ERICKSONIAN HYPNOSIS: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The Ericksonian hypnosis or hypnotherapy Erickson is a psychotherapeutic approach that uses the hypnotic trance to help the patient to use their own mental associations, memories, and life potentials to achieve their therapeutic goals.

Hypnotic suggestion can facilitate the use of abilities and potentials that already exist within a person but remain unused or underdeveloped due to a lack of training or understanding.

The hypnotherapist carefully explores the individuality of a patient to learn what life learnings, experiences, and mental skills are available to deal with the problem.

The therapist then facilitates an approach to the trance experience within which the patient can use these unique and personal internal responses to achieve therapeutic goals.

What is hypnosis?

Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, similar to sleep, artificially induced under various methods, mainly using suggestion, in which the hypnotized person accepts the hypnotist's suggestions, as long as they are in accordance with the natural way of acting and thinking of the subject.

During the hypnotic trance you are more receptive to any stimulus than in any other state of consciousness. The hypnotized person can think, act and behave the same or better than in everyday life, since their attention is intense and free from distractions.

Classical hypnosis has been linked to medical and psychological approaches, overcoming the limitations it previously presented. One of these convergent approaches is the Ericksonian, where hypnotherapy is discussed.

Characteristics of Ericksonian hypnosis

Ericksonian hypnosis has a positive approach, insofar as it is responsible for achieving the objectives and improvements in the patient, and it does not focus on finding the cause of conflicts or trauma, but on connecting the individual with their resources and their motivation.

The patient is not given an unanalyzed set of therapeutic messages, because the intention is not to program behaviors. The idea is to facilitate the transformation from the unconscious, so that it is the subject who creates the creative resources and solves their problems.

For these reasons, Ericksonian hypnosis obtains results in very few sessions in the treatment of phobias, anxiety, problems with self-esteem, the achievement of goals, preparation for future events, addictions, grief, depression and many more.

Who was Milton Erickson and how did his hypnosis technique come about?

Milton erickson

Milton Erickson was born in 1901 in Aurum, Nevada; a city that has already disappeared from the maps. A few years after his birth, Milton, along with his family, moved to a rural town, where they had a farm and a lot of work to distribute among all.

From birth Milton was color blind and tone deaf, but this was never a major impediment to him, or to work. However, at the age of 16, Erickson suffered a polio attack, which left him in bed, immobilized of all muscles, and deprived of all tactile sensation. He could only move his eyes.

At the time, a polio attack of this magnitude meant preparing to die or, with better luck, inertly extending life. In Milton's case, luck had nothing to do with his walking again. It was just his search, technical intuition, commitment and enthusiasm.

For a whole year, Milton began to train himself to recognize his body again and to know that of others. He spent hours trying to locate his own limbs in search of the slightest sensation.

He observed the body language of the people around him, he noticed the incongruities of this language with the spoken one, he tried to amplify the smallest movements that he detected in his body, he observed the learning of locomotion in babies, etc.

Thus he was reeducated and soon he could walk, limp, and surprise a few people with quite mature hypotheses about human movement as an indicator of adaptation, consciousness and behavioral patterns.

And he had even had time to consider how to re-educate the human movement to obtain a transformation in adaptation, consciousness and behaviors, this being one of its therapeutic principles.

His training and his revolutionary ideas

To make a long story short, he soon walked without crutches, began to study medicine, contacted Hull, his hypnosis teacher at the time, quickly overcame him, and noticed that since he was 6 years old and without knowing it he was self-hypnotizing.

He revolutionized the concepts of the era by speaking of self-hypnosis, which was in fact his mode of curing polio during his year in bed. By the end of his freshman year at university he was almost a teacher, but he was still weak and weak in health.

So to strengthen himself he traveled 1,900 kilometers of continuous river for 10 weeks, with a small canoe that he had to carry over the impassable gaps, and at the end he was robust and healthier, although at first the experience almost killed him.

He married at 23, had 3 children, and separated at 10. By that time she was already a doctor and a teacher of arts, and began to act as a psychiatrist and to publish her first works on hypnosis.

He remarried, had 5 more children, helped in World War II as a psychiatrist and performing activities that are still secret, worked with Aldous Huxley, founded the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, and thus continued, producing knowledge and increasing his therapeutic formulas..

And there is talk of therapeutic formulas and not of techniques specifically, because Milton always refused to form a structured theory and a strict therapeutic method. This intuitive and unstructured approach was precisely what produced his success.

His last years, new diseases and the maturation of his theories

After the age of 50, Milton suffered another attack of polio, which along with his many allergies forced him to move to the desert. He never fully recovered and, at the end of his life, in a wheelchair, he did long sessions of self-hypnosis to gain some control of his muscles. He even had to learn to speak again, although after this his voice was already diminishing.

In recent years, Erickson became more interested in paradoxes in communication, and that is why, in his latest interventions, hypnosis increasingly took on a more frontal background, although he never completely ruled it out.

In 1980, while writing his memoirs, and before being able to receive a tribute at the First International Meeting of Ericksonian Hypnosis, he died, leaving a magnificent legacy of knowledge that transcends the limits of psychology and therapy.

Steps of Ericksonian hypnosis

The Ericksonian hypnosis treatment has 3 fundamental steps.

There is a first period, which is that of preparation. Here, the therapist explores the patient's repertoire of life experiences and facilitates constructive frames of reference to guide the patient toward therapeutic change.

The second period is that of the therapeutic trance, in which the patient's own mental resources are activated and used.

Finally, in the third period, a careful recognition, evaluation and ratification of the achieved therapeutic change is made.

Pillars of Ericksonian therapy

Not having preconceptions about the patient

This point underlines the importance of observation and, above all, of clinical non-classification. This implies a more accurate understanding of the problem and allows us to escape from the narrowness of the classification to focus only on the universe of the patient.

Seeking progressive change

His goal was to achieve concrete objectives for the near future. The therapist cannot aspire to control the patient's entire process of change. He just starts it and then it continues on its way.

Establish contact with the patient on their own ground

This idea is not only related to Erickson's idea of ​​leaving the office and intervening on the street or in the patient's home. It also has to do with the way in which the therapist and the patient should come into contact, the way to establish a relationship.

Develop listening and put aside interpretations, in order to understand the particularities of each patient. This implies understanding their world in order to enter it, which requires intense work, long hours of reflection and patience.

An example of this is when he began to speak the incoherent language of a schizophrenic patient and communicate with him on his own terms. It also happened that, if the person was used to being treated harshly, Erickson treated him the same way. It was his way of contacting and achieving communication.

Create situations in which people can realize their own ability to change their way of thinking

For Erickson, it was essential to allow the patient to recognize their abilities by placing them in a framework in which they could manifest themselves. Therefore, the patient had to be left control of the situation and motivated to make the change.

Erickson used insight (awareness) although in a different way from the psychodynamic approach. His educational approach emphasized the discovery of the positive (rather than the negative) side to produce insight in the patient.

The Milton method

In the last years of his life, Erickson no longer spoke so much about hypnotherapy, but about the Milton method, which consists of the use of the word in order to create confusion while establishing a direct suggestion.

Erickson used metaphors, stories, and paradoxes as his main tools, whether or not he caused the trance. Hence, many know his therapeutic model, too, like Milton Erickson's metaphors and paradoxes.

Therapeutic model

To understand the therapeutic model under which Erickson acted, it is necessary to start from a fundamental conclusion: Erickson's therapeutic strategy was totally original for its time and totally unstructured.

This is to say that Erickson did not start from recognizable influences from other authors, in the style of mentors or teachers, nor had he deduced his way of acting from any psychological or therapeutic school.

When Erickson began his journey through therapy, the great school that influenced therapy was psychoanalysis and, obviously, he was not part of its ranks, nor was he of the later behaviorist movement.

For Erickson, the past was not the key to solving the conflict. The past, in his words, cannot be changed, and although it can be explained, what is lived is today, tomorrow, next week, and that is what counts.

Let's say you were intuitive, observant, disciplined, and independent enough to create your own strategy of action from hypnosis. However, we cannot reduce its therapeutic action to hypnosis.

Hypnosis as a means, not an end

As time passed, its use decreased more and more, giving more relevance to metaphor and imperative language. This made it a precursor to other very common models today, such as narrative therapy.

For Erickson, learning hypnosis was above all learning to observe the other, to understand his vision of the world, to follow him step by step so that all this information could be used to help the patient behave differently.

Therefore, it can be understood that, in Erickson's vision, hypnosis is not the key point, but is another tool that allows us to reach that point: the change obtained through interpersonal influence.

Erickson's premise was to solve the problem, but without recipes, for which he had the patience and thoroughness to face each problem in a unique way. This originality in addressing his cases was what made it difficult for him to convey what he knew.

But that is not to say that his therapy was formless. Some authors think that there are fundamental pillars in Erickson's therapy, and here they will be mentioned below.

Milton Erickson's legacy

As we study the life and work of Milton Erickson, we realize that, although his theory is not one of the best known, it has contributed to the growth of many others that are now commonplace when it comes to psychotherapy.

His contributions have been observed in psychoneuroimmunology, in health psychology, in humanism, and even in behaviorism and psychoanalysis. In addition to this, his contributions to the philosophical and scientific growth of the topic of hypnosis with a therapeutic orientation is among the largest produced by a single person.

And as if this were not enough, his way of life leaves a clear conscience to anyone who wants to follow his "confused doctrine", because it can be assured that, more than a therapeutic method, Milton's theories constitute in a true and applicable way of life.

References

1. Erickson, M. (1958). Pediatric Hypnotherapy. The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. 1, 25-29.
2. Erickson, M., & Rossi, E. (1977). Autohypnotic Experiences of Milton H. Erickson. The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. 20, 36-54.
3. Therapeutic Metaphors: Why Milton Erickson's Stories Healed (And How Yours Can Too).