Ericksonian Hypnotherapy
A
personal Introduction
Melbourne,
Sydney, Auckland, Tahiti, Honolulu, LA, San Francisco,
Dayton, Philadelphia. 36 years old, wide eyed, bushy
tailed, and jet lagged. My first trip to USA. My first
International hypnosis conference. The second evening, the
lights dimmed; a talking head - a long list of hypnotic
communication forms, “indirect suggestion, double binds,
illusion of alternatives”, on and on .... All about this
Milton Erickson person I’d heard so much about, and was
surrounded in a purple mystery.
And suddenly, there he was. Looking benign and harmless
enough, but what hope did Monde or Nick, the two clients in
the demonstration, have against the slow, relentless,
obsessively attentive old man in purple pyjamas, sitting in
his wheelchair as a legacy of poliomyelitis in his youth. I
was fascinated, but the jet lag .... I opened my eyes as
the first reel came to and end, and feeling somewhat
irritated with myself for missing it, I was doubly
determined to see the second hour.
The lights dimmed again, the same talking head, another
list of yet more hypnotic forms of communication ... and
there he was again. This time Nick was experiencing the
full laser like attention he had previously been only a
witness to. I was fascinated, but that dammed jet lag again
... wasn’t there anything I could do? Again, I opened my
eyes to see everyone shuffling around, talking wisely about
their observations at the end of the second reel of the
film.
I should have arrived earlier, got over my jet lag, then I
would have been able to see and do justice to learning
something about this guru of 20th
Century hypnosis.
Next
morning, half way through a glass of orange juice, it
suddenly hit me. It wasn’t jet lag at all - it was HYPNOSIS
! ! And I thought I knew something about this topic. I’d
completed a 2 year training programme. I should have learnt
some things, but this was something from a different
planet, or was it from
this
planet ?
I was hooked.
Erickson’s spell had caught me, even from a film. It wasn’t
just any film - it was Herbert Lustig’s “The Artistry of
Milton H Erickson MD”. The tapes of that film continue to
enthral and delight.
This
was my introduction to Erickson, the therapist, and the
following year I was sitting at the master’s feet. I have
never been so frightened of anyone as I was of Erickson
that first day. I didn’t doubt for one moment his benign
intentions, but he was so direct, so penetrating, so open,
it was totally disarming for me and my human obsession
about looking like I knew some things, terrified that I
would be discovered to be the person I am.
I
was ushered into his sitting room on that Monday morning.
Lee was already there - he was visiting from Canada.
Erickson asked me what I wanted to learn, and when he heard
my reply he nodded silently. I said I wanted to learn about
the use of hypnosis for pain management. Nothing I’d heard
in Melbourne made sense to me. He asked Lee to show me what
had happened the previous day, and Lee obligingly began to
say that he was sitting in the same chair, listening,
getting increasingly comfortable , and ... ! I looked over
to see Lee’s head slumping forward as he went into
hypnosis. This was extremely disconcerting to a well
mannered Victorian doctor. Lee had gone into trance
remembering his experience of going into trance. This was
something I came to recognise as a signature of Erickson’s
work - his elegant utilisation of what was already
available within the client.
I
was confused and increasingly uncomfortable. My discomfort
increased as I could feel myself beginning to slip into
hypnosis, but I hadn’t been told to, given suggestions to,
even hints to, and yet it was happening. Eventually my
Scottish determination wore down and I closed my eyes and
surrendered to my experience with huge relief.
Erickson
then began a series of stories about this, about that, ...
something about a circus painting, about a sculptor and
driftwood, about rattlesnakes and Indians and respect,
about the uniqueness of an individual being like their
fingerprints, about learning, about unlearning, about
nothing, about everything.
As
I was attempting to make my own sense of all this my head
began to pull on my neck with the weight of a cannon ball,
my elbows were digging into my knees, I felt dizzy as if
any moment I might fall forward onto my face. After three
and a half hours of this I had learnt a lot about pain
management. But what exactly? When I asked him for an
explanation of what had happened, he stated concisely and
succinctly that “what we experience depends on how we
direct our attention.” Another signature of his work - an
ability to say something in one densely compact sentence,
or extend it for hours.
I
sat with him each day for the next 2 weeks; sometimes just
the 2 of us, sometimes with a client, sometimes other
students. Each day I would return to my motel room and make
some notes, and reflect. I was enthralled and bemused. I
now recognise this emotion as wonderment. I had no idea
what was happening, and I liked it.
When I returned home after 2 weeks, I was glowing. I felt
like a kid in a lolly shop. I was not to be silenced about
my experience, and I may have even lost some friends over
this. Certainly people would cross the road to avoid yet
another of my enthusiastic outbursts!
Another
2 weeks the following year and another week two years
later, just before he died. On our last day with him, he
asked my wife, Cherry, to push his wheelchair to a
particular spot in the yard, and when she asked him why, he
silently pointed to some mistletoe above, and she said
there was no way she could avoid giving him a kiss. There
is no doubt in my mind that he was a delightful rogue. He
enjoyed his life, and brought joy into the lives of many
who met him.
All
of that was long ago. How is this relevant now? In Los
Angeles in December, 1994 his widow, Elizabeth Erickson
spoke of his legacy, and invited students of his work to
return to his original writing as well as reading what many
have written about him. She stated that she felt it was
important to recognize that Erickson had a long career and
that he evolved and learnt as he went.
I
appreciated her comments, as a reminder of the lessons of
history as it unfolds, of the need to be inclusive of
differences rather than becoming tribal and to foster the
continuing evolving of this approach. One of his sons,
Allan, told me that he didn’t know what all the fuss was
about his father. He’d been doing that work for 50 years,
so he should be good at it. On the other hand I notice that
I can get more entrenched in my blindness which can become
deeper with the years rather than wiser.
There
was a storm in the Ericksonian camp several years ago about
his actions in his middle years, particularly with young
women as maybe inappropriate at best, and downright
chauvinist and manipulative at worst. There was talk about
his “dark side”.
I see Erickson as an explorer. He immersed himself in the
direct experience of living. He had his own journey to
learn to deal with his considerable physical disabilities -
dyslexia, colour blindness, absent rhythm sense on top of
his severe polio, and ever increasing pain. What explorer
hasn’t taken some wrong turns, gone down some wrong paths,
made some decisions which in retrospect seem terribly dumb
and stupid, but at the time of making them, how could the
future have been known.
It
is a pleasure for me to see his human frailties being
accepted as a part of the actions of an unusually
adventurous pioneer, but still a human being with human
limitations. Pioneers don’t have the map they bequeath to
us. They help to make the map, but of course, who wants to
see all the preliminary maps which were thrown away.
Ancient Sources
Somewhere
about 500 BC Heraclietis in Greece, Loa Tsu in China and
Buddha in India each spoke independently about the mystery
of existence, it’s flowing transitory nature, it’s
ineffable quality. Heraclietis wrote about the river as
always the same, always changing; life as always becoming
... . Loa Tsu wrote about there being no absolute reality,
only the external manifestations of the internal, eternal
mystery. Buddha taught about detachment as an escape from
suffering, and the benefit of avoiding the extremes of
fundamentalism to chose instead the middle way.
Balancing and perhaps reacting to these were Plato,
Socrates, Aristotle & also Confucius. The Greeks
searched for an absolute fixed metaphysical reality and
Confucius emphasised the need for hierarchical order.
Reason and control, with its inevitable fundamentalist
consequence became the order of the day, and for the last
2500 years this has been the general direction.
Contemporary Sources.
During
this century, there has been another cluster of thinkers -
Einstein in physics, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Austin &
Searle in the emerging philosophy of language &
Maturana in biology. Their work looks to me very like a
return to the time before rationalism took hold and heralds
the completion of a two and a half millennia phase in our
human history.
Since
Einstein and relativity, we can never now make a detached
observation without also including the opposite. His
question about whether the next station stops at this train
still tickles my brain in a pleasantly disturbing way.
These contemporary thinkers have removed us from the
falsely cozy position of being detached observers, and
placed us firmly back into the activity of language. Our
language is now seen as going beyond a mere description of
reality, to a tool we use knowingly or unwittingly to bring
our reality into existence, to bring it forth from the
“mara” or ground glass background of the void which is
full. By making distinctions in language, we are literally
creating our world.
Maturana, as a biologist, is impeccable and seamless in his
insistence that communication is concerned with
coordinating action with others, not transmitting
information; that language is concerned with a further
degree of coordinating such actions; and that emotions are
also primarily to do with actions - allowing or forbidding
certain groups of actions. He also states that
love
is the fundamental human social emotion.
This
contemporary return to the ancient way of understanding is
only a return for those who left it. The holistic way of
living which is intrinsic to the native cultures of Koori
and North American Indian is much more at home with
Einstein or Heraclitis than Newton or Aristotle. The
emerging interest in spirituality, getting beyond rigid
prejudices and the awful pull to fundamentalism, and the
practice of meditation can be seen as part of this return.
How is these relevant to the Ericksonian
approach?
In
an increasingly technical world, humans are searching out
the sacred, the timeless. In a time of escalating rate of
change, many are recognising the joy and wonder of dancing
with the uncertainty, riding the rapids, rather than
attempting to hold back the flood, and celebrating the
perennial human aspiration of relating with respect,
dignity and good-heartedness.
Erickson’s
work, and the direction of many who learnt from him, is
consistent with non linear, holistic, respecting,
generating, inviting, and including. He said that people
with grim problems could do without the added burden of
grim therapy. He seemed totally comfortable in expressing
opposite opinions within minutes of each other. He told me
that to think that there could be a single theory of human
behaviour which would adequately explain all situations for
all people of all ages and all races of both sexes for all
times was ridiculous. To my observing, he was again a
pioneer here, in the very ground of the interactions. It
may be that his pride in having Red Indian blood makes
sense here.
I
would characterise the essentials of the approach Erickson
used as a difference of
emphasis
from traditional approaches.
He invited his students to develop in themselves
a
passionate respect for individual differences and
the legitimacy of these differences
an attitude of positive expectation towards future
emphasising action rather than understanding causes from
the past
the assumption that the client needs to remember forgotten
skills or
learn new skills or
unlearn unhelpful skills
rather than being diagnosed and fixed
The issues in therapy are then towards
learning rather than correcting
creating a mood of lightness to facilitate the learning
a selfless emphasis in focusing on the client as the source
of change and
away from the significance and power of the therapist
an obsessive attention to language - what is said, not
said, what is done, not done by client and therapist
a willingness for the solution to appear at any moment for
no good reason.
Erickson said that a person can be walking down the street
doing nothing in particular, and a problem arrives
seemingly out of nowhere, so why couldn’t a solution arrive
in the same way? Why couldn’t the problem simply go back to
where it came from? I value this notion, and like the
results of keeping it handy.
To me, a major contribution Erickson made to our
relationship with hypnosis was his claim that hypnosis was
simply a variation of everyday experience. He stated that
hypnotic phenomena are an extension of commonplace
phenomena. Dissociation was then like daydreaming, time
distortion was a variation of “time flies when you’re
having fun”, hypnotic analgesia was seen as a development
of the anyone anytime occurrence of not noticing sensations
such as a watch on a wrist, glasses on a nose, feet on the
ground. This approach does much to demystify hypnosis, and
make it a more ordinarily relevant experience, which anyone
can have, simply by learning to extend experiences they
have already had, or may be having even now.
This is so different from the understanding which appears
to give power and control to the hypnotist, since it
restores power and control to where it can most effectively
be used - to the client.
A key question which guides the Ericksonian process is
“what’s missing?”, rather than “what’s wrong that needs
fixing?”. This shift in emphasis from pathology to
recalling or learning leads in a delightfully different and
more useful direction, as well as generating a mood of
lightness and openness to what is yet to unfold which will
be useful to the client.
Josephine
had experienced increasing difficulty signing her name in
her executive position. She had had weekly insight oriented
psychotherapy for 5 months which she stated had not helped.
She had focused on what was wrong that she couldn’t perform
such a mundane task, and was increasingly concerned about
her dilemma. She reported that she loved to walk along the
beach early in the morning and that what was missing for
her was an ability to sign her name without being
self-conscious.
She was an intensely focused person, looking intently at me
when I asked her questions, so as well as suggesting that
her intensity may be part of her fixation about the issue,
I asked her to focus on me, and then as she readily entered
hypnosis, she exhibited the characteristics of light trance
- relaxed facial muscles, altered breathing rate and depth,
slowing of the pulse, general immobility … I suggested that
she recall the pleasure of walking along the beach, and to
be aware in some unselfconscious way that her legs were
moving perfectly adequately without her needing to attend
to the length and height of each step. She was also able to
notice how naturally and effortlessly she was breathing,
and that as she increased her pace, her breathing
automatically increased correspondingly.
I asked her to recall some time when she had been able to
sign her name, and she reported that it was never a problem
at the bank. She had no explanation of this, and remained
rather puzzled. I suggested that she could pay attention to
the experience in the bank, so she could learn this and
have the event as a resource she could use at her
discretion in the same way her legs walked and her lungs
breathed. She was then asked to imagine signing her name
comfortably and confidently, as she had in the bank, but
this time at the office. She enjoyed this and was then
invited to come out of hypnosis. She reported feeling
relieved and satisfied and smiled as she wrote the check
and signed it.
A
35 year old woman was referred because she had been pulling
out her eyelashes [upper lids only] since a car accident 7
years previously in which there had been a laceration of
her lid resulting in some distortion of the growth of the
new eyelashes. She had begun to pull out these lashes and
now couldn’t stop. She said that she had always had
restless hands, and thought that there must be something
wrong with her personality since her hands had always been
restless.
I offered an alternative explanation that she just hadn’t
learnt how to have still hands, and since she requested
hypnosis, the induction was initiated by asking her to
concentrate on the sensations in her hands as she
discovered the ease of letting them rest as they were. The
session continued and she entered a medium trance with her
hands delightfully immobile throughout.
She was offered the suggestion that she was learning the
experience of having still hands, and that she would be
able to make her own use of this learning.
She expressed dismay and pleasure with her experience, and
was able to sit in the evenings and not even think about
pulling at her lashes.
Erickson has been dead for more than two decades, and even
though his ashes were spread over a mountain in Phoenix,
his recurrent invitation continues. He quoted one of his
sons as saying that he would always be grateful to his
grandfather who taught him that, sure there were great
times in the past, and of course we can make the most of
this moment, but the
best times,
they are still to come.
I continue to be grateful for Erickson’s example in living
what he taught - to have an attitude of gratitude to life
for life’s sake, not just the obvious benefits. He told me
personally that you never know what life will dish up to
you, so you take whatever comes, and you make the most of
it.
