a set of clinical methods, and the institution responsible for teaching and maintaining standards. In the age of the internet, social media, and now AI systems that scrape, remix, summarise, and misattribute material at scale, names easily become detached from their actual source. Trademark helps prevent that drift. It helps preserve continuity between the name, the model, and the standards behind it.
That matters particularly in this case because “cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy” is a broad field description (and hypnotherapy even broader!), whereas Hypno-CBT® refers to a specific model that has been developed, taught, documented, and refined over many years.
The public record is straightforward. The Hypno-CBT® wordmark was registered in 2005 under Donald Robertson, transferred to MindEase Limited in 2013, lapsed in 2015 during a period of rapid College development, and was re-registered by me in 2017. It was registered in the United States in 2021. Because some jurisdictions considered the wordmark descriptive, a distinct logomark was developed and accepted for UK registration in 2026.
I would not have chosen the lapse, but the larger point remains: the ongoing development, use, maintenance, and protection of Hypno-CBT® have been carried forward by MindEase Limited and by me since 2013. The significance of the name rests not only on registration, but on sustained use, development, and accountability.
Where We Are Now
Hypno-CBT® is a registered trademark of MindEase Limited, held since 2013 and actively maintained. The wordmark is registered in the UK and the United States, and the Hypno-CBT® logo is now also registered as a trademark in the UK.
The model is currently taught exclusively through The UK College of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, which is now transitioning to The UK College of Hypno-CBT®. To date, 992 practitioners have qualified through our Diploma training in cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy at Level 4 or Level 5, and we expect to pass the milestone of 1,000 this month. The training has reached more than 3,000 students across over 20 countries through UK delivery, international teaching, LiveStream Webcast, and online formats.
Later this year we plan to launch a public Hypno-CBT® practitioner directory, making it easier for members of the public to find therapists trained in the model and giving the approach a clearer professional presence.
A formal academic publication programme is also underway, with the aim of establishing Hypno-CBT® as a recognised integrative psychotherapy model in the research literature. Alongside that, we expect to publish, later in 2026, a formal pathway towards becoming an Accredited Hypno-CBT® Psychotherapist.
Hypno-CBT® is not a static system. Its foundations are established, but the model continues to grow. One current area of development is the integration of predictive processing, which provides a contemporary explanatory framework for themes that have long been present in the training, including competing implicit learnings, competing response patterns, and the updating of older patterns through new experience.
Acknowledging the Lineage
Donald Robertson made a real and lasting contribution to the field of cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy. His CBH curriculum was rigorous and well-built. His 2013 book remains a genuine resource. I trained with him and I learned from him. I am also the published introducer of the new edition of Andrew Salter’s Conditioned Reflex Therapy, the book that, in Robertson’s Stage 2 curriculum, changed everything for me. That lineage is worth acknowledging.
Setting the Record Straight
But Hypno-CBT® as it exists today, the model, the methods, the theoretical architecture, the clinical tools, the international programme, and the research trajectory, is something I built. The name existed before I arrived. The vision of what it could become, and the years of work that turned that possibility into a developed model, are mine.
That said, no living model develops through one person alone. Hypno-CBT® is now being taught, tested, refined, and extended through the work of an exceptional wider community: our trainers, tutors, supervisors, staff team, and Senior Advisory Board, all of whom help to carry the standard forward in practice, teaching, discussion, and development. It is also being shaped by the growing community of therapists trained in the model, whose clinical work, feedback, questions, and applications continue to reveal where the model is strongest and where it can develop further.
So this is not a claim to solitary genius, nor an attempt to erase the genuine contributions of others. It is a claim about authorship, stewardship, and historical accuracy. The current model of Hypno-CBT® did not simply appear, and it did not remain what it once was. It was built, developed, and carried forward, first by me, and now by a wider professional community that is helping to teach, deepen, and extend it.
I am writing this down because it needs to be written down, not out of pride, but out of accuracy. The record should reflect what actually happened.
Director and Lead Trainer, The UK College of Hypno-CBT®
Founder and Developer, Hypno-CBT®
Published Introducer, Conditioned Reflex Therapy (Andrew Salter, new edition)
April 2026