Hypnotic Language in the Consulting Room

I first learned my permissive approach watching Milton Erickson’s work in the late 1970s, particularly the way Erickson used hypnosis and challenged standard ideas about hypnotic techniques and affects. Many considered hypnosis a rigid procedure, which could be effective only if certain exacting conditions were met: a person had to be physically and mentally relaxed to go into a trance; once in a trance, the person was supposed to be unaware of his or her surroundings except for the hypnotist’s voice. So rigid were the requirements for succeeding at being hypnotized that many people believed they didn’t have the ability to “go under” the hypnotist’s spell.

Erickson’s view was different. For him, trance was more of a not-doing than a doing. He understood that the hypnotist had to take the pressure off people, and make them realize that they didn’t have to experience specific mental and physical stages in a particular order to go into trance. He invited people to just allow their own experiences to happen as they happened, without having to force anything. He used language that neutralized the mind’s tendency to break experience down into dualistic opposites—this or that, right or wrong, correct or incorrect.

In a sense, he gave his clients permission to experience simultaneously or in rapid succession contradictory emotions and states of mind and body, emphasizing that no reaction excluded any other, and that all were “right.” From Erickson, I learned to make statements like: “You can listen to and hear everything I say and you don’t have to. You may remember what I say and you may not. You don’t have to believe anything about this.”

Here was a way to break up unconscious logjams; permissions enabled clients to experience two seemingly contradictory states simultaneously. The structure of hypnotic language freed people from the tyranny of having to choose, and choose correctly, what to feel and how to proceed. I began to appreciate the extraordinary power of permission, with or without hypnosis, particularly with my most challenging cases.

I began focusing on how to most productively include the good, the bad, the ugly, and the in-between of my clients’ experience to help them expand their sense of possibilities in life. In my training workshops, I began emphasizing the importance of not excluding those thoughts and feelings that didn’t look like solutions to anything. As valuable as it is to help people focus on solving their problems, it’s equally important to validate people’s experiences, however negative. The essence of good therapy is to be able to descend with people into their hell and at the same time keep one foot in the land of hope and possibility. I once heard a radio interview about research conducted with people who’d survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The only common factor among them seemed to be that on the way down each of them had had more or less the same thought: Hmmm. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

As therapists, we must recognize the complexity and ambivalence at the core of human experience. Inevitably our therapy theories invite us to oversimplify, and solution-focused therapists aren’t the only ones guilty of that: the client’s problem is “cathected introjects”; she needs to “express her feelings”; he needs to “take responsibility for his life”; clients have to “reexperience their abuse to heal from it.” Whatever ideas we therapists get are going to be helpful in some situations with some clients, but they necessarily diminish and impoverish our clients’ inner realities. Recognizing this, we need to remind ourselves that whatever conclusions we come to about our clients, it’s always more complicated than that.

The Power of Permission

People run into problems when their lives are dictated by rigid beliefs that make the stories they’re living out too restrictive. One common set of beliefs is about what you must or should do. For example: “I must always be perfect,” or “I should always smile and be happy,” or “Females should take care of others’ needs.” Another common set of beliefs is about what you can’t or shouldn’t do: “I can’t be angry,” or “Big boys don’t cry.”

Permission counters these commands and prohibitions. The therapist who offers permission goes beyond accepting clients as they are and moves into encouraging them to expand their life stories and their sense of themselves. In effect, the therapist who offers permission is saying, “There’s more to you than this story you’ve lived out up to this point.” Permissions can introduce choice and possibilities into circumstances that have been limited by necessity and impossibility.

Practicing What We Preach

If the approach I’ve been laying out here was purely a matter of logic, theory, and better clinical outcomes, its principles would be more widely demonstrated in therapists’ consulting rooms. But embracing clients’ multiple realities inevitably leads therapists to face emotional issues in their own lives, issues that make an inclusive approach much more than a merely intellectual exercise.

Being a therapist means taking the time to get all the pieces of people’s reality, spoken and unspoken. At the most basic level, we must discover how to perform the balancing act of simultaneously giving up the need to see clients change while holding open the possibility of change. This attitude requires us to face our own fears (of lawsuits, suicide, failure) and be still with the client’s pain, immobility, glaring absence of change, and , at the same time, we must be able to see the “and”—that something more, unrecognized and unspoken, happening beneath the dead calm of an apparently inert sea.

This blog is excerpted from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Read the full article here. >>

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