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Erickson and Confusion
The ingenious Milton Erickson was on the right track for his time toward this aspect of confusion. It is said he once had an encounter with a man who, in his haste, ran into him. Whereupon Erickson looked down at his watch and said politely: "The time is exactly ten minutes after two o'clock." - although it was almost four o'clock, gave the man a friendly nod and kept going. A while later, Erickson turned around and found the stranger, as if rooted on the spot, staring at him in bewilderment. He had played this game ever since he was a child.
There once was a stable hand who was using all his might to lead a donkey into a stall. The animal bucked, as donkeys are wont to do, planted its haunches firmly to the ground and did not budge. No matter how hard the man tugged and cursed at it. So what did little Milton do? A quick yank on the donkey's tail - and the donkey was sent flying through the stall.
"Confusion is the best method of debunking strongly held assumptions."
Milton Erickson followed this maxim to success with his mentally ill patients. The goal was to confuse the patients so much with unconnected trivialities that they no longer clung so tightly to their problems, and at those moments were open to new perspectives and paths to solutions.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ron Franks on -
No doubt Doc, that...
confusion is a great condition for bypassing the critical faculty fascilitating hyper suggestibility however, most often that condition provides a window of opportunity which generally exists for mere seconds rather than moments and because of the need to operate quickly and effectively within that time frame, I'm hesitant to agree that "Confusion is the best method of debunking strongly held assumptions." Personally, I prefer using expectancy for setting up hypnosis as the window of opportunity is much longer and I feel more comfortably gliding, rather than rushing into hypersuggestibility. But to each his/her own, for sure. -
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