Milton Hyland Erickson - a short biography
Erickson's influences and things/people he influenced
Milton Hyland Erickson was an American psychiatrist who specialized in the clinical hypnosis field and also conducted therapy for families. He was born Dec. 5, 1901 in Arum, Nevada and died March 25, 1980 while in Phoenix, Arizona.
Erickson founded the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, as well as being lauded for what some saw as miracle cures through his use of treatment methods then considered unconventional. He also had much influence in the areas of psychiatry,
neuro-linguistic programming, psychology and several forms of other therapy.
Erickson: Overcoming Diversity in His Life
Erickson came from a farming family and originally wanted to be a farmer as well. However, he had several physical problems including being color blind, dyslexic and worst of all; he got polio at age 17. He become so paralyzed that the doctors told his family he was going to die.
There is a story of the night when the doctors had told Erikson’s parents he would die. He had asked his mother to place a mirror in his room at such an angle that he could see one more sunset before he died, however there was fence and a big boulder in the way outside. He says that he concentrated so deeply on the sunset that he put himself into an altered state and was able to block out the fence and boulder.
Of course, he didn’t die, but did spend three days unconscious. When he awoke he thought the fence and boulder were gone due to his vision, but was shocked to find them still there. This experience would be one of the things that led him to learning more about hypnosis, altered states and related areas.
He also credited his success to his interest in language (verbal and nonverbal) and listening to patients speak whilst they lay in bed paralyzed from the polio. Another moving experience, Erickson claims, was when he spent much of his time watching one of his sisters learn to crawl and walk. He said that this helped him learn how to train his body get back sensations and start his recovery from cancer. Later in life when the polio returned he learned to treat his pain with self-hypnosis methods which are very popular today. Some say that his fight back from polio is what influenced his work in what Erickson called, “ordeals.”
Despite his handicaps and problems early on, Erickson strived onward and became the doctor, therapeutic hypnotist, psychiatrist and one of the prominent influences in NLP that everyone knows him by today.
Erickson and His Legacy
Erickson is credited with influencing many forms of therapy including family therapy and strategic therapy methods. He is credited with being one of the first doctors to believe in getting other family members involved in the therapy to be able to better help the patient, as well as being able to use nearly anything from a patient’s background to help them to recover from their beliefs to their culture, history, habits or even their favorite words.
To do this, he taught other doctors that the unconscious mind is separate from the conscious mind, yet retains an ability to have awareness of its surrounding with its own interests and creative abilities that could be harvested and used to help the patient.
Gregory Batesson introduced
John Grinder and Richard Bandler to Erickson in the 70’s. Grinder and Bandler then
modelled Erickson and found they could achieve similar results. This formed the backbone of NLP back in the early days and its influence is still very much seen in NLP today.
Erickson’s Hypnotic Methods
Milton Erickson used hypnosis to put patients into trance, then to to give their unconscious minds suggestions which would help their therapeutic response. He would then communicate and hold conversations with the person’s unconscious mind to influence them. He would even put himself into a trance as well if he thought that it would help his patients.
However, Erickson debunked the idea that one could influence the unconscious mind to cause someone to do something they didn’t want to do. He thought that such suggestions would instead be countered by the person’s own unconscious objection. Instead, he explained that his methods were able to offer the patient possible opportunities and choices that would help their situation. These subtle suggestions would present themselves in such a way that clients would be most likely accept and undertake.
For example, if someone was a smoker and wished to stop, they may not accept a firm suggestion telling them they had to quit, but may accept a positive statement given to them in a trance that told them they were capable of becoming a non-smoker. This is due to the fact that the second phrase is an encouraging suggestion while the other is seen as a demand. To read more about this please see our article on the
Milton Model.
Erickson’s therapy methods
Erickson is also famous for his therapy techniques besides hypnotism. He didn’t use traditional methods of getting the patient to talk about what was wrong, instead he told them to only tell them what they wanted to tell him and didn’t pry things out of his patients. He believed that by giving the person permission to hold things back that they would be more likely to tell him things. In his experience, this was indeed the case in many of his patients.
He had several other unorthodox methods of therapy that he used with patients. These included ‘in life experiments’ that involved different strategies to get people, or even his father’s farm animals, to do things they initially balked at doing. Much of this was again based on his study of the unconscious mind.
Erickson: The Latter Years
Through his use of hypnosis and the sometimes seemingly strange ways he went about his therapy sessions, Erickson is credited as helping to get rid of the superstitions around hypnosis and now many physiatrists use it as a powerful tool for helping their patients.
Erickson also wrote many books and in later years conducted many lectures. As well as NLP, he is credited with influencing many forms of today’s psychiatric treatments such as brief therapy, solution based therapy, and some forms of children’s psychology.
The bottom line is that Erickson was one of the greatest psychiatrists of his time and without his work and studies, many things would be different in the fields of hypnosis, NLP and other therapy forms in today’s modern medical treatments. We owe Erickson, and those that modelled him, a great deal of gratitude.
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