Bill OHanlon - A Guide to Trance Land: A Practical Handbook of Ericksonian and Solution-Oriented Hypnosis

Here, well take up the minimal elements that can serve to invite a person powerfully and compellingly into trance using this approach.

I have divided these methods into elements (and sometimes subelements within the main method) to make them easy to learn. Obviously in hypnotherapeutic practice, many of these are used together or simultaneously. But for learning purposes, making them discrete elements makes them easier to distinguish and master.

To Helen
my entrancing paramour

Okay, together we have taken a tour of trance land. Having used hypnosis in therapy for over 30 years, I am still learning more about it and hope to keep learning more in the years to come.

From my wanderings in this land, I have tried, through this book, to give you a map to find your way around. I hope I have made the tour sufficiently simple and empowering, so you now feel you can find your way on your own.

I have actually learned more from the people with whom I have worked (commonly called subjects or clients but I prefer to think of them as people) than from any books or courses, but those books and courses got me started and gave me enough confidence to let people teach me. I hope this book has done the same for you.

Trancendentally yours,

Bill

There are two major types of hypnosis: authoritarian and permissive. The tradition I practice within, which I have come to call solution-oriented hypnosis, is permissive. I studied with the late psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson a few years before his death in 1980 (I was actually Ericksons gardener while I was in graduate school studying to be a marriage and family therapist, since I couldnt afford to pay him for his teaching).

There are both philosophical and technical differences between authoritarian hypnosis and the permissive approach. To illustrate the Ericksonian tradition, lets start with a story or two.

The first was one Dr. Erickson used to tell students quite regularly. When he was a child, growing up in rural Wisconsin in the early 1900s, he and some friends came across a horse that had obviously thrown its rider. None of them recognized the horse or knew to whom it belonged. After catching the horse and calming it down, young Erickson declared that he would take the horse back to its owner. How are you going to do that? asked his friends. You dont even know whose horse this is.

But Erickson just got on the horse and spurred it on. Some miles down the road, the horse veered into a farm. When Erickson and the horse arrived before the waiting farmer, he thanked Erickson for bringing the horse home, but asked how he knew to bring the horse there, since they didnt know one another. Erickson replied, I didnt know where the horse should go, but he did. I just kept him on the road and moving.

That is a cornerstone of the permissive approach to hypnosis: the person knows the way. The hypnotherapists task is to keep the client moving.

The second story is one told by a child psychiatrist who was a student of Ericksons. Erickson was teaching a workshop in San Francisco and the child psychiatrist brought one of his oppositional-defiant teenage patients, Ed, to work with Erickson, since he wasnt making much progress with the boy in treatment. He expected Erickson to hypnotize the boy, but when the boy came up and sat before Erickson and the group of workshop participants, Erickson mentioned that the psychiatrist had told him about Ed getting into trouble. Erickson then looked at Ed and said simply, I really dont know how you are going to change your behavior. Then he thanked Ed for coming, and the boy and his psychiatrist left the workshop. The psychiatrist was mystified by this turn of events and decided that perhaps Erickson had decided not to work with Ed. But over the next few months the boy showed a remarkable improvement in his situation. When the psychiatrist thought back to that brief encounter, he realized that Erickson had actually made an intervention that day. He had implied that Ed would change his behavior and then left the boy to his own devices as to how he would change it.

These two stories illustrate the main differences between the two hypnotic traditions, both in how they approach trance induction and how they approach treatment.

Traditional hypnotherapy relies on the authority and power of the hypnotist to get the person into trance. It also taps into suggestibility, which is required for success in this more authoritarian approach. Once the client is in trance, the hypnotherapist has a clear direction for trance (uncovering repressed or forgotten trauma that may be creating present problems; implanting new, more positive beliefs; and so on). I see this as an outside-in approach. The hypnotist is trying to get new stuff to happen from the outside and is the expert on what is going on with the person he or she is treating and what that person needs to do to get better.

The solution-oriented approach, in contrast, is based more on evocation than suggestion. Echoing the title of a book on Ericksons work (The Answer Within by Steve and Carol Lankton), solution-oriented hypnotherapists hold that people have answers and knowledge within themselves that can be tapped and released with the right invitations. The right invitations are the ones that really resonate with a particular person. Thats why this approach, while it has a set of generalized guidelines, does not have any formulas. Every trance induction is different. Every treatment is different. Some people will discover some repressed memories. Others will merely shift their thinking. Still others will perceive strange sensations or colors that will become meaningful and lead them to change. The person is the expert; the hypnotherapist is merely the facilitator of the evoked answers or responses.

Differences Between Solution-Oriented and Traditional Hypnosis

Permissive versus Authoritarian

Evocation versus Suggestion

Expert versus Collaboration and Nonexpert Stance

In authoritarian hypnosis, the hypnotherapist must establish his or her authority to cause things to happen with patients or subjects. The phrasing used in this approach typically involves words like will, are, wont, or cant.