Stephen Gilligan - Generative Trance: The experience of Creative Flow

Generative Trance: The Experience of Creative Flow, Stephen Gilligans newest book, is not only exciting to read, it gives new ways of looking at already-known information and adds whole new dimensions of different perspectives. Firmly built on his mentoring by Milton Erickson, Gilligan did what Erickson urged all his students to do - he took ideas from Erikson and made them applicable to new and different circumstances.

Beginning with understandable definitions, Gilligan lays out his own framework. The reader is captured with new ideas for hypnosis an up-dating, so to speak, of what hypnosis is. Generative trance is the real communication. It is not a place where the therapist provides answers and techniques for change, but where the client can have experiential learning, a reconfiguration of his own unconscious or forgotten resources. This, as evidenced by Ericksons work, is how lasting and sometimes remarkable and quick changes are achieved.

Under this umbrella of generative trance, he breaks his ideas into separate pieces. He discusses the familiar situation of a client frozen and seemingly unable to act, explaining how this is part of what he refers to as neuromuscular lock and literally takes apart what is happening. Then he provides clear methods of using generative trance, how client resources can be accessed and how different, more productive responses, can be learned and practiced. His approach is convincing, intriguing and eminently do-able.

His idea of centering is inclusive of what most people understand this term to mean. But typical of all of his writing, he uses words so precisely and carefully, that the reader stops to absorb his more expansive definition fully. Some of his phrases are immediately transferable to any therapeutic session you (can) feel both a part of and apart from an experience be with something without becoming it . He points out that when people learn to be centered, they can be vulnerable . Then with generative trance states, they can provide new and safe places within themselves and new learning and the transformation of dysfunctions can occur more easily.

Gilligan believes, as Erickson did, that peoples realities and fixed meanings have to be broadened. A change in perspective allows people to respond differently; each person can create a different sense of self a different identity as all of us have done since childhood. Generative trance allows this easily and naturally.

He goes into detail with some of the ideas for example, Creative Acceptance which redefines acceptance not as passivity but as an active curiosity about what something might be if it were accepted. This counter-intuitive idea accept something to change it is detailed in one of Ericksons cases the girl with the gap between her two front teeth. Gilligan connects this to the first part of his book seamlessly.

Part of the book holds case examples in script form. This clarifies and demonstrates the uses of generative trance states. He gives explanations of what he was doing and even little, easy-for-all to do ideas, such as various phrases to insert in any hypnotic work trance is a learning place and the words Erickson used so often, trust your unconscious. Each script is primarily aimed at one of the points Gilligan has made earlier in the book, and the how and why is explained. Additionally, as he points out, shorter versions of the scripts are useful to all in everyday life we all need to be able to become more centered, to be in touch with our bodies and relax comfortably while maintaining alertness.

One of the bonuses always present in Gilligans writing is his use of meaningful, often beautifully poetic, quotations from a huge variety of sources to begin every chapter. And its in this book too.

Generative Trance is an extraordinary book filled with different and new perspectives , captivating, and most important valuable. My father would be so proud!

Betty Alice Erickson, M.S.

Steve Gilligan is the closest Ive experienced to being with Milton Erickson since Ericksons death in 1980. His new book, Generative Trance, delivers a tour- de-force of the latest thinking of third-generation hypnosis in a charming and organized way. This is the definitive overview of a new approach in psychotherapy and change work. I continue to learn from Gilligan and look forward to returning to this book, again and again, to gain even deeper insights.

Bill OHanlon, author of Taproots, An Uncommon Casebook, A Guide to Trance Land and Solution-Oriented Hypnosis

Steve Gilligan says we are on a journey a journey of infinite possibilities but only if we are open and aware. Generative Trance is not another cognitive change process. It is about using trance to learn how to love and access the wisdom of your deeper mind, so that new awareness and choice can emerge. Whether you read this exceptional book for your personal development, or you facilitate others in theirs, you will discover that Generative Trance leads to a kind of sacred sight, after which your world will never look quite the same again. What a journey!

Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, authors ofMetaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling

There is a revolution taking place in psychotherapy that sheds the limitations of nave models of therapy and change. Stephen Gilligan is one of the most important leaders in this transformation of practice, particularly as it applies to hypnosis . His generative trance marks a major advance in helping us resourcefully relate to all that clients and therapists bring to a session. We enthusiastically recommend it to both your conscious and unconscious mind!

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D. & Hillary Keeney, Ph.D., authors, Circular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart andA Master Class in the Art of Performing Change

This latest book by Steve Gilligan puts into practice the Ericksonian principles he has taught brilliantly for decades. He extends his self-relations model in several important ways, especially in the memorable sections on welcoming and weaving the identity parts into generative trance in order to allow new parts of the self to be born through generative transformation.

Though not a simple book, Generative Trance