John Crook Teleseminar€¦ · Web viewBasically, I would explore the different kinds. The summary says it probably better than I can say it myself, but there's actual loss, there's

Transcript from “The Many Faces of Lost and How To Resolve It.”

Steve Andreas

The Many Faces of Lost and How to Resolve It.

Original video: http://hypnosis4depression.com/

Ryan Nagy: The many faces of loss and how to resolve it...

Steve Andreas: All right.

Ryan: I guess I do have one question before we begin, which would be I know you and Connirae were spending time with Milton Erickson near his death. You went to visit him a couple of times. Did this in any way come out of Erickson's work? How do you relate it to Erickson's work?

Steve: Connirae went twice. I only went once. I wasn't really able to track what he was doing, so I got bored.

Ryan: [laughs]

Steve: Every once in a while, he'd pull a miracle out of the hat, but I wasn't learning anything that I knew about, and in terms of relating to Erickson's work, we developed a method for resolving a lot of about 25 years ago.

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http://hypnosis4depression.com/


What I've done is I've researched Erickson's cases on depression, and Bill O’Hanlon's “Uncommon Casebook” to see to what extent I can verify that loss was involved in the various clients that he saw.

Basically, I would explore the different kinds. The summary says it probably better than I can say it myself, but there's actual loss, there's the loss of a dream, there's loss of other things — locations, information, and so on.

So there are many different aspects of loss that many people may not be aware of.

Ryan: So it's not always about death.

Steve: It's not always about a person.

Ryan: Ages ago, I read "My Voice Will Go with You," by Sydney Rosen, and there was this comment that he made about Erickson where Erickson said, "There's a lot of hogwash going around about assisting families in grieving." That, to me, fits with what you're doing. It's not about grieving, per se, but about remembering positive aspects of what was lost, or what's still with you.

Steve: Right. It's about resolving grief. A lot of people think that they have this, what they call grief, and what that crying your heart out for ever and ever and ever. That's no resolution there. It's just expressing the feelings, which has a certain value at a certain time.

I'm going to talk today mostly about unipolar depression, not bipolar, because I don't know much about bipolar depression. I have a couple of ideas that I may thrown in, but mostly I'm going to talk about unipolar depression.

My position is going to be that it's always in response to some kind of loss. Sometimes it's very clear. Someone dies and their husband or wife goes into grief, depression, and so on. That's going to be my basic idea.

What I've done is I've went through Bill O'Hanlon's book, "Uncommon Casebook," and I pulled out 12 examples of where he was working with depression, to see if his work backs up my basic position or not, and if not, why not?

Ryan: So depression as a response to some type of loss.

Steve: Right.

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The first example is very clear. It's calle case of Cynthia. A woman got married, and fairly soon after, she got severe arthritis. Doctor's told her she really shouldn't have a baby. She wanted, above all things, to get pregnant and have a child. She saw Milton Erickson, and he said, "Look, this is the most important thing to you. It may not be possible to have a normal delivery. The child might be born dead, but it's the most important thing for you. Go ahead and get pregnant."

And so she did, and she loved being pregnant, the nine months of being pregnant. She loved the baby, and at six months, there was a crib death. Her arthritis came back full force and so on, and they said, "You really shouldn't have another child. You shouldn't get pregnant again."

She went into suicidal depression. You had to keep knives away from her and so on and so on. Erickson basically said, and he did this quite often. He says, "You know, I think you're being very stupid." And his commentary is saying, "I wanted to get her attention." Then he said, "You had nine months of happiness, carrying the baby. You had six months of happiness caring for the baby, and you want to throw that all away? I think you should treasure it, and I'll tell you how to treasure it."

Then he told her to plant a eucalyptus tree — a fast-growing tree that does well in Arizona. This was down in Phoenix. "And so then you can look forward to resting in the shade of Cynthia. You call the tree 'Cynthia,' and you can rest in the shade of Cynthia."

Now, this is a way of re-associating with the beautiful, wonderful experiences she had. Dr. Seuss put it this way — "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

Ryan: Fantastic.

Steve: We're all going to experience losses, and the most interesting thing about this case, actually, is that there's a preamble to it, that before she had the baby, before she got pregnant, she was very, very depressed, because she had this arthritis, and the doctors all told her it wouldn't be wise to get pregnant.

She was suicidal then, not because she lost the baby, but because she lost her dream of a baby. There's several messages here. One is, it's not the situation and external reality that causes the problem. It's the way the person represents it internally that makes the problem. A lot of people realize that so much of loss is loss of a dream, loss of a treasured experience that they hoped to have, they never actually had. Somebody can grieve just as hard, or maybe harder, for an idealized dream than they can over their actual reality.

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Ryan: So there was some type of future, and that future is gone, and they're grieving it. You're helping them re-associate to it somehow.

Steve: Right, and that's the key process that my wife and I developed years ago. One way of leading into it is, you can probably — I assume you have some people that are very special to you, and probably they're not present in the room with you right now.

Ryan: Mm-hmm. No.

Steve: But if you think of them, how do you think of them? Pick one. How do you think of that person?

Ryan: Well, I think of her...I'm in my office right now, and I'm just thinking of her when we were visiting in the back part of the house.

Steve: Okay. So she's close by?

Ryan: Uh-huh.

Steve: Can you think of someone who's far away?

Ryan: Yes.

Steve: Okay, if you think of that person, where are they in relation to your body and your personal states?

Ryan: Well, hang on, I lost them. So this is someone that I'm still close to, still connected to?

Steve: Yeah.

Ryan: Okay. Um, [laughs] it's a little weird, but they're in another country, but I can imagine them being right here with me, going down to get a coffee, because we used to spend a lot of time just chatting at coffee shops.

Steve: Exactly. So they're essentially here with you, and it looks like they're life-sized?

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Steve: You could reach out and touch them? You could talk to them?

Ryan: Sure.

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Steve: That's the experience we're going for in terms of the loss, that you don't know your friend is in another country. They could have been hit by a bus yesterday, and you don't know about it yet.

Ryan: [laughs] Yeah, okay.

Steve: It could be done. They could be dead, and yet you can represent them as present with you, and you can have all the good feelings that you have with that person. That's the goal in the grief resolution process, to take what someone is experiencing, and the loss of a special person...

I should back up a little bit and say usually when people are grieving, they're experiencing the lost person as very, very far away, or as ghost-like, as transparent, or there's a dent in the bed, or they see themselves with the person, but they're far away, so they don't have the good feelings they had with them.

That's the experience that causes the tears and the grief, so the overall goal is to take that image of that's person that's far away and distant, and untouchable and unreachable, and represent them in the same way that you represent you friend that's there with you, life-sized and so on.

Now there's some variations on this. Some people like to represent the loss person in their heart. One person represented like a cloak over them, so that the lost person that they were still connected with was like a cloak or a heavy overcoat, embracing them gently and keeping them warm.

So there are variations on how people do this, and part of the work is to find out, how does the person represent the lost person? Where in their personal states? Is it over here, is it over here, is it up, is it down? Is it far away, is it panoramic, and so on?

Find out the details, and this is very respectful of the person, because then you're going to find out exactly how they're representing the grief now of the lost person, and then you find out how they represent someone who is present to them, like your friend, so that they can actually talk to them then right there. You gestured a little to your left, for instance. Someone else might gesture to their right.

Connirae's in Europe right now, and when I think of her, she's always at my left side. I don't know why, but that fits for me.

Ryan: That's just the way it is.

Steve: It's just the way it is, and since I know how it is, if I can find out how it is for a particular person, then I can give them instructions that will fit for

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them perfectly. Maybe for no one else on the planet, but it will fit for them perfectly.

Ryan: It's really nice, because in preparation for talking with you today, I read the grief resolution process. You have it on your website. I'll give the link to people. I've been to some of your NLP trainings, years ago.

But in that moment when you asked me to think of the person who's far away, that I still feel is very close to me, I hadn't thought to...I don't know what I'm saying. I guess I hadn't consciously done that in a while. I had this kind of flush, and I felt really good, and it was nice. I hadn't thought to bring...I just know that he's close to me, and somehow thinking about where he is, it just somehow amplified it a bit.

Steve: This is another aspect of this. What we're dealing with here are unconscious parameters of experience. Most people, if you walk down the street and you said, "Can you think of a good friend, they'd say, "Yeah, I can think of a good friend," but they'd have no idea where in space they represent them, how far away — whatever the image was — a movie or a still, life-sized or small, and so on. Those are all unconscious parameters.

Another way of thinking about this is, Milton Erickson was always going for what he called, "What you know, but you don't know that you know." Someone who's grieving thinks, "Well, they're gone. I have to feel sad," and they don't realize that there are plenty of people that they've enjoyed in their life, that when they think about, they don't feel sad. And if they really can't find one of those examples, I can do what I did with you. I'd say, "Think of someone who's special to you, but isn't present, close by to you, and find some of those unconscious parameters that make it possible for them to feel that contact, and the loving feelings that they had, and all the rest of it.

Ryan: You're saying that these sub-modality changes and these type of inner experience changes were happening with Erickson when he was doing his work in these cases of depression, or maybe in the cases that Bill was doing. You're saying these changes were part of the process, happened as a part of the change work he was doing and that was Bill was doing?

Steve: I would really hesitate to Erickson. I really don't know what he knew and how much he knew. I know he knew something about sub modalities, but how much he knew, I don't know.

What I do know is that in this particular example, with Cynthia, he did the right thing, in my view, of having her re-associate with the wonderful experiences that she had had with the baby as a way to pull her out of the

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depression, because she was just thinking of the death, and so on, and that's another point.

When somebody's lost, a lot of people don't remember the good times, and what they call grief is actually more like a phobia or a PTSD. They remember the death, or they remember the cancer, or they remember the horrible fight and the breakup, and stuff like that. They remember the end of the relationship, rather than the good things that they miss, and so it's important, right at the beginning to say, "Tell me a little bit about your picture. What are you representing inside?"

If they say, "Well, it's the fight and the breakup," or, "The cancer," or whatever, you say, "Look, that's not what you missed. What you missed is the good times. What you miss is the love, the spontaneity," or, "the steadfastness, or all the qualities that you had with that person. I want you to change that picture to one of the good times, when everything was going well. I'm sure there were bad times, too, or times when you were annoying, but think of one of the good time, because that's what you miss. You don't miss the annoying part."

Just last March, I presented the networker, and I wanted to demonstrate this process. Two women came up in succession, and it turned out both of them were remembering the end of the relationship, and when I told them to change to the good times of the relationship, that's all that was necessary, actually, to go through the rest of the process at all, because as soon as I said, "Change to think of one of the good times," it all came back them right away.

Ryan: Yeah, they associate to it.

Steve: Associate it into the good times, and they were done, which is kind of qualified as briefest therapy.

Ryan: [laughs] And so you found this pattern in other of these case studies that you've recently reviewed in Bill's book, Uncommon Casebook?

Steve: Yeah, there's another one that's very similar in a way, and I'll keep it fairly short.

A woman had been paralyzed for 10 years. She was a PhD grad student. She came to Erickson with a very clear request. She says, "Either I want a philosophy of life that makes me willing to go on, or I want justification to commit suicide — a life that will either or."

He worked with her in a lot of very interesting ways. As a result, I'll skip the details, unless you want to go into them, but she ended up marrying a

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medical doctor, a pathologist. She was paralyzed from the waist down, she was incontinent for both urine and feces, and basically Erickson built a future for her. He started out by...I guess I will tell some details.

Ryan: I think that's fine, yeah.

He had her go through the National Geographic and the Encyclopedia and look at the funny-looking women that men were marrying, the variety of women that men can find attractive and so on.

So he built a little opening of hope, just a little window of hope, that maybe she could find someone, and then he did a lot of other work with transferring orgasms from her vagina to the breast, to the earlobes, to various other parts of her body, and the way he did it is very interesting, too. I won't go into that.

He interviewed her 10 years later when she was married and had four kids, I think.

Ryan: Whoa.

Steve: She had orgasms. She had sex four or five times a week, and she described it in detail about how she had them around her lips and her earlobes and her breasts and so on and all this stuff. So he built a future for her, and there are a number of situations where he built a future for people in a number of cases.

There were 12 cases that I found, and I think at least three or four of them, he essentially built a future. Now, there are other ways of building a future, too, that most people don't realize. Everybody has a sense of time, and most people, either their future is in front of them, and their past is behind them, or their past is to their left, and their future is to the right.

Sometimes people had an end to their timeline, that literally it ends. Sometimes very close, and you can actually extend the timeline and then fill it in with pictures of what they could do, or what they might be willing to do, or what they could be interested in doing, so that's another way of building a future.

He, with one client who had a very really nasty past, living in a boarding house, had a poor job, and no relationships, and so on, he started out by reviewing his past in crystal balls, which is something he often did. The nice thing about a crystal ball is it's essentially dissociated. You're seeing yourself in the crystal ball, reviewing your past, so when you're viewing your past without getting a lot of emotion out of it, is a more or less Dr.

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Spock kind of review of the past, of all of the things that happened and so on.

He gradually then did use crystal balls into the future as well, first with very little, just modest changes, and one of the things Erickson did was he introduced very modest little changes, just some kind of little change that might seem totally irrelevant.

One of the cases was a guy. He was an industrialist who had had lost everything, lost all his money, lost his house, lost his wife, and so on. He was in a psychotic depression in a mental hospital, and he was rubbing his hands together like this.

Erickson, the first thing he did was he said, "Now you're a guy who's really had your ups and downs," and he gradually had him move his hands up and down like this, and then like this — a very small change. Now that might seem a ridiculous change to try to induce in a guy with psychotic depression, but it was a very small window, a very small start to then making further changes.

What he did was he strapped sandpaper to the guy's hands, put a piece of wood in a vice, and had him sand the wood. Initially he did it just listlessly, sanding the wood, because it was a piece of board in between his hands. Then he gradually got interested in the wood and making it nice and really smooth. He ended up doing things in the wood shop and so on, and he eventually got released.

So there's a situation where it was clearly a loss, an actual loss. He had had all this money. He'd had all this influence and so on, and then he'd lost it all completely.

Ryan: Interesting. So he had a loss, and then he helped the guy build some type of a future. I guess he helped the guy get involved in the present moment, just doing some of these things.

Steve: That's it, just a beginning to recreate, because he was in a psychotic depression. What are you going to do? You can't really talk to him yet. You've first got to get him engaged in the present moment, get him into the present so that you can then do more with him.

A friend of mine, another NLP trainer, Ed Reese, did a home visit on a psychotic depression. The woman was sitting on the edge of her bed, not responding to anybody, and he tried all the stuff he could think of. He has a lot of flexibility and a lot of skills.

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Finally he went into the bathroom, got a paper cup full of warm water, put it behind his back, walked around, stood up on top of the bed, said, "Well, you really are a piece of shit." Unzipped his fly, and very gently trickled a little bit of warm water down her back.

She came out swinging. She was pissed, and being pissed is not a cure, but it's a start. She was engaged. He got a response from her, and then he could utilize that response.

Ryan: I find those examples very motivating. I can't imagine actually doing that, pretending like I'm pissing on someone, but as you were, the other example with Erickson just...sometimes we have this idea of Erickson as the miracle worker. He does all these amazing things, but when we're in front of someone, sometimes we just want to start with something very small. "What's something we can do to get this person moving in a particular direction?"

I just find that very motivating somehow.

Steve: One of Erickson's sayings was, and it's been in the forefront of my mind for the last, I don't know how many years since I've discovered it through a friend, is, "Your task is that of adjusting, not abolishing. Make a change, but don't try to wipe out anything." I think that's...I have yet to find an example that violates that. You want to make changes, but you don't want to try and wipe out anything.

Ryan: Yeah, that's interesting. It's also, I don't work too much doing hands-on Feldenkrais work anymore, but for many years I did, and Feldenkrais, back in the '90s, when I was learning it, was sort of the therapy of last resort. No one had heard of it. They'd see their physical therapist and their doctor, their massage therapist, and before giving up, say, "Well, I'll try this weird Feldenkrais stuff a chance."

In the beginning, I was very intimidated, because these people would come to me with really big problems. There had been car wrecks, they could hardly move, but it was somehow paradoxical in the sense that the more limited someone's movement was, the more pain they had, the easier it was, actually, to make a difference, to make just a subtle adjustment that would give them some space to breathe or to move, and so perhaps it's similar with Erickson's work.

Steve: Yep. Let me use another example.

There was one young man, he was in his mid-20s or something like that. He was in college full time, he had a full-time job in the evenings, and he loved to work, do music in a band on the weekends.

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He was hired because he clearly had talent, but he had so little time to practice that he wasn't developing his talent. His boss said that he was going to have to fire him if he didn't develop more, so there's clearly an impending loss, that he was depressed of.

In this case, Erickson just did straight-ahead problem solving. There wasn't an internal image to deal with. There wasn't an actual loss to deal with, there wasn't an internal conflict or anything else. It was just a practical problem that he didn't have time to practice.

He taught him time distortion, and taught him that in his evening job, on breaks and little moments when he didn't have anything he actually had to do — he was pausing between jobs or something like that — he used time distortion and imagined practicing his music, and he kept his job.

So since it's just a matter of simple problem solving, many people wouldn't call it therapy, but it got the job done.

Ryan: That's very cool. That has uses for a lot of things, I would think.

Steve: Sometimes, it's just a simple thing that somebody needs.

Another example from Erickson is the African Violet Queen. Do you know that story?

Ryan: Yep.

Steve: Just very briefly, it was a friend, a former client, said, "I've got an aunt who's depressed. She lives alone. She's in Milwaukee. I want you to go see her."

So he went to see her, and there was this dingy old house. She was independently wealthy, so she had a maid come in and a gardener and so on, but she didn't interact with anybody. The house was all gloomy.

But he found out that she went to church every Sunday, and he also found out that she grew African violets. He picked on these two things as whether there was some energy, there was something that could be developed. First he accused her of being not a very good Christian.

Ryan: Yeah, I remember that. Some more of that attention getting, like, "You're not a very good Christian," just to sort of...

Steve: It's partly attention-getting, and it's partly motivating. She thought she was a good Christian. She wanted to be a good Christian, so being accused of

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being a poor Christian — and what he meant by that was apparently she would enter the church just before the sermon, she would leave just before it ended. She never talked to anybody, she never interacted with anybody, and so on.

He talked about Christianity being all about giving and serving and interacting with other people and so on like that, and then he instructed her to raise African violets and then give them away every time there was a birth or a christening, or a marriage, or a death. She became known as the African Violet Queen.

By doing this, she re-engaged her with her future, so he essentially built a future for her, created a future, in which she would be interacting with other people. Now, she didn't have a sudden loss, but she had an empty life. She had a life that had no future, that had no essential relationships, essentially no relationships with other people. He built it for her.

Ryan: Very nice.

Steve: I've got my examples on little cards here.

Ryan: All right, that works for me.

Steve: There are two of Erickson's examples where women who had internal conflicts that erased their future, or made their future bleak. And that's another thing. People often talk about "the future looks black," or, "I have no future," or, "There is no future."

I talked earlier a little bit about just straight-ahead building a future. "What could you do tomorrow?" Again, starting very small. "What could you do differently tomorrow that would make you feel a little bit differently when you wake up in the morning? What could you do in the afternoon that's different than what you usually do?" and so on.

One of these women had found out that her best friend was having an affair with her father. Is there a loss there? I would say there is.

Ryan: Yeah.

Steve: Because she didn't like it at all. It wasn't appropriate as far as she was concerned. One way you could think about it is she was faced with losing either her friend or her father, or maybe both, because she probably didn't think about her father having affairs, and apparently he'd been having them all his life.

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She would lose her idealized image of her father, whatever happened, and she ended up breaking up with her friend.

Ryan: So she lost that friendship.

Steve: Yeah. This conflict was about, "What do I do in this situation? Whatever I do, it's between a rock and a hard place. Either way I lose something."

The other example of this was a woman who was raised by a very moralistic mother who told her to not let boys do anything to her, and so on. Her mother died when she was 13, and she didn't get to update this information. She fell in love, and when the guy tried to kiss her, she vomited all over him.

[laughter]

Steve: It actually didn't slow him down, but she refused to see him again and so on and so on, so it's an internal conflict between an early childhood admonition or injunction, and natural wanting to have a relationship, have children and a marriage, and so on.

In those cases, he worked on working on conflict inside.

What I'm trying to do here is fill the picture of, there's many kinds of losses. I'll go into that in more detail, too, but loss is the key thing, and then, what is causing the loss? Is it a practical thing like this musician, where he just couldn't find the time to practice to do better? Is it an actual loss? Is it a phantom loss, or a loss of a dream, in which case, you need to do the grief process and so on?

With loss as a major focus, then what are the parameters that are causing the loss, or threatening the loss, and what's the most efficient way of dealing with that? That's where I think Erickson really shone. I really don't know how much he knew about sub modalities, but he was immensely practical.

He would get the job done the most efficient and effective way, and in the shortest period of time. With the African Violet Queen, he only saw her once. She grew her violets, and the rest was just the result of the instructions he had given her. When she died, 900 people showed up at her funeral.

Ryan: That's interesting, because when I was doing some reading just to get prepared to talk to you, I read the grief resolution process, and I was really thinking of it in terms of death and dying, but there's all kinds of different losses.

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How do you make the decision to employ the grief process or to do something else?

Steve: Basically if there's an internal representation of something that has been lost — with the young man and the music, it was an impending thing, that he might lose it.

Steve: He hadn't actually lost it, but if he was told that he could never play again or something like that, or if he had injured his hand so he could no longer play guitar.

That leads into the other thing about what are different kinds of losses. You can lose a person, and that's what most people think about. You can also lose an activity. I'm almost 80 now, and there are a lot of things I can't do anymore. One of them is skiing. My balance is so bad now, that sometimes I get up out of a chair and sort of stagger around. I haven't fallen yet, but I stagger around. Skiing is totally out of the question now. Besides, I've got lower energy as well.

But I can still ski in my mind, and I can still feel the snow on my cheeks, and the wind on my cheeks as I go down the hill, and jump over jumps, and carve those turns, and so on. So activity is another one.

Location is another one. I'm a real location person. I love to have a particular thing, a place to live, have everything in its place where I know where it is. Location is important. Someone who loses a house or is forced to flee a country and loses a whole culture, they may lose relationships. They may lose location. They may lose information. They may lose their native language.

There are many, many different kinds of losses. There are basically five different categories. I've already mentioned person, location, activity, information, and things.

People lose things. For some people, losing a diamond ring is worse than losing a human being, and you need to give respect to that. It would be easy if you're a really person-oriented person, and if someone came to you for therapy, and they're all fussing about how they lost a diamond ring, you might think, "Oh, that's ridiculous," but for them it can be just as bad as for an athlete who loses his ability to play a sport. It can be just as bad as losing a human being in a relationship.

There's another aspect of loss, and that is that there's a loss of self. If a woman loses a child, she also loses her sense of self as a mother. If a

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sports guy loses an ability to play a sport, it isn't just losing the sport, it's losing the status that he might have had, the skill that he might have had, his self-concept of being an able person, so there's also the sense of self that's involved very often.

It's good to be aware of that and respect that. It's a way of building rapport, if nothing else. You can say, "Oh yeah, that must have been hard for you, to realize that you're no longer capable in that way, blah, blah, blah, whatever..." It's something they may not even have thought about.

Ryan: Yeah, this is great, because it's really expanding my ideas of what you've been teaching and what the possibilities are.

I spent many, many years in Utah, which is kind of like where you are in Colorado. There's the outdoor life everywhere. I could walk up and be in a canyon in 20 minutes. There's mountain biking. You have these deep forests, and to the south was the dessert. After a few years of living in Mexico, I'm in the very southern tip of Mexico where there's beach, and there's a little bit of outdoor life, but I've realized after a couple of years that something wasn't right in my life. I was feeling kind of disconnected, and I was missing the rolling, the rivers, the dessert, and the forests.

I remember just sitting back in my chair, back behind here, and just sort of trying to bring those experiences up, remember them, and think about planning a trip, et cetera, and I went out and actually bought a mountain bike. There's not any mountains around here, but over the course of a few weeks, I was able to find some trails out here in the system, and sort of find what nature I have here, and bring it into my life.

I guess that would be an example of a geographic shift. We change to a new area.

Steve: Of course. It's also a nice example of finding something that interests you and sending it out into the future, and doing something and re-engaging in the present and the future.

Ryan: Yeah, and actually I haven't taken any trips back to Utah or back to some of the nature up around...there's this city called Puebla that's got a lot of mountains, but it's out there, right? It's just a matter of, "We'll launch this conference, take a few days off," so it's created a bit of a future to pull some…Yeah, interesting.

Steve: One of my gripes with a lot of the...well, let me just back up a little bit.

Back in the '70s, I was part of the Now generation, of "be in the here and now," and now it's called mindfulness, being in the present moment, and

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there's certainly something to be said for that, particularly if you have a future that looks really bleak — is to step back, and feel your body, and feel the present moment.

But a lot of life is living into the future, and it can be overdone. Somebody can decide on a wonderful future, and then lose their life for years trying to achieve it and so on, so there can be an imbalance in that way.

But on the other hand, a lot of our satisfactions are in what we're hoping for and what we're working toward, and it can even save your life.

There's a story of Viktor Frankl, where he's in a concentration camp and is going on the work detail in the snow, and he stumbles and falls to his knees. The guard pokes him with the muzzle of his rifle and says, "Get up or I'll shoot you."

He flashed on being 5 or 10 years in the future, having survived that concentration camp, giving a lecture to a bunch of people on man's search for meaning, which was the book that he had already written, that was taken away, and then he tried to rewrite on little scraps of toilet paper and things like that while he was in the concentration camp.

That gave him the strength to get up off his knees and continue, so sometimes the future's really important, and if you have no future at all, it's not nice.

Ryan: No, that's brutal. That's

Steve: ...On a lot of people have that, and if you can help them build a little bit of the future...there's a piece in the grief resolution process — since it's written up, and you're going to get the thing, I won't go through it in gory detail, but there's a piece at the end.

After the person has re-associated into the love experience — whatever it is — and having the thing, the person, or the activity with them so that they can re-experience that fully in the present moment, then what you do is you take the qualities of that experience, make an image of the qualities, and then you make a separate image of how you could exercise those qualities in your present life.

You take that image — it's a future image — and so it's fairly vague. You don't know quite how it will happen or when it will happen. You make it glow, and then you multiply it into a deck of cards, 50 or 100 different

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cards, each of which is a little bit different, and then you cast them out into your future.

What happens, especially if people have their eyes closed, is these little glowing dots of light go out into the future. Some are fairly close, and some are at mid-ground, and some are in the farther future, but they're like little beacons that lead the person out into the future.

It's taking whatever is valuable to them, and throwing it out into their future, so that if they had a particular warmth and closeness that the loss hurts, they can think about how they can have warmth and closeness to other people in the future. It's a way of bridging from the past to the present into the future. That's one of the things that Erickson was always doing, going from the past into the present into the future.

Most people, when they're in difficulties oriented towards the past, or they have no future, and to reorient them into the future, is a huge intervention.

Ryan: Yeah, very much so.

So when someone comes into our office, they're sad, depressed, maybe we find some type of loss that they've had, or maybe they're talking about a loss, and we bring in the positive qualities of things before the loss, the good parts of the relationship, the good parts of the...

Steve: Whatever the image is. Let me give you another example that hopefully will also broaden the scope of this thing, because that's the major thing I want to get across here, is that this sense of loss is a unifying principle that you can find in many, many different ways.

The first time I was going to demonstrate this pattern in front of a conference, a woman came up to me ahead of time and said, "I had an abusive childhood, and it feels like I lost the childhood that I could have had. Is that something you could work with?"

I hadn't thought about it yet, that particular aspect, but I thought about it for a while, and I said, "What's your image of your childhood?" She had a very, very vivid image of the mother sitting in the chair, she's sitting on the floor, her head is in her mother's lap, the mother is stroking her hair, and so on.

I said, "Sure, it'll work," because she had that image. She never had the experience, but she had the image of the experience. That's what's driving people. It's the image inside, not the reality.

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And so I worked with it, and I heard back from her later. She was, like many people, she worked with abused people, and she did it with all her clients. She would elicit the idealized image of what they missed out on, and then give it back to them.

Once I did this with a friend's wife. I did this process with her, and my friend was watching and observing, and he says, "Ah, I see. She lost a part of herself, and you gave it back to her."

Ryan: This is fascinating, because I have a cognitive idea of what that would be like, but not the experiential base. So let's just say — I'll use myself — I feel a sense of loss, perhaps. There were things that I wanted to have happen or qualities to have happen with my parents that I didn't have.

But if I have an image of how I wanted things to be, you could help me bring that image in, and make it real. Does that change my past? Does it change the sense of my past?

Steve: It gives you an alternate past. I don't want to mess with people's real pasts, but it gives you an alternate past.

There's a famous example with Erickson called The February Man, where a woman had had a very deprived childhood, cold mother, and distant business father. He visited her as The February Man, and interspersed experiences before or after her birthday, before or after some particular time in her life, so that it didn't interfere with her real life, her real experiences, and her real memories, but he sliced things in.

For most of us, in fact, for all of us as far as I know, we don't have a totally continuous past. There are gaps. There are times when nothing much is going on. It's time where it's another day like yesterday.

He would slice in experiences in there that gave her the sense of being loved and wanted, and understood so that she could be a good mother to her child, because she was planning to have a child and she knew that she would be a bad mother because she didn't know what a good mother was.

He spent a lot of time with her building experiences of what it is to be parented, so that she could then use that as a basis for parenting her own child.

Erickson was tremendously creative.

Ryan: Well, so are you, and the people that you work with. You're doing stuff here, you're making a lot of patterns explicit. I feel like I'm in a trance right now, thinking about the possibilities.

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I think I've had an experience of what you're talking about, where I've — I don't want to talk about myself here too much, but I want to bring the experiential aspects in for people. I had not talked to my father for quite some time, and when he got sick and he died, I had been traveling. I was unreachable, and so this whole process — my father got sick, he died, the funeral, and I wasn't around.

At one point just a couple of days ago, when I was reading through your grief process, I had this idea that I had, since my father had died...he was very upset when I dropped out of college, right? It was a big deal for him. He was really upset, angry, and since then I've finished college, gotten a master's degree, taken some other post-grad training.

I don't know how or why, but I was working with your grief process, reading through it, and I just imagined an old situation where we had argued about me not having my degree, and I was telling him, "Hey, man, I've got my bachelor's degree. I've got my master's."

I remember getting this idea that he was very happy about that. Somehow, it was a traumatic memory, fell away.

Steve: Yes.

Ryan: I know it's not real, per se, but it feels real.

Steve: Here's the thing. It's not real in the sense that your father was not real, and here's the important thing. What's important is your image of your father, just as what's important is the image of the loss.

What you did was you made peace with a part of yourself, and as far as I know, and I'm pretty much immaterial, your father probably didn't know anything about what you did in your mind. What you did, and your image of your father did, whenever we're angry at somebody or have difficulties with somebody in our mind, it's like our brain gets separated a little bit.

There's the me, and then there's the person I'm having trouble with. There's a disjunction there, there's a separation, and by doing this kind of internal dialogue in experience with fault visualization and feeling, essentially healing spite within yourself.

Ryan: Every time — you said something about the image with my father — I immediately went over here to where the image of my friend is that we talked about in the beginning of the session, my friend who's far away, who feels very present to me.

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Then you said it again, "As far as you're concerned the image of your father," and then I went over there. Obviously, I'm in on the game, because I know a lot about the process, but I can see how...anyway, it's helping me associate into some positive images and positive experiences, so. [laughs]

Steve: Right. Thank you.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks a lot.

Is there more that we need to cover here? Are there more examples that you have?

Steve: Let me just look through my notes and see if I've left anything out seriously.

Well, there's probably something in here, but I don't think it's that important. Oh, maybe one other thing. Long ago, there used to be an idea that depression was anger turned inwards.

Ryan: Yeah, I remember that.

Steve: I haven't heard much about that recently, and I think probably that's a good thing. I don't think it's anger turned inwards. I think sometimes someone can be in conflict and be angry at somebody, and result in depression because it cuts off their future, or because it eliminates possibility in the present that they'd hoped for and looked forward to.

But I don't think the depression, anger turned inwards makes a lot of sense.

Ryan: No, and I don't think too many people listening to this or experiencing this presentation, or Ericksonians in general would believe that.

Steve: I don't think so, but it was something that I jotted down and I mentioned something earlier...

Ryan: Well, if they do, we'll hear about it. They'll leave a comment under the presentation, so I may get back to you with the comments that people leave.

Steve: Well, even if somebody believes that, I think perhaps I could adjust their belief a little bit.

If I'm angry at myself, it's not really me that's angry at myself. It's an interjected part of somebody else. It's like a parent, like you talked about your father was angry with you. That's a part that you interjected, and it

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became part of yourself. You remembered that he was angry with you, so it became a part of yourself.

That means it's like an internal conflict that needs to be resolved. Well, you did resolve it already, but if somebody had that and had not resolved it, then it was an internal division that needed some resolution.

Ryan: Could we talk for just a couple of more minutes about one piece of your presentation, or one kind of loss, which is the loss of self?

Steve: Sure. Ryan: So things like someone comes into our office, and they've just been

through a divorce, and they're feeling the loss of that relationship. Let's say they've dropped out of graduate school, so there's a career, perhaps, that's not going to materialize.

Steve: Sure, there could be lots of different losses. It's good to realize that there might be lots of different losses, and to validate and acknowledge all of them.

Someone might come in and, say, just be focused on the divorce and the loss of the spouse, and you can say, "That must have been difficult for you to give up your dream of what you were going to have with your…..so

Ryan: Then do we associate them to the positive qualities of that relationship that they had before the breakup? And then...

Steve: You bet, and here's another important distinction to make. Sometimes a loss is traumatic. Somebody's in a car accident and dies. The other person is with them in the car, and they don't die. What you need to do then is be very careful and separate out the method of the death and the loss of the relationship from the relationship itself.

And the traumatic experience of the loss of the relationship, you have to deal with using the phobia procedure, the VK dissociation, and the grief is just the opposite. If you don't separate them out, the more you try to deal with the phobia or the traumatic situation, the worse the grief gets.

If you try and work with the grief, the worse the trauma gets, because they're exact opposites. In trauma, you're remembering a horrible experience, associating and being inside it.

Ryan: You need some distance.

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Steve: And in grief, you're remembering a wonderful experience, but from a distance, so they're exactly opposite, structurally. You have to do opposite things.

With the trauma, you need to get the distance from it, so that you can see it like Dr. Spock, and for the grief, you're already doing that, and you need to re-associate and bring it in so that you have the positive experience.

The basic idea is that good things and bad things happen to us through life. Some people get the raw short end of the stick and get a lot of bad stuff and not so much good stuff, but either way, whatever the balance is in a particular person's life, they may as well dissociate from the bad stuff so that they don't have to have all the bad feelings, and associate into the good stuff so that they can have those as resourceful feelings to go forward into the world, the future.

Ryan: I think that was the piece that I was somehow looking for, consciously or otherwise, so in the sense of someone just going through a relationship, you can help them, or we can help them, associate to the positive parts of that relationship — the feelings, the ideas, the qualities that they want to have in the future, and disassociate from perhaps the negative qualities, or the things they didn't like about their relationship.

Steve: Yeah, once I demonstrated this at a social work conference. A guy came up, and his wife had died of cancer. The last six months were up and down — chemotherapy — and good times and bad times. They made really good use of it. They reminisced about old times together, and all of the enjoyment they'd had during their marriage and so on.

But it was interspersed with good time and bad time, good time and bad time. So I had him go in a film-editing booth and just go through all the movies of those six months, and sort it out. All the good stuff went on one side, all the bad stuff went on one side, and got those all sorted out.

Once they got it all sorted out, did the phobia procedure on the bad stuff, and the grief procedure on the good stuff. It's often important to sort things out, because there's a lot of different factors going on. If you don't sort things out, it can be really a muddle and be hard to accomplish anything.

Ryan: Great. I encourage people watching this presentation to, again, go to the link. I think if they just type in "Steve Andreas grief process," they'll come to it, but I'll put the link as well — to grab that, print it out, and go through the process a few times, with friends, with colleagues, and feel free to start with something subtle.

Steve: That's really mild. Don't go for the...

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Ryan: Yeah. I found it very accessible, very easy to do, and a great learning experience.

Steve: Most people have no objections to resolving grief. There are a few that are discussed in that article. The easiest way to find it is to go to SteveAndreas.com, and then search for "articles," and then "grief." That's probably the quickest way, since they can't click on it. Or maybe they can click on a link.

Ryan: I think they should be able to click on it.

We've been going for about an hour.

Steve: Well, maybe it's time to wrap up. Do you have anything?

Ryan: Well, no. You mentioned objections, so can we talk for two or three minutes about objections?

Steve: Well, some people will say...

Ryan: If people want to get up and stretch, they can do that.

[laughter]

Steve:

Some people will say, "Well, if I feel like I'm with the person, that might get in the way of my future relationships," and it turns out, that's exactly backwards, that by having a sense of what it is like to be in a loving relationship, it gives you a template, or it gives you a goal to strive for in meeting new people, and recreating that relationship with somebody else.

And these are very rare, that people have objections, but there are a few sometimes, but sometimes people will say, "Well if people knew I was going around with my dead wife at my side all the time, they'd think I was nuts." Well, just don't tell them.

Other people — if someone's from a Middle Eastern culture where you're supposed to grieve for a year, or wear black for a year, or something like that, then if you don't, then other people will...you don't fit in with the culture.

Well, you can have the sense of being with this person, so you know that you're not grieving, but I'm sure you know how to look mopey and put

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your head down, wear black. you can go through the motions of satisfying a culture while at the same time, inside feeling resourceful and so on.

So there a few of the objections like this, but mostly they're not that strong.

I want to mention one other thing. If somebody has some objections or some hesitancy, you can say, "Talk to your son, and ask him, how would he like to be remembered? Ask him that, and find out what he says." I have never yet found anybody who says, "I want you to remember me crying and weeping, and moaning and groaning."

They all say, "I want you to remember the good times." You don't have to put words into their mouth. You just say, "Talk to your son. Ask him how he would like to be remembered."

Ryan: Yeah, that's very powerful.

Steve: It is. It's a very simple little piece, but it's very powerful, and there's another good one, too. There are all these little tricks, there are these little pieces.

If someone has some hesitation, you can say, "You know about amnesia, right? Where you forget everything? Now, if I could give you amnesia from ever having known your son, for ever having known your spouse, would you accept that?"

Ryan: No, that's painful, even just to think about.

Steve: Exactly. [laughs] Everybody always instantly answers, "Yes," but it builds a picture. It builds an unconscious image of, "Oh my God, yes," and then you can ratify that and say, "Yes, of course. It was a wonderful experience. It would be terrible to lose it," just as Erickson did with the example of the woman who'd lost her baby.

It would be terrible to throw that experience away, but it's a real punchy way of getting that across. We do except amnesia. No one has ever accepted, has ever said yes.

Ryan: I feel physically revulsed at that idea, even with some sort of painful relationships I've had. To just totally block them out would somehow seem like numbing or cutting off some part of myself, which I don't want.

Steve: Exactly, and you could amplify that, too, because in any relationship, not only do you discover things about the other person, but you discover things about yourself, your own ability to care, your own ability to be all

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those loving things that you did in response to the other person. Those are parts of yourself. That's the "self" part of the loss, that often people lose. When they lose their relationship with the other person, they also lose a sense of themselves as a loving, caring person, able to be humorous and spontaneous, and so whatever qualities were brought out in you by that relationship.

Ryan: Great. We haven't talked specifically, really, about hypnosis, like hypnotic language patterns, and that type of thing, but they're everywhere in what you're doing. There's presuppositions about time, and experiences. I just want to point that out for people that are listening. What you're doing is very hypnotic, but we're not necessarily saying, "Go into a trance."

Steve: No. In fact, I've just been watching some Erickson videos that were fairly recently released, and in one of them he says, almost word for word, "Hypnosis by itself doesn't do anything. Hypnosis is a way of creating the positive climate for doing other things."

My emphasis is on, "What do you do after hypnosis, or what do you do after someone's in a trance?" Personally, the most I ever put somebody in a trance is they close their eyes.

On the other hand, a lot of the things that I do are trancey. When I do the thing about, "Would you accept amnesia?", that builds a picture for the person of losing all the wonderful things. That's essentially a trance. That's a very motivating trance.

You talked about being revulsed. You had an unconscious response to that image. It was very powerful for you.

Ryan: Yeah, and being deeply involved in some future possibility, some future state, that's trance, very much like.

Micheal Yapko says that a lot, too. He's like, "Hypnosis is a powerful amplifier, but it's not therapy," in his opinion, or not necessarily change work.

Steve: I think amplifier is a good word. It can help people focus attention. I think all therapy and change is a matter of shifting attention from one thing to another, looking at things in a different way, and trance can help that, but personally I can do pretty much everything I need to do without any official trance.

But I don't work with some of the difficult people that Erickson worked with, either. There are probably people that I can't work with very well, because I don't use trance, but that's my style.

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Ryan: Yeah, maybe. I'm not so sure I'd agree with that, but my consciousness had definitely been shifted as we've talked, and as I go into thinking about my friend, thinking about the future, and thinking about these various possibilities. It's definitely been hypnotic for me, and I'm guessing for some of the other people.

Steve: Another way of talking about hypnosis is that any time you use words, you're doing hypnosis.

Ryan: Yep, I remember that from somewhere, Bandler, Grinder or maybe it was you. I don't know.

Steve: I think it's in the book, "Tranceformations." Any time you're interacting with somebody, your words are ways of conveying experience, ideally. Unfortunately, a lot of therapy is involved in describing experience rather than creating experience. The hypnotic language is about creating experience.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann said a long time ago, back in the '40s, "People don't come for explanations. They come for experience." Unfortunately, most therapy I see, it's all explanations and almost no experience at all. In fact, it mostly puts you to sleep.

Ryan: Ericksonians and Erickson in general — it's all about creating new experiences for people.

Steve: It is.

Steve: And most hypnosis is about that, too. Even the crude hypnosis is about at least relaxation. It's an instruction. It's an injunctive language.

Paul Watzlawick talked long ago about injunctive language versus descriptive language. Descriptive language is, "You're this way because of your parents and your genes, and your this, that and the other." That's describing things.

Injunctive language is, "Try this out, and find out what happens." Hypnosis is all injunctive language. "If that's do that, do the other."

Ryan: I have to admit, I'm full at this plate, so I'm not going to be able to understand what you just said until I put this online and review the video a couple of days from now. [laughs]

Steve: Okay, well, thanks a lot. I think I'm pleased.

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Ryan: Yeah, so am I. I appreciate you doing this. I'm glad. I think it was two years ago that we did this last time, so I hope we can keep doing it. It's very valuable, in my opinion.

Steve: Well, I'll do my best to stick around, and thank you for your participation in this, because you've been an important part of this.

Ryan: Thank you.

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Documents

John Crook Teleseminar€¦ · Web viewBasically, I would explore the different kinds. The summary says it probably better than I can say it myself, but there's actual loss, there's