Development of My Professional Philosophy, Part III
Dr. Milton H. Erickson
You may remember from Developing My Professional Philosophy, Part II, I shared about discovering the work of Dr. Milton H. Erickson (MHE) and how important his work is to me. Additionally, I discovered the work from the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA called Brief Strategic Therapy where they also studied the work of MHE and taught tools for resolution to problems.
As a review, MHE determined that what people were doing to solve their problems was the very thing that perpetuated their problems. Their Attempted Solution = The Problem. MHE found ways and gave instruction consciously and unconsciously to interrupt the Attempted Solution and people got better.
Here are some examples of what is meant by an Attempted Solution (AS) = The Problem (P):
People trying to lose weight.
AS – They frequently focus excessively on food and diet plans, counting calories, fat grams and points.
P – This creates the response to obsess about food and creates more cravings as a result.
Parents who have problems controlling their acting out children.
AS – They spend hours lecturing the child with no progress toward gaining any control of the situation.
P – Yelling at a child gives attention to unwanted behaviors and conveys the message that the parents really have no control. Oftentimes, when yelling does not work, their tendency is to yell louder or lecture more.
Individuals dealing with unwanted feelings or behaviors.
AS – The focus is on “what is wrong and why?”
P – In most cases, it is impossible to determine the “wrong” and the “why.” And even if we could, what good would that do? This focus keeps us stuck on our undesired past.
I have spent many hundreds of hours in Neuro- Linguistic Programming (NLP) workshops and other trainings, learning all I could to develop skills to help my clients in therapy. I take my profession very seriously and feel it is my role to facilitate people to find their deeper inner resources and resolve their problems.
In the future, I will be offering Zoom workshops to help you have an experience of processes to achieve the state of creating new and different, more positive and satisfying choices. Please contact me if you are interested!
I believe there is nothing wrong with anyone. We are all doing the best we can, based on our past experiences and how we learned to adapt and survive. In our own ways, we have all been caught in doing more of the same of what’s not working, expecting different results: the definition of insanity.