HOW ERICKSONIAN THERAPY HAPPENS
( This account reflects the views and practice of keith bibby and is not intended to describe
the work of other practitioners. )
No matter how seemingly depressed or distressed or defeated by a
particular personal problem, every individual has a wide range of strategies that operate perfectly effectively in other contexts.
Often - within their own personal repertoire - people have all the resources which could solve an otherwise unyielding problem - if only these could be brought to bear. But often we have to learn different
( and easier ) ways of engaging with difficulties before this can happen.
Strategies for doing this are largely founded on original insights into his own condition, gained by Milton Erickson in his youth. He observed, one day, how his paralysed body, which he could not control by willpower, generated some spontaneous motion in the rocking chair in which he had been seated. Although he was incapable of the appropriate conscious movement, he found he was able to further amplify this motion - through imagining it.
Further experimentation led him to discover how - through similar imaginative strategies - he was able to induce movement into his fingers and his limbs and thus, over a period of some months, to rehabilitate his whole body.
He realised that in thinking about problems and trying to solve them in
commonly adopted ways, the mind may be overwhelmed with their seeming enormity and insoluble quality. We often defeat ourselves before we start by attending in the wrong way to the wrong things.
Our capacity to solve problems lies in our psychological flexibility -
and our ability to let go the problem and its limiting mind-state. This allows more flexible unconscious processes and a much broader
range of resources to be brought into play.
It was his capacity to be observant of and curious about his own
response, which had allowed him to discover what it was he was doing
unconsciously that caused the motion of the rocking chair.
Often we are too close to problems and too fixated in the desperate
pursuit of failed conscious strategies to notice the clues the
unconscious offers us about their solution.
All our processes are individual and distinctive. Despite the fact that we may call a problem by a certain name or label or give it a particular diagnosis, every individual does the problem in their own individual way. Therefore, solutions need to respect these individual qualities.
Careful appreciation of the individual's way of having the problem can identify where things are going wrong and indicate which individual resources need to be harnessed or enhanced - or even where new resources need to be created - for a solution to be achieved.
Carefully structured suggestion may be used to install such resources.
Clients may also be asked to do curious but harmless things which seemingly have nothing to do with the problem as they perceive or experience it. Some of these tasks may seem quite extraordinarily odd.
They will be designed to activate and access process from an entirely different direction - generating a new limitation-free context.
Skilful framing of the tasks allows the right resources to be brought unconsciously to bear without engaging the consciously - trying mind
set - which has previously failed.
The results are often so successful that the client can neither give any account of what they are doing differently, nor how they are doing it - but nonetheless they now succeed where previously they failed.
A perfect solution - which does happen - is one where the client cannot even remember having had the original problem !
Neither do clients have to experience formal ( ' heads down and eyes
shut ' ) hypnosis. A really skilful practitioner is able to observe and access constructive states in the client ' on the fly ' as these occur spontaneously in the course of their exchanges.
Proficient practitioners uses every part of the process - from the very first phone call - to assist the client. Practitioners need an excellent
command of language and a clarity of mind to enable them to be systematic in discovering the structure of the problem and to be very purposive and carefully focused in the way they frame suggestions.
Powerful though these methods are, there need be no concern that the Ericksonian therapist might be exercising control over your mind or making you do anything you don't want to.
Only solutions which are compatible with your own aims, wishes and process will take. Ericksonians are also sufficiently aware of the complexity and unpredictability of human process to gratefully confine attention to the tasks in hand - which are usually sufficiently challenging - even in the most apparently simple cases - to engage our minds completely.
Copyright keith bibby august 2007 >> Return
