Tao of Psychology Part 6: Erickson Revisited

Surprise! More Milton Erickson :P. In all seriousness, though, in my first article on Erickson, I primarily covered the general character of his therapy and methods. I didn't, however, say much about trance or hypnosis, what those are, how they work and what you can do with them. While I won't be giving any instructions on how to actually induce a trance (ok I lied, sort of), I will be describing what you can do with one, how that relates to what I've been discussing, and some of the latest findings in neuroscience and how that relates to trance.

What is Hypnosis?

While the word 'hypnosis' might bring up images of swinging watches, 'hypnotic gazes' and the like, hypnosis can easily be defined as any communication which causes a change in thinking in another person. Advertisement is hypnosis, teaching is hypnosis, negotiation is hypnosis, even social situations are hypnosis. All of our mental problems can be ascribed to hypnosis, and any successful treatment is also hypnosis.

More specifically, hypnosis affects people on an 'unconscious' level, where responses seem 'automatic', and not voluntary or controlled. "Un-conscious" literally refers to anything that isn't conscious. When you walk down the street, you don't think "ok now left foot go there, now right foot go there, now left foot.." and so on. You just walk, and your unconscious does all the rest. Your unconscious regulates your breathing and immune response, it filters your experience and it performs all the skills you've mastered and no longer need to think about. It also has the reigns on all of those latent mental abilities that you always hear about how we don't use them.

 

Characteristics of Trance

 You can't really talk about 'hypnosis' without also talking about 'trance', although like hypnosis there's a lot of superstition surrounding the phenomenon. Really a trance is just a mental context. When you go to work, you probably put yourself into a 'work trance'. When you 'fly into a rage', you're invoking an 'angry trance'. People who are good at performing or playing music will put themselves into a 'performance trance'. As you might guess, we're in some sort of trance or another all the time.

However, in most of these trances, 'consciousness' is in the foreground; reacting, watching and making the usual fuss. In a 'hypnotic trance', the unconscious is brought to the foreground, which is what makes this sort of trance different and special. It is not, as many hypnotists do their best to convey, a state of 'increased suggestibility'. You do not become a mindless slave or automaton. Rather, you gain more direct access to your more subtle inner machinations, to your imaginative abilities, to your autonomic functions, and to many other abilities that you probably didn't know you had.

There are certain profound differences in awareness that characterize a "trance" as opposed to the normal "waking state". Awareness of 'external reality' is essentially traded for 'internal reality', leading to what is called "rapport", where the person ignores and/or gives no significance to external reality objects. Instead, ideas are given reality, and additionally examined very closely to relevance to the subject as a person. While a person in a trance is very receptive to ideas, they will reject or defeat any ideas which they find objectionable or harmful. It is this very engaged ideation which allows access to various physiological and intellectual capacities. Also, as a result of a limited awareness of reality contexts, a person in a trance may fail to find amusement in things which they normally would in the waking state (like practical jokes).

Outwardly, there are observable differences between someone in a 'hypnotic trance' and someone who is 'normally awake'. Probably the most obvious and profound indicator is that their pupils dilate like satellite dishes. It's almost impossible to miss. They also tend to relax their muscles and take on a sort of spaced-out or stuporous look. Their movements take on a strange rigidity (catelepsy), their attitude becomes more child-like, they lose awareness of most things in reality unless you specifically point them out, and they become very literal in the way they interpret what is said to them (due to the literal interpretation of ideas). Check out the video links at the end of the first Erickson article for examples.

Light vs Deep Trance

 Most hypnotists seem to recognize that there are 'light' and 'deep' trances, and some even add in a 'medium' category, although for reasons I'll explain I don't consider that distinct. Basically, in a 'light' trance, the conscious mind is still 'awake', and can even participate in eliciting and experiencing hypnotic phenomena. In a light trance, you're generally limited to associative phenomena like positive hallucination, although you can also elicit dissociative phenomena in a localized way. For example, you could develop amnesia for your name in a light trance, but if you developed amnesia for the entire experience the trance would automatically 'go deep'. It's really a sliding scale, with fine variation in how far you've 'drifted off', but at some point you really 'zone out', which is called 'deep trance'.

In 'deep' trance, your consciousness has either gone away, or to sleep, or is simply in a state where it is so comfortable that you just don't care about anything. You don't care enough to try to move, or to speak, or to pay attention to anything in reality. In a 'deep' trance, it's possible to elicit all of the associative phenomena with profound lucidity, and to elicit all of the dissociative phenomena like negative hallucination, amnesia and anesthesia in a global way.

Hypnotic Phenomena

There are a number of specific phenomena associated with trance as they are easily identified as unusual and are easy to elicit consistently. There are also many more than I could list, some profound and some subtle, which cover a wide range of experiences and capabilities above and beyond what is well studied. I'll try to give some examples of both to give you a pretty decent overview and an inkling at what sorts of things are possible with hypnotic phenomena.

Some basic phenomena:

• Ideomotor activity (and automatic writing)
• Positive hallucination (experiencing something that isn't there in any of the senses)
• Negative hallucination (not experiencing something that is there)
• Anesthesia/analgesia
• Hyperesthesia (amplification of senses)
• Amnesia
• Hypermnesia (extreme recall)
• Time distortion (time seems faster or slower than what the clock says, sometimes extremely so)
• Control of breathing, heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, blood flow (to specific areas, has even been used to reduce bleeding during surgery) and immune response (amongst other things)

Erickson also often used hypnosis to awaken people's 'intuition'. He took the position that the unconscious could be aware of more things and process them faster than consciousness can (modern science agrees, more below). He used this to help people improve their performance in sports, to make creative leaps, and went into a trance himself to improve his awareness of his client's state and to allow himself to instantly respond to whatever they did during therapy.

To give a firsthand account of something similar, back in my "pickup" days, I had the opportunity to see someone who was 'in state'. I decided in the moment to see if I couldn't go into a trance to 'copy' that state, and so I defocused my eyes and watched him for a moment; and as he moved and interacted I could see sort of 'swirls' occurring around his elbows and other joints, and soon I felt a strange new feeling arising from my center. This expanded like a flame, and then when I went to walk away it didn't even feel like my body. I moved like he did, almost exactly, and at his pace (which I had to slow down). Later I was making small talk with some customers and it didn't even sound like me (although it wasn't like him either). I was more confident, easygoing and personable than I have ever been; normally I hate making small talk at all.

Of course, that experience didn't last, but it was astounding how I was able to 'absorb' so completely what someone else felt and how they moved. Especially when it was something so alien to my own experience.

There is another case of Erickson's which I think is illustrative. He once had a blind woman come to him because she thought hypnosis might help her see. Having no sense of sight, it was difficult to distract her and limited the kinds of hypnotic phenomena he could elicit. After much effort, he finally managed to get her to manifest arm levitation, and left her only with the suggestion that she would be surprised. Later, she found that she could walk and move easily and smoothly like a sighted person. Being blind all her life, she had built up her senses of hearing and touch over her lifetime which she was able to synthesize so that she could move gracefully without thinking about it.

Posthypnotic Suggestion

By linking a hypnotic suggestion either to a class of experiences or to a future time, it effectively becomes a posthypnotic suggestion. When the trigger for the suggestion is activated, the person goes into a 'posthypnotic trance', during which time they carry out the suggestion. This may persist until the suggestion is fully carried out, or it may only last a moment and then the person wakes up with residual hypnotic phenomena.

Hypnotic Sophistication

To Erickson, unless you intended to purposefully deceive him (and probably even then), he considered you a good subject as a matter of fact. However, he often spoke of a distinction between subjects in terms of "sophistication", which I did not understand for a long time.

In order for a person to carry out a suggestion such as "stay in trance, but act as if you were awake", or "you have an interesting experience, and learn important things", they must first be able to manifest basic hypnotic phenomena such as ideomotor activity and hallucination. The more abstract and complex the suggestion, the more sophisticated the subject must be in order to carry it out.

Autohypnosis

Many of Erickson's first experiences with trance were autohypnotic. You can learn autohypnosis through a posthypnotic suggestion, and/or you can also learn to do it in a 'naturalistic' way which Erickson described. His method was simple: Gather, in your mind, all of the impressions which are relevant to what you want your unconscious to do, focus on them clearly in consciousness, and then set them in the back of your mind for safe keeping, with the knowledge that your unconscious will respond when it has come up with a solution. It may respond like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, or intuitively without you noticing that something has changed, or perhaps in a dream, but you won't know until it does. Of course, sophistication helps, but it isn't necessary to get a good response.

Hypnosis & Neuroscience

While modern neuroscience has found out virtually nothing about trance itself, or hypnosis in general, it has found some fascinating things about representation and memory which are linked to trance phenomena.

It was found that for the primary senses (VAKOG) each could be trained so that you can remember and name more details of things you've seen. Hypnotic games with hallucination and hyperesthesia can achieve the same thing without having to do 'flash card' type work. Nikola Tesla, for example, gained his engineering skill because as a child, he was in such boring and captive circumstances that he found himself drifting off to daydream worlds regularly. Later, when he learned engineering, he figured that because he already had such imaginary prowess that simulating engineering in his head would be easy. Turned out he was right.

They've also found that reaction time can be reduced, regardless of age. This can be trained through martial arts practice, or ironically through first person shooter games like Halo(tm). Posthypnotic suggestions have also been used to aid in improving reaction times.

Previously I mentioned how memory champs use the method of loci to memorize obscenely large bits of information (like 18,000+ digits of pi). The method of loci is a combination of visual representation and anchoring, both skills which can be practiced and improved through hypnosis.

Other experiments have used people as living computers. They showed some subjects pictures of helicopter pads and had them become familiar with what one looked like on a satellite photo. They then hooked the subjects up to an EEG and rapidly flashed many satellite photos in front of them while measuring the output. They found that even though the person wouldn't have any conscious awareness of it, whenever they saw a helicopter pad in a photo their brain would register an 'aha' response, telling the computer to search that frame to find a pad. The photos were cycled fast enough that they could barely see anything at all.

Closing Thoughts

Hypnosis not only offers the possibility of directly teaching the fundamental skills and states needed for inner work, but also the possibility of awakening the latent potential of the human intellect and human action.  It can be used to bypass and break up rigid conscious states, and to achieve rapid change and growth. It's faster and more powerful than meditation, and I almost consider it to be a way of life. Ultimately, it's something you'll have to experience for yourself.

Links

• "What Every Body is Saying" by Joe Navarro 
• "Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expressions" by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesan
• The Dog Whisperer: The Complete First Season
  (Humans act more like dogs than you think)
• Uncommon Knowledge

Tao of Psychology Part 1: Milton Erickson

 Update 11/17/2012: Added a quote and some video links.
11/18/2012: Added some pdf links!

When I first took an interest in psychology, most of what I came across was very typical of the mainstream. Label people with these diseases, categorize them as this or that "personality" and work with them to establish "healthy self-esteem" or whatever criterion a particular school might consider desirable. Failing that, there's at least one drug for every complaint a psychiatrist might make about a patient. All of that was interesting in an intellectual, scientific sort of way (although in retrospect I wouldn't call any modern psychological research "science") but in practical terms none of the popular therapies really have anything (or at least not much) to offer. They spend all their time analyzing their clients and telling them how they should live, and none of their time actually observing or interacting in a meaningful way.

Then I came across NLP and Hypnosis, which changed the way I thought about psychology forever. Both in hypnosis and NLP, the name Milton H Erickson seemed to be a common theme, so I decided to see for myself just what he was about and whether he was as great as people were saying he was. I was not disappointed.

Milton Erickson studied hypnosis and trance before hypnosis had even become an accepted field of study within psychology. Even after hypnosis became mainstream, Erickson's view of hypnosis and trance still differed considerably from the accepted norm. So too did his method of therapy, and the results he achieved were beyond anything that anyone else even thought possible.

Erickson considered trance to be a normal, everyday occurrence that virtually everyone experienced frequently without realizing it. When you space out momentarily in a conversation, that's a trance. When you're driving and start thinking about something and driving becomes an automatic task, that's a trance. When two lovers become entangled within their own bubble of reality and zone everything else out, that's a trance. He called these "common trance" to distinguish them from the more profound forms that he was able to induce purposefully, and very often he would give examples just like these to begin an induction.

Discussing Dr. Erickson's hypnotic technique in any detail would require volumes (which have already been written), so I want to focus here more on his general approach to therapy, and how it differed from most all other therapies before or since.

Dr. Erickson considered therapy to be something that the client did for himself, with the therapist only providing suggestions that the client could follow in order to accomplish his own ends. He never took the attitude that he was telling his clients what they should do, and vocalized his opinion that taking that attitude was never helpful for the client and in fact insulted their inherent capacities. Straight from the horse's mouth:

Now, too much has been written and said and done about the reeducation of the neurotic and the psychotic and the maladjusted personality. As if anybody could really tell any one person how to think and how to feel and how to react to any given situation. Everybody reacts differently, according to his own background of personal experience.

He did not view trance as a state of increased susceptibility to suggestion (in fact he found the opposite to be true in many ways), nor did he believe trance to prevent one from resisting suggestions (his experiments demonstrated otherwise). Instead he saw trance as a state of intense inner concentration in which a person could learn by direct experience. His suggestions were merely a tool to help people learn to use hypnotic phenomena to solve their inner or outer problems. The result is that people who he had helped not only got relief from the problem they came to him for, but also often learned to solve other problems for themselves, or to use hypnotic phenomena to enhance their abilities in other ways.

As an example, one of his former students suffered a blow to the head by a falling brick just days before he was scheduled to give a speech at a conference he was attending. He recounts that he was able to negate the pain of the injury so that the doctors were able to work without anesthetic, and in spite of the fact that the doctors had claimed weeks of healing time, he was able to heal quickly enough to manage to speak at the conference without trouble. His doctors could not believe that he could have healed as quickly as he did. He also noted that Erickson had never given him any specific suggestions that he should do, or be able to do any of those things.

Much of what Dr. Erickson was able to do he attributed to what he called "anticipated response". While what he meant by that could really be interpreted in three ways, the main thread between them was that he could direct his own belief in order to direct the client more effectively. In some cases this might mean speaking with deliberate uncertainty in order to cause the client to question themselves. Sometimes this meant speaking with absolute certainty (especially when giving positive suggestions) so that the client, too, will believe that something will happen. At other times, this would mean that Milton would go into a trance first (which was common) and sort of "share" in the hypnotic experience, hallucinating whatever it was that he intended the client to hallucinate, or at least giving the distinct impression that he was.

Dr. Erickson took a very "natural" approach to therapy. More often than not, he would go into a trance himself and allow his unconscious to respond to his clients in real time without needing to think about what he was doing. He always had an underlying attitude that his clients could and would achieve the change that they wanted or required. If his clients would not believe in themselves, he would believe for them (although not in an obvious or obnoxious way). This is something which I think is absolutely required for successful therapy, and sadly something which the vast majority of therapists today lack.

Unfortunately his legacy organization, the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, apparently has no requirement for reading anything he has ever written. They seem to be more focused on pushing new books by new authors, and while they seem to be capable enough at inducing trance, they completely lack the most important characteristics of Erickson's own success with actual therapy. He inspired a number of other schools of therapy, however, including brief therapy and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

In part 2 of this series, I'll talk a bit more about NLP. NLP offers a lot in the way of understanding Erickson's hypnotic techniques (but not his approach to therapy) and provides a better understanding of the mechanics of thought.

Some links:
A hypnosis demonstration with Richard Bandler. (aka Richard Bandler behaving deplorably)

"Hypnosis Without Trance" - James Tripp, uses semi-ericksonian technique.

"Hypnotherapy, an Exploratory Casebook" with Ernest Rossi (free pdf)
"Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton Erickson, Volume I" by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (free pdf)