UNSOLICITED STORIES
My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson – Sidney Rosen
Kev and I were discussing how, and to what extent, people come to believe in disproven hypnosis concepts and theories such as trance and ‘conversational hypnosis’ yesterday.
Kev suggested that if you have no prior knowledge of, or investment in, a new concept or theory, you’re likely to maintain a healthy scepticism and distance.
But, on the flip side, let’s say a person is familiar and invested – for instance, pursuing NLP and then discovering ‘conversational hypnosis’ in a big ‘aha!’ moment. In that case, a belief that the discovery is real and credible is more likely to be sown, and the person continues down that path and confirms their biases accordingly.
I added to this mix: the heady thrill of thinking you’ve come up with a novel idea – say, your own mad brand of ‘conversational hypnosis’ – and then happily discovering a bunch of people who’ve done the groundwork for you.
That’s kinda what happened to me. And, boy, was it challenging to question and shake those beliefs!
I revisited My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson with this conversation, and remembrances of my earlier beliefs, in the back of my mind.
I first read Sidney Rosen’s compilation of Erickson’s ‘teaching tales’ waaay back in mid-2016. So early into my hypno-journey, in fact, I wasn’t convinced my GENIUS ideas about communications, stories, metaphors and messages had anything to do with this ‘hypnosis’ nonsense!
I remember lapping up the stories – they confirmed many of my biases, and I assaulted people with unsolicited ‘therapising’ stories parcelled up in peculiar speech patterns and obnoxious behaviours for months afterwards. (Sorry, people!)
Interestingly, because I had not personally invented trance, it made zero sense to me – and so I discarded it as a relic of hypnosis-past.
Similarly for inductions – namely, Milton’s famous handshake induction. My own-brand hypnosis ideas included the possible need for a jarring or confusing ‘inciting incident’. So I was intrigued for a time by this apparent ‘key to the city of mind-control’ and spent many an hour on YouTube studying the chocolate-box variety of inductions. (A rugby-tackle induction struck me as the most novel… yet dangerous!)
However, as someone drawn to ‘power hypnotism’, I felt that The Patriarchy would never allow for my inductions to be especially commanding. And so this was also soon discarded. (In spite of some top-notch feminist thinking on the merits of an air-kiss induction.)
I remember finding Milton, the man and the legend that surrounded (and still surrounds) him, deeply inspiring. And I could feel the lure of NLP and conversational hypnosis courses and products galore that promised to unlock his secrets…
But I was more invested in the methods in my own madness back then. The thinking styles and turns-of-phrase of an old, white, male American born in 1901, prescribing 50s/60s nuclear family ‘apple-pie-and-white-picket-fences’ American Dreams to people in his capacity as a doctor, was of limited interest and value to me.
(Writing this, I’m grateful that mad, egomaniacal, hypnosis-inventor Amy saved me a small fortune in Milt-inspired NLP and conversational hypnosis offerings!)
Rereading this book today, the teaching tales remain as poetic and inspiring as before. But so much has changed for me since…
I used to take individual case histories and anecdotal evidence on merit. When we first met, Kev quickly crushed my naivety with a crash-course in science! Clark L Hull, who taught Milton Erickson, drove the change to measure results with quantitative data rather than via individual case histories; it’s hard to get excited about an apparent one-off success with, say, a bedwetter after such truth-bombs!
I guess I’ve also read sufficient case histories now that I appreciate the vast superiority of a Milton Erickson bedwetter tale. The storytelling and writing, as well as the richness and cleverness of the metaphors and (apparent) social engineering, are unsurpassed in the hypnosis world IMO (so far). I don’t doubt that many tales are grounded in truth, and that Erickson did help and succeed with many patients. But it would be fascinating to unpick how Erickson’s students and acolytes finessed these stories over the years; it’s funny to think that perhaps a too-rigorous edit here, or a too-florid rewrite there of a printed story influenced ‘conversational hypnosis’ as much as Milt did!
This time around, I really enjoyed and appreciated the editor Sidney Rosen’s introductory commentary. I’m much more interested these days in the wider constellation of people around Erickson – I realise I’ve neglected investigating the work of his wife, Betty, as well as Jay Haley, plus there’s a mention of Milt hypnotising Aldous Huxley in the 1950s that I’ll keep an eye out for.
All in all, I love this book and I’m now looking forward to revisiting other books I read early in my hypno-journey to see what did and didn’t push my belief-buttons at the time.
