The presenters will describe specific strategies for naturalistic trance induction and utilization. Emphasis will be on the adaptation and application of brief Ericksonian techniques, methods of naturalistic trance induction, deepening techniques and process instructions utilized to stimulate participants into shifting their perceptual positions and thinking about things differently.
Educational Objectives:
1) To describe how therapists can connect clients to a calm, centering inner state.
2) To describe how connection to the inner self can allow new resources and solutions to develop.
A key idea in Milton Erickson's work was that a person's problematic experiences and behaviors can be skillfully accepted and utilized as the basis for therapeutic change. Self-relations psychotherapy develops this idea further, emphasizing symptoms as indicating the death of an old identity and the impending birth of a new identity. In this workshop, we will see how a therapist can generate a ritual space where symptoms and other disturbing experiences can be "midwifed" into new identities.
The Ericksonian approach rests on the use of effective direct and indirect technique to access inherent resources and promote patient-based change. Lecture, demonstration, group exercise.
Hypnosis continues as the "mother of the psychotherapies" by contributing new approaches to human facilitation. Specifically, we will learn to use the therapeutic
double bind, symptom prescription, and ideodynamic channeling to assess and facilitate a patient's inner resources.