Change your mind

• Ericksonian Therapy and NLP by kendavis@erols.com, 9/3/97
  • Specifying Interventions by Stephen Lankton, 10/4/97
    • How did Erickson choose interventions? by Ken Davis, 10/24/97
      
      

I think that my wife, Carol, and I have written the most comprehensive and replicate-able account of Erickson’s approach over all. Yet, it is not the techniques that are the crux of the matter, in our opinion. It is, instead, the manner in which one experiences and conceptualizes people and change that makes the difference. When you engage with the client and hold a certain epistemology, if you will, the interventions that seem so terrific are “all around you” and there is hardly a way to not “do them.” But, ironically, you are not “doing them.” Take paradoxical intervention as an example. In a case published in volume 6 of the Monographs, I work with a client who had extremely violence in her childhood (sexual and physical – I believe she saw her brother killed, in fact). Her way of operating in the world was to be highly dependent and highly self-critical. Now, in the trance work she was able to stay safe and face a large group and make contact in ways she always would have avoided. Were I to have suggested that she take the learning of that session’s success into her daily life two things would have occurred. First, she would have tried very very very hard to do it (dependency on my suggestion) and then she would have tried just as hard to criticize herself for not doing it well enough (probably). To help her avoid self-criticism and anxiety I asked that she not consider taking this success into her real life outside the session – that she let it be an isolate experiment that she would recall. I added that she might get a great idea that she would not be able to shake. So, my point is, this would be analyzed as a clever paradoxical intervention: do not try to improve like this out side the session. We all hoped she would take the therapy success and learn it and do it, etc. Right? So, was it created from my thoughts that I would use paradoxical intervention? Did this come from my cognitive analysis? Did I think it over that way? Not at all. I was “inside her world view” as far as I could be and from where she sat, as I identified with her, the learning we were having was enough, the thought of contaminating it with worries about how to do it later was too much, the idea that there was so much more to accomplish, etc., all of that and more, ~ dictated ~ to me that I advise as I did. Looking back we can analyze it as paradoxical…but the understanding of people and change made the intervention happen and not the other way around. I believe it was most often this way for Erickson. Kind of a long answer…I hope it helped shed some light.

No Replies