How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 252

miles from where I had boarded him, he turned into a farm yard and the farmer said, "So that's how that
critter came back. Where did you find him?" I said, "About four miles from here." "How did you know
you should come here?" I said, "I didn't know. The horse knew. All I did was keep his attention on the
road."
Erickson's metaphorical strategies can be compared with the teaching tales of the Sufis (those of for
example the Nasreddin) and the Zen tradition of Koans, each also designed to act on the unconscious
mind.
Encouraging a Relapse
To bypass simple short-lived "obedience" which tends to lead to lapses in the absence of the therapist,
Erickson would occasionally arrange for his patients to fail in their attempts to improve, for example
by overreaching. Failure is part of life, and in that fragile time where the patient is learning to live,
think and behave differently, a random failure can be catastrophic. Deliberately causing a relapse
allowed Erickson to control the variables of that failure, and to cast it in a positive therapeutic light for
the patient.
Encouraging a Response by Frustrating It
This paradoxical approach acts directly on the patient's own resistance to change. Obese patients are
asked to gain weight, or in a family therapy session, a stubbornly silent family member is ignored until
the frustration obliges them to blurt out some desperate truth. Once again, this approach has its roots in
Erickson's hypnotic language patterns of the form "I don't want you to go into a trance yet".
Compare this with "Prescribing the Symptom" (below).
Utilizing Space and Position
Hypnosis and therapy are experienced subjectively by the patient, and any part of their total experience
can be used to reinforce an idea. The physical position or even the posture of the patient can be a
significant part of the subjective experience. Manipulating these factors can contribute to a therapeutic
transformation.
If I send someone out of the room - for example, the mother and child - I carefully move father from
his chair and put him into mother's chair. Or if I sen