IGB Colloquium
Our feelings, our emotions are always more precise than our intellect.
Technique supports good therapy. But not automatically.
The best results are obtained when we use the reality and the language of the person.
Resistance happens when people don't do what you want them to do.
We gave them our best arguments and they don't change. Sometimes it is known and sometimes it is even usual. Sometimes people even forget that this functioning is a
habit.
We try all sorts of things, but we forget to use the person's words, their world, their vision, as THE main asset. It's about using everything that is productive productively. Everything that sticks and brings the person closer to his productive goal. It amounts to deploying one's perspectives. The hardest part of expanding the person's perspective is not just doing it, but shutting my mouth, as a therapist, to let the patient do it when they need to do it. It's about letting them redefine their own changes. This is exactly what Erickson meant: “trust the unconscious”.
Not just your speaker's unconscious.
But their patient unconscious. We've all been well trained - but the greatest respect you can offer people is to offer and let go. This perspective, implicitly and explicitly, changes both the definition of therapy and of the problem.
The expansion of choices becomes a goal.
Everyone likes to have choices. We can add humor and curiosity. On a hierarchy, curiosity and humor are at the top. No one can be afraid if he laughs or is curious.
Adding humor and curiosity changes the whole perspective of reality.
Erickson believed in the power of connection. And that's basically what I'm teaching today: CONNECTION
- If I say the voice of Luciano Pavarotti touched me a lot
- But what are you talking about?
- He made me different
- For me you are still the same
- In the end I say: you know what I mean
After much thought, I believe that connection is one of the main reasons for influence.
At each conference people come to see me, they hide their names, they catch me in a place and tell me: “your father changed my
life”.
He said to me, "what I remember of him saying to me, and they're still touching me, I just want you to know
that."
I say thank you and they leave. It's amazing and it happens so often. One day I asked Dad, "How do you get your patients to do such amazing things?" Starting with going up a mountain, how do you get them to do that. »
He tells me that contrary to the myth he responds directly by saying:
- They know that I know what I'm doing
- They know that their well-being is important to me
- They know that I have goodwill for them
One of the reasons Erickson was able to get things done was through the use of trance without hypnosis .
Trance is the highest communication. When you are in trance you listen to me sincerely, really. There are many ways to create this trance. Anyone who has ever kissed the skin of a little child who has fallen and hurt himself - mum says she is going to kiss, and the child leaves because he thinks his skin has no more injury.
If in this room I wanted to look at someone and say to him: “a long time ago… you will calm down and begin to put yourself in a position to wait for this handsome prince. It is YOU who will reach your own resources. »
2 things are necessary for the trance:
- to be myself in trance
- to wait delighted by proposing to the person to join me
Between Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson, part of the magic came from the immense love that there was between them.
Erickson clearly meant: "my pleasure is to give". It is a voluntary gift. Erickson personified the possibility of a love that comes from afar, a connection to something larger than you and me, that goes beyond most of us. Now the connection empowers people brave enough to change now and sustainably. Because it takes a lot of bravery to change.
One of my favorite stories:
In the whole world there are 2 kinds of fears:
- spiders, fear of speaking in public…
- the fear of the tiger: if he walks into this room with his tail swaying, his big canines showing, staring straight out with his hungry yellow eyes. All other fears come from there.
The difficulty is to identify the difference between the 2.
Lovers who walk synchronously.
That moment of true connection with a complete stranger. When your eyes meet the gaze of another and you have just understood. It's memorable and it's lasting. We can have this connection with the patient, it is not a technique. It is to be available, to be, to offer.
I have often heard that Bateson regretted sending many students to learn from my father, because many students confused BEING with TECHNIQUES. Like the student who looks at the finger rather than the moon.
True communication is beyond techniques.
Connection communicates so much more than words.
You know a lot more than you realize about a lot of people.
How long do you need to know if the teacher was good. 10 mins?
We know more than we think we know. We are playing a social game. It's not a judgement, just knowing. In this room we are all old enough to have been betrayed. Most of the time we say to ourselves: "I should have known"
The real connection: letting others into us.
Erickson said and believed that our natural state is that of a 4 or 5 year old child.
Cheerful, curious, reckless, fearless. Now we have to bring the children into civilization.
By doing this they lose contact with this infantile part which is in them, they lose everything.
We forget to remember a lot of things.
That there are differences between reality and perception. Think about food.
We agree that we don't want to eat disgusting cockroaches. Insects are full of protein and half the earth eats them.
But everyone has to believe that I don't eat bugs even though it costs less than beef. Reality is the physical laws of the earth.
And gravity exists whether we agree or not. Everything else comes from our learning and our perceptions. Reality cannot be changed. Perceptions of reality are interchangeable, modifiable.
Long ago, some in this room thought 40 was better.
(laughs) Emotional content sometimes interferes with perceptions.
If you grew up in a home where you felt bad, then you're stuck in this belief that you're not good.
130 years ago we couldn't see the bones in our body, now thanks to Pierre and Marie Curie we can.
We can see the energy within us. Who knows what will happen, and that we can measure.
First story
One is well known, the other has never been published.
First story is about my daughter.
She is the second Vietnamese orphan adopted in the EU in 1965. She arrived in my daughter at 11 months, she had an 18 month old brother and a 2 ½ month old brother. His 2 brothers and his father were very blond with blue eyes. And Kemberly has brown skin, brown eyes.
40 years ago adoption was not trivialized. At the age of 3, Erickson had a very serious conversation that only he could do.
She was his "little gingerbread girl," brunette, her eyes like raisins.
“As you are my daughter, what do all the girls in the world want with their brothers: to have power”. And here is Grandpa giving her cookies that she can decide to share or not.
The boys jump next to her. And on one level the brothers knew. But she was this gingerbread person who also had the power to give them cookies or not.
And it lasted until his death (of the grandfather). And there are plenty of things I don't know.
It wasn't a topic until kindergarten. And one day she comes home from school after the first day of class, and says to me: “Mom, I have a gingerbread mistress.
And I told her she was like me.
And this mistress she still loves put her arm next to his and confirmed to him that she is also a gingerbread lady. Everything changed with the "little gingerbread girl"
Second story
In the latter part of his life Erickson had seminars in his small house. Most of the people present were therapists. In one of the seminars, a young man (a patient who was having seizures) remained silent and then at one point indicated that he wanted to speak.
Silent room.
A year ago I knew we were going to hurt the president of the United States.
I called the police, the CIA, everything possible. They all came to listen but paid no attention to me.
He lived in Southern California. I went to the desert. I thought I was going to die. I had nothing. I found puddles of water. I sucked cacti. I was almost dead. Then I came home. I came home.
There was this silence in the room and Erickson began to narrate:
he says first: “you know when my daughter was little, she went to Australia.
In Australia there are aborigines. Among them was one who was about 15 years old. This aborigine goes into the perfectly inhospitable desert, he has to find water, to eat. Afterwards he returns to his village after months, and that's when he becomes a Man.
Then he says: in the same way among the Native Americans, they will find themselves near a particular tree until they have a vision.
They're hungry, they're thirsty, but their name comes to them in a vision. Then they get up, go home and they're Men
He finally says: in the tribe of Maasai warriors, men go into the savannah with a spear and have to find food and drink.
The young man must protect himself from predators. Only a few don't die. Some want to become village elders, and for that they have to kill a lion. Lions are very lazy. So first you have to find a group of lions, and the male lions are the protectors, the females are the huntresses. These men must provoke the males. When they provoke him, the lion says: “OK, leave me alone, I want to sleep, otherwise you will regret it”. And the boy continues to provoke the male.
But there is only one way to kill a lion with a spear.
You have to hold one end of the spear on the foot and at the top of his jump that's where you have to hit him.
The weight of the lion pushes the spear so that he kills himself by his own weight on the spear. Then the young man provokes him, throws stones at him.
Then the lion comes and leaps.
And the lion jumps - so he has to dip his spear at the right time. If he has a lot of change and is very skilful the lion immediately falls.
So he returns to his village with tail and ears and becomes a sage, immediately.
And he can't talk to anyone about it because no one can understand what he felt.
Only he and the other sages know.
There was silence in the room.
(back to patient story) After hearing these stories, the young man said, “I changed my name when I got home”.
Listening to all these stories, I said to myself: “my god!”.
I know dad, and he blew me away with this intervention because not only did he stop taking the psychotic for the youngster, but he made it something out of the ordinary. He achieved the feat of being able to tell this young man, through his 3 stories, without ever telling him explicitly : 1°) you never do that again! 2°) you don't tell anyone about it!
I have known this young man for 30 years. He never had any other psychotic attacks.
