August 2024.
“Every person has more resources than they realise”, as Milton Erickson put it. Erickson was a founder of modern hypnotherapy, an American psychiatrist whose greatest skills were his capacity to observe and listen very closely to his clients and utilize their inherent resources.
In such close listening and observing he learned much more about the whole person than his medical diagnostic training may have produced, and he acted on it. His methods were quite eccentric. Sometimes someone would come to his Phoenix, Arizona house with a particular problem but who was so preoccupied with the issue that they didn’t actually listen to what Erickson had to say, so he had them climb a high peak outside the city and then come back for their session. Then, the real work could happen. Another client came to study Erickson’s methods (and he came preoccupied with his own self importance), so Erickson had him work in the garden, which was cacti and stones and not much else. When we are preoccupied, we neglect paying attention to very ordinary things so encouraging the doing of the ordinary is very valuable. Climbing a mountain or talking about ordinary things, puts clients back in their bodies and makes them attend to the here and now and thereby reconnect with the resources that they’d forgotten about.
I’m less about extremes, but I will talk about ordinary things – interspersed with the problem that the client came to work out – to reassert a groundedness and to help the person not get stuck in the murkiness of the issue that has preoccupied them.
We all have more resources than we realize, and attending to ordinary everyday stuff is part of that. Erickson used this knowledge to regain muscle strength and mobility after spending a year in an iron lung after contracting polio at age 17. He began to explore autohypnosis and concentrating on the body memories of the muscular activity in his own body. He learned to
tweak and stretch his muscles and to regain control of parts of his body, to the point where he was eventually able to talk and use his arms. Then he trained his body by embarking and completing a thousand-mile canoe trip. Extraordinary man! On his return he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in both psychology and medicine and then in psychiatry. All these experiences helped in his work with clients and students. Most particularly, though, they focussed attention to the people around him; enabling him to notice not just what they said, but how they said it, and what their bodily expressions had to add to their presence.
Unfortunately polio comes back to bite you. The virus that affects the nerves and the spinal cord and may affect the breath and can lead to paralysis, doesn’t go away, but returns later on in life. In his late 40s Erickson got post-polio syndrome and became too weak to walk, even with sticks, and so was bound to using a wheelchair. But this article is less about Erickson and more to do with listening and observing and utilizing all the resources we all have.
He didn’t just listen to what the clients said they wanted, but observed them to identify what they needed. This is not to say that Erickson always got it right. There are several cases that he missed the boat entirely, but this is not unusual for any therapist. We are fallible. Nevertheless, what he taught us about listening, observing and utilizing the resources and strengths each client brings to a session is invaluable. We need to move beyond a self or medical defined diagnosis (eg the person who comes saying they have clinical depression) to understanding how ordinary resources can be drawn upon to grow beyond their problem story. The art, of course, is to say this in an acceptable way to the client, so that they do not simply reject the therapeutic session. Exploring the subtleties of generally overlooked resources can be the way forward to untangling presenting problems in a safe and acceptable way. Listening, observing and witnessing person is critical and doing good work from that point onwards.
