Ericksonian Therapy - How It Works -
Ericksonian Principles In Practice
The art of success is to discover how things may be done easily.
Observations of himself and others convinced Milton Erickson that
our best efforts to change often fail because of the way we try. The very act of trying often activates powerful sub-conscious processes moving us away from easy states - evoking self-limiting beliefs and patterns of awareness.
The self - limiting states we generate may be detected in actions or feelings that seem disproportionate to the circumstances. These may be negative states like self-doubt or uncertainty, frustration, anger, fear or acute self-consciousness - or they may be overly positive states
and impulsive actions with no secure foundation.
These powerful self-limiting patterns result largely from many
subtle influences we absorb unconsciously from our earliest years
which have come to form the habitual expressions of how we are or think we should be.
Because these patterns were installed early - before we had the ability
or knowledge to challenge or disengage them, these have become part
of our core identity. They resist change even where such changes might help our general well-being.
Erickson realised that in order to transform such deep processes and to prevent our systems from engaging with the old internal tramlines that lead to failure............
something out - of - the - ordinary is required.
Erickson's genius was to notice how, in ordinary day-to-day life, some people make improbable recoveries from debilitating physical conditions. Others seem to have other kinds of magic touch - seeming more at ease or naturally wiser, apparently able to come up with the inventive thought or gesture - or say just the right thing to release other people or themselves from difficult places.
An acute observer, he connected these outcomes with barely noticeable behaviours and language structures, whose deeper meaning was clearly not evident to most people - often not even the speakers themselves.
He also observed that, even with some intractable physical conditions, profoundly beneficial responses seemed most likely to occur when such processes were at work - even though people had no idea that their problem was being addressed at all !
He realised that if understood and activated in the right way, such profound changes could be achieved deliberately under the most unlikely of circumstances.
The highly original indirect method was born !!!
As a hospital intern and in later experimentation and research in his
medical and psychiatric work, his insatiable curiosity led him to identify a variety of effective formal and informal hypnotic strategies and linguistic devices. Some are simple, some extremely complex - operating at many levels of awareness to enable constructive suggestion to pass to deep levels - bypassing any critical filtering or resistance -
and freely engaging the unconscious energies of the system.
In this way, he discovered how, by temporarily uncoupling conscious
effort, unconscious reorganisation and change can occur, in both mental and physical processes.
Thus the person can acquire a much easier natural function in place
of their previous laboured and deficient process. Thus we can achieve, relatively effortlessly, what has resisted all previous conscious efforts and treatments.
The principle is simple, elegant and profound :-
create the unconscious conditions for change
- it then follows naturally !
He demonstrated through thousands of cases, many apparently insoluble, that respectful utilisation of such processes achieves significant and lasting changes with great economy of effort.
He published hundreds of books and papers, inspiring a world-wide
movement which has developed brief, thorough, effective therapies for many distressing medical, psychological and personal adjustment problems.
His singular achievement was to transform little understood and even worse exploited hypnotic processes from a trivial means of public entertainment into a range of powerful instruments which, in alliance with other therapeutic skills, and in the hands of a properly qualified therapist, can confer lasting benefits on the experience of living.
( See - My Voice Will Go With You. Teaching tales of Milton H Erickson. Authors Milton H. Erickson & Sidney Rosen - a brief but fascinating insight into his extraordinary mind and methods.)
Copyright keith bibby august 2007 >> Return
