Mind Mirrors 1

MIND MIRRORS

ADVENTURES IN HYPNOTHERAPY
Why this blog: I have worked forty years as a clinical social work psychotherapist. For the last thirty years I have used hypnotherapy as an integral part of my practice. Early on, after I started working this way with clients, I often felt shaken by what they said --simple truths they were discovering for themselves --- little gems about their lives -- they would utter, often as they were coming out of trance , or after a very moving encounter with their own self-revelation. I decided to start a file so that their words would not be lost forever.
For example: Walking out the door, Kleenex in hand, a 40-year old woman turned to looked over her shoulder at me, tears running down her face and said:; “This can’t be therapy. It feels too good.”

After all these years working with people I am a true believer in hypnosis as a therapeutic tool, and what I have learned I want others to share. Here’s why: Thanks to brain imaging and other uses of the computer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, research is showing that lasting change occurs in the context of deep emotion when we shift into the highly-focused attention called “trance state” or “the unconscious.”
Hypnosis in psychotherapy is now, if not commonplace, at least readily available from professional clinicians who are well-trained. It can be a shortcut to the roots of our suffering. It can minimize the discomfort of self-discovery and revolutionize the thrill of self-awakening. I want more people, professionals, and non-professionals, to become aware of its effectiveness so that they can take advantage of all that we are learning about it.
I was lucky. Thirty years ago I found therapeutic hypnosis in UNCOMMON THERAPY, a book by Jay Haley about a psychiatrist named Milton E. Erickson, MD. In almost every case Haley described, Erickson’s stunning, out-of-the-box mind, which captured the clarity, simplicity and humorous absurdity of our everyday human behaviors. At the time I was working in the Psychiatric Department of a major New York Hospital where I had spent ten years alongside brilliant colleagues. Much money was spent, many hours consumed in endless discussions of pathology, symptoms, treatment of our patients. Some patients improved and moved back into their lives. Sadly, many improved a little and were discharged, only to return months later. We called it “the revolving door syndrome.”
Medication began to be used more and more; clinical skills, it seemed to me, were valued less and less. The balance began to tip heavily toward psychopharmacology: emphasis was on the search for grants for yet more research and development of the magic of medication.
But the magic of the human connection between patient and therapist -- ,often the context for profound change -- was fading into the mist of NIMH grants, studies and trials.
It was just at that time the mists cleared for me. I had made contact with the mind of the man who was already beginning to be described as “the greatest medical hypnotist in the world.” He was also called “the shrinks’ shrink”. Doctors who couldn’t help their patients sent them to Erickson as a last resort. He had the reputation of achieving success with the seriously impaired and “impossible-to-help” patients and was steadily doing his own research and publishing papers on what he understood about hypnosis and the mind. Basically he was in the process of “demystifying” hypnosis. At the time, except for physician converts, of which there were a good many, hypnosis had a bad reputation as a stage gimmick and almost no recognition as a medical discipline, although Freud had gone to France early in his career to study hypnosis with Charcot and was much influenced. In 1985 the American Medical Association accepted hypnosis as a legitimate treatment modality. Now, current research, working with the new computer techniques like imaging is demonstrating how Erickson’s work is evidence-based.
Soon after I read Haley’s book I arranged to go to Phoenix, where Erickson practiced, for two weeks to work with him. Despite my Ivy education and my years of experience I couldn’t understand what he was doing so I returned to New York and I went back again for another two weeks. This time I got his permission to videotape his sessions with our training group. Fifty hours’worth. After I returned to New York, a New York group of my colleagues and I studied my tapes weekly for a year, gradually integrating it into our own work. Then, on the theory that if you want to learn something well, you teach it, some of us began to teach his approaches. That began in 1982 with the establishment of the New York Society for Milton H. Erickson Psychotherapy and Hypnosis. In 1997 I started my own Institute, The Parsons-Fein Training Institute for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis.
My work with Erickson had utterly changed my life, and at first I did not have a conscious clue about how sitting in that little office with about twelve other people and listening to him talk about how he treated last-chance patients and changed their lives could have reached such depths in my heart.
But now research on the brain is telling us that depth of feeling is the context for profound change.
As he sat in his wheelchair and talked to us I felt that Erickson was holding up a mirror to my mind’s possibilities. He had had polio at age 17, taught himself to walk again, married twice, fathered eight children and traveled the world teaching medical and clinical hypnosis. He did research, wrote, started The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, (ASCH) and was also involved with the two other most reputable and respected hypnosis organizations: The Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH) and the International Society of Hypnosis (ISH). He then had a bout of what some people said was a return of polio which put him in a wheelchair for good. He
died in 1980 after a rich, full, powerful life.
This man affected the lives of thousands of others, as he had mine. There are now 185 Erickson Institutes worldwide continuing his work. Jeffrey Zeig, Ph.D., Director of the head office of the Milton H. Erickson Foundation in Phoenix, sponsored the first conference that brought together professionals in the multifarious health-related disciplines – physicians, dentists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, physical therapists, educators and others. Seven thousand attended, the largest meeting for the exchange of ideas among these diverse disciplines ever held in this country. It was to have been a tribute to Erickson for his birthday, but he died before it was held. These conferences are still being held every five years.
Thanks to my efforts and success in studying and later teaching Erickson’s techniques I was grateful to see how students could use them with enthusiasm and success. Because I learned so much from him I was drawn to the work of other great innovators: Virginia Satir, Moshe Felkdenkrais, Kay Thompson, DDS. They all held up their own mind mirror so we could see ourselves clearly and come upon our own inner miracles, large and small. I believe that almost all of us of us has our own inner light, no matter how deeply it is buried
Erickson often taught us to “Discover their patterns of happiness.” He was excrutiatingly aware of the power of words and used them with more care – and calculation –than anyone I have ever met. I saw how, without moving from his frozen position in a wheelchair, he could talk patients into moving limbs that hadn’t move, hearing themselves say things they hadn’t said, look at things they hadn’t seen. He had an astounding ability to enter into the subtexts of what his patients were telling him. When his patient was in that absorptive state Erickson called “trance,” he used impeccable language to ask the question the patient could really hear at the right time and he spoke in the rhythm of the patient’s understanding. We are now discovering from the new research how and why his rigorously sensitive language could change the function of brain cells, generate new cells and new pathways.
And so on that particular day, my client walked out of my office to begin to create new landscapes in her life, having discovered her own patterns of happiness that were there all the time.