Milton Hyland Erickson, MD, was born in December 1905, and grew up in Lowell, Wisconsin. Dyslexia, and color-blind, he was largely self-taught. His self-training methods and his perception that many "autohypnotic" and "Eureka" experience in his youth led to Ericksonian hypnosis.
Ericksonian hypnosis is some of the earliest science-based body of hypnotic techniques. It is based on the "confusion" that Erickson, who was a psychiatrist and one of the earliest recognized psychotherapists, insisted the gateway to the reprogramming of the mind. One of Erickson's own autohypnotic experience, one that come in during the confusion and transform their lives, occurred when 17 years old and had polio. Who predicted his doctor soon fatal
In the July 1977 edition of "American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis," Erickson recalled in an interview with Ernest L. Rossi that it is the night when he had to die, "I lay in bed that night I heard three doctors say my parents in another room that their boy will be dead in the morning. I felt intense anger that anyone should tell the boy's mother was dead by morning on a mirror on the dresser I could see through the door, through the west window another room. i was damned if i die without seeing another sunset i saw all the sunset, but I saw the fence and large boulder that were there. i blocked out everything except the sunset. After what I saw sunset, i lost consciousness for three days. when I finally woke up, I asked my father why are taken to fences, trees and rocks. i did not realize i had them washed, when i fixed my attention so intensely on the sunset sun ."
Convinced that his intense focus given him healing the body, these and many other experiences of its further convinced that Erickson subconscious or unconscious mind has a vast and largely untapped power. Indeed, as long as it is to recover sufficiently from his polio will be able to get out of bed, he learned to entertain the people watching those around him on the farm where he lived. This led him to intensively study of people's body language, nonverbal cues, and how they react to their environment. He realized that his brothers and sisters, all but one of them were women, could easily say "no" when they mean "yes" and vice versa.
Ericksonian confusion involves going along with the patient when they say they can not do or have something - that things are "hopeless" or "impossible" and then skillfully ask the patient what some would call "leading questions" to to publish them to feel that, in fact, they will not give up, which means that their situation, and probably very difficult, not "hopeless" or "impossible". In other words, he gets people to resist their feelings of despair or helplessness. As Erickson have done with their polio
Ericksonian Hypnosis and Psychotherapy also makes great use of "therapeutic metaphors", or concept is presented as a symbolic analogy or a story about what the patient is experiencing or has recently experienced, to make them see things from a new perspective to directly advise or conversation would not allow them to see.