Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 3, Issue - 6, 1 December 2018 | Page 9

Saturday, 24 November 2018
relatives started calling in advance before turning up, to see if she were
"well enough" to see them.
The subject of dozens of songs, "emphasising the positive" is a well known
self-help strategy,
•
Encouraging Resistance - For Erickson, the classic
therapeutic request to "tell me everything about..." was both
aggressive and disrespectful, instead he would ask the resistant
patient to withhold information and only to tell what they were really
ready to reveal:
I usually say, "There are a number of things that you don't want me to know
about, that you don't want to tell me. There are a lot of things about yourself
that you don't want to discuss, therefore let's discuss those that you are
willing to discuss." She has blanket permission to withhold anything and
everything. But she did come to discuss things. And therefore she starts
discussing this, discussing that. And it's always "Well, this is all right to talk
about." And before she's finished, she has mentioned everything. And
each new item - "Well, this really isn't so important that I have to withhold it.
I can use the withholding permission for more important matters." Simply a
hypnotic technique. To make them respond to the idea of withholding, and
to respond to the idea of communicating.
Some people might react to a direction by thinking "why should I?" or "You
can't make me", called a polarity response because it motivates the
subject to consider the polar opposite of the suggestion. The conscious
mind recognises negation in speech ("Don't do X") but according to
Erickson, the unconscious mind pays more attention to the "X" than the
injunction "Don't do". Erickson thus used this as the basis for suggestions
that deliberately played on negation and tonally marked the important
wording, to provide that whatever the client did, it was beneficial: "You
don't have to go into a trance, so you can easily wonder about what you
2