Mind Mirrors

MORE THOUGHTSABOUT STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANCE

2010-05-29T04:27:00.000-07:00

After I went to Phoenix to learn from Milton Erickson,MD, in 1979, I wrote a book called "Trance State in America". Of course it was unpolished and I was surprised at myself (and a little embarrassed) that I would presume to tackle such a momentous subject. Didn't do any research. Just wrote. Put it away. It is still in the file cabinet where it languishes.

One of Erickson's many mind-blowing observations is that we shift states of consciousness all the time AND most of the time we are unaware as we move from one state to another. A second observation: that when we are in a special trance which he called "highly-focused attention" or absorption, we hear and process language differently than when our conscious mind prioritizes and screens out incoming information. Some people call that state "the willing suspension of disbelief." We shift from our rational mind to an all-receiving mind. Some people call this state "the zone". In this state we can hear, integrate, and use therapeutic suggestions effectively, sometimes consciously unaware until we notice we are changing our behavior easily, without struggling with the old obstacles that kept us stuck.

We can also be "imprinted by negative suggestions. It happened all the time when we were kids and we received in the absorptive state of unconscious learning all the subtexts of family myths, rules and messages. They often stay on unconscious levels until something in later life triggers their emergence into conscious behavior.

A characteristic of being in trance is that we can hold two opposite ideas simultaneously. In therapy people can learn that they can love someone deeply and at the same time hate something that they do or say. We usually have more than one feeling. There is always the other side of the coin. Within ourselves there is a constant interplay of parts of ourselves with each other. Acceptance of this interplay alchemizes the process. Like most music, as it moves through time, the disharmonies and staccatoes relax and dip into harmony with each other.

I think the core of wisdom is that we know we don't know and still have faith in the experience of knowing. Life can't be pigeonholed. It washes over us and when we surrender to the not knowing we are renewed by some deep inner spring that can bubble up and surprise and delight us. It is a paradox. When we let go of the need to control, to be masterful, is when we become masters. Like a great river, there is a current underneath us as we are carried along our life's journey.We can let it carry us and enjoy the ride. I think that is what Erickson meant by his utilization strategies. The therapist creates the context of safety so that the patient finds his own inner current and learns to enjoy trusting that process and letting himself be carried by it. By allowing that to happen he becomes master of it; he becomes an artist of his own life.

MORE WORDS TO LIVE BY: THE UNCONSCIOUS

2010-05-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

"I believe in man's unconscious, the deep spring from which comes his power to communicate and to love. For me, all art is a combination of these powers; art is nothing to me if it does not make contact between the creator and the perceiver on an unconscious level. Let us say that love is the way we have of communication personally in the deepest way. What art can do is to extend this communication, magnify it, and carry it to vastly greater numbers of people. In this it needs warm core, a hidden heating element...I believe in art for the warmth and love it carries within it."
-Leonard Bernstein

"From the experimental point of view, reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acqired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows. By this individualization of himself in the depths of himself, the living element, which heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions and activities, we constituted for the first time as a center in the form of a point at which all the impressions and experieces knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organization.

"The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and invention, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love -- all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed center as it explodes onto itself."
-Teilhard de Chardin

These two quotes come to me as I sit day after day working with people in hypnosis and I am exquisitely aware that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. It is the phenomenon of double consciousness -- the self observing the self as it experiences itself ..

WORDS TO LIVE BY

2010-04-27T04:59:00.000-07:00

There are words and statements I have come across that I like to think about:

Milton Erickson, MD said to his students: "(When working with your patients) discover their patterns of happiness."

Moshe Feldenkrais talked about helping people develop their "aesthetic appreciation of self."
He also said, "Movement is life...Improve the quality of movement and you improve life itself."

Dabney Ewin, MD has said that he never lets any of his dreams go by without analyzing them.

Virginia Satir said: I can never really connect with another person unless I am congruent with myself."

Larry LeShan, PhD, said about his working with cancer patients: "(When I discovered my own way of working "I came home to myself."

Anna Quinlan, quoting a famous writer said: "No tears in the writer; no tears in the reader."

Working with Pain

2010-04-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

The experience of physical pain, especially acute and long-term pain can be different from emotional pain, but they are so closely related that in our thinking and in our language we can work with them in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels.

Milton Erickson, MD, tells the story of his working with a woman who had a terminal illness. It was in front of a group. A year later, Erickson received a letter from a man who had witnessed the demonstration. The man said he had weighed over 300 pounds as he listened to Erickson’s hypnotic induction. In the following year he lost some 130 pounds. was happier than he had ever been and was about to get married.

Erickson said “To one person his pain is overweight, to another that he is too short, or too tall or has a severe illness. Everyone will hear what he or she needs to hear.”

Once when Feldenkrais had worked on my painful back, he touched some emotion and and I left the room sobbing. He followed me into my room , sat on the floor and held me. I said, “Oh Moshe, you don’t have to comfort me, You have helped me so much already.” He said to me,
"We are all in the same boat.” Several years later, when I sat with him in Tel Aviv every afternoon after he had had his subdural hemorrhage and his brain was not alert I thought about what he said and how many hundreds of people those wonderful hands had helped.

Story about Moshe. When he was a kid he saw a man with no legs crawling on his elbows along a road. Moshe ran into a barn and sat there for many hours and when he came out he had lost the power of speech. He didn't talk for many months. I often wondered how that affected his subsequent work using touch, and rarely speaking in his silent communication with people who were so disabled.. He often said, “When you are touching a body you go right up to the pain gently and hold it until the body relaxes into it.” And this is how I think we hold pain as we work with people in pain We stay with them and help them relax into it. We have to hold the context of the possibility that the pain can be relieved. And if we are clear it will help them.

Kay Thomson said about pain:“When everything that needs to be done and should be done and HAS been done, there Is no longer any reason for the pain.”

I remember one moment in time with my analyst Dr. Bernie Fein. After a particularly painful session for me I staggered to my feet and as I walked out the door I turned to look at him and I saw such compassion in his eyes that I have never forgotten it…and it goes with me whenever I see a person in deep pain. I think the alchemy of healing occurred in that moment .and I thought of it in the hours that I was with him the day before- and then right after he died.

***

With everyone I work with as soon as I can (sometimes I have to wait until the right time if they are in crisis) I set about accessing as many resources as I can directly or indirectly to remind them of all the times they are not consciously aware of that they have healed themselves. I do a resource induction tailored to all the times they have consciously and unconsciously healed their own pain.

Resource induction I want to bring alive to them that part – ego state, subpersonality or the inner healer, whatever we want to call it that has always been able to heal us even when we are not aware of it – the day we thought we were coming down with a cold and then mysteriously the next day it went away…Some part of me knew what to do. That is the part Erickson said to trust and that is the part we want to talk with as much as we can.

***

Hypnosis and Couples

2010-03-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

HYPNOSIS AND COUPLES

"Hypnosis is a natural everyday experience. Trance is a natural everyday experience."
-Milton Erickson, MD

When couples fall in love they "entrance" each other; they shift each other into a state of consciousness Erickson called "trance". Usually this trance state is positive.

As they get closer and become more vulnerable to their earliest feelings of love and longing, early-memory imprints trigger unfullfilled expectations, and, if these triggers go unrecognized, the couples' mutual states of trance regress and then...

Couples tend to put each other into negative trances that develop into habitual patterns.

We can use hypnotic tools to reverse this proces by helping couples unhook from imprinted patterns. The split-off parts of themselves that are accessed and amplified can then be transformed.

These split-off parts hurt the most and are therefore the hardest to get to.

The trained therapist who is comfortable with his or her own unconscious (part of the training)
can create the many-layered context of trust and safety so that each spouse feels the unconscious acceptance necessary to open up to these vulnerable parts. By accepting and working with them together the couple can transform them.

Where there was anger there can be compassion.

When people develop compassion for themselves they can open their hearts to the humanity in each other.

The art of the therapist is to maintain the unconscious connection with the humanity in each person simultaneously, and to hold that space for them until they can transform their negative
patterns and become who they really are, not who they were programmed to be.

Copyright 2007 by Jane Parsons-Fein

Mind Mirrors 1

2010-03-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

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.