“You’ve got to want to change!” That’s what they say about psychotherapy. And it seems to be true. But it’s also true that a ‘cunning’ (I use the word advisedly), skilled therapist can help generate and build that motivation in clients who may not – yet -really want to change.

Here’s a true story. Some years ago the staff of a retirement home by the sea called on me to help one of their residents. This woman, in her eighties, had suffered a fall some six weeks previously while using her Zimmer frame. Miraculously, the fall hadn’t injured her, and she was perfectly physically able to walk with her frame. But she wouldn’t. In spite of all the encouragement of the staff, she just refused …

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“I use a soft voice because that compels attention.” Dr Milton Erickson

In the normal way of things, focus of attention flits about like a sugar suffused butterfly from one thing to another. Ideas tumble through the mind like leaves tossed in the wind. Why do we hypnotise our clients? Because we want them to listen – really listen – so they can take on new, more productive ideas and emotional responses. So the first task of the hypnotist (or indeed anyone who wants anyone to take on board new ideas) is to fixate or capture the subject’s attention or interest.

I’ve found that it takes only a couple of minutes of narrowed focus of attention in your clients for them to become deeply hypnotized.

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Life isn’t fair and you could say it’s not meant to be. ‘Fairness’ – as we normally speak of it – is an entirely human construct and there’s no evidence that the universe takes any notice of what humans think. What you get in life is (largely, if not 100%) a matter of luck. Some of us are born into wealth, good looks and talent. Others are not. Some of us are born into loving families or societies with enough food and shelter, while others find themselves in conditions where it’s an exhausting daily struggle just to stay alive.

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I love these words from the writer Nathaniel Emmons: “Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.”

That is so true.

Good habits like work ethic, habits of health and habits of good social connection can enrich our lives, while bad habits like procrastination, addictions – which are really very compulsive destructive habits – and habits of avoidance of opportunity can ruin our lives.

A habit is a thought or a behaviour that you find hard not to do. Obviously, if you find it hard not to drink yourself into oblivion every night, then this ‘habit of drunkenness’ is likely …

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“Every person has abilities not known to the self.”

Milton H Erickson

Sometimes, just sometimes, I don’t know how my clients get better and they don’t know either. But they definitely got better.

It’s great to have a strategy with your clients and to have clear steps to help them heal,whether emotionally or physically. But it’s a mark of a confident therapist, on occasion, to be able to;

* relinquish ‘expertise’ and entertain the idea that they have within themselves the capacity for healing, even though …

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We’re all beautiful, are we not? Well, er… no, actually.

Like it or not, there are universal standards for male and female beauty. And – most unfairly – standard notions of ‘attractiveness’ may be hardwired in the brain. It’s been found that even very young babies tend to stare longer at faces widely considered attractive by adults. ⁽¹⁾

But it gets worse! Beautiful and handsome types get preferential treatment. From the courtroom, where the beautiful people are deemed more honest and trustworthy, to the movies, where the handsome and pretty are portrayed as braver and more determined than the rest of us.

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When I was a child, my mother felt awfully guilty because she worked and couldn’t be at home to greet me when I came in from school. Not that I minded being a ‘latchkey kid’. To assuage her guilt, she would bring me a chocolate bar, and I would eagerly wait to hear her key turn in the lock, announcing my daily treat.

She would have been most surprised to learn that she had inadvertently ‘trained’ my brain to trigger my salivary glands at the mere sound of metal scraping on metal – the turning key ‘priming’ my expectation of some soon to be gobbled up chocolate. But she had. Well into adulthood, whenever I heard a key turning in a lock my mouth would water.

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Really clear goal setting is extremely important when you truly want to achieve something. Having vague goals – or even definite goals propped up with only the vaguest notion of how you’re actually going to reach those goals – is a recipe for disappointment. To make real progress, we need to be precise in our thinking, using the strategic part of our brains (the prefrontal cortex) effectively, so as to determine what direction we want to take in life.

But there is another powerful way to use the mind…

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Remember Yossarian, the US Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, the main character in the book and movie Catch 22?

In that story you could be grounded for being crazy and so not have to fly dangerous missions. All you had to do was ask. But if you asked not to fly dangerous missions, this meant you were sane, and not crazy, so you’d have to fly them!

Being sane enough not to want to fly these missions meant you weren’t insane enough not to have to fly them.

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“… and the subject takes credit for it. You’re not telling the subject to ‘do this, do that’. So many therapists tell their patients how to think and how to feel. That is awfully wrong.”
Milton Erickson

And here’s Erickson again (I really must curb this habit):

“You ought to have your techniques so worded that there are escape routes for all resistance – intellectual, emotional, situational.”

We generally don’t like bossy people.

Sure, we may respect them, know they are ‘right’, that they get things done, but they tend to rob us of something that we human beings prize, perhaps above anything: a sense of freedom…

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