face appearing, eliciting an involuntary autonomic response of constriction. Then it was easy to give her another way to trigger that constriction response, so she didn't have to have an image of a strange man looking at her all day long!
One of Erickson's clients was a woman who was in intractable pain due to inoperable cancer, and drugs and surgery had not helped. After considerable matching of her doubts and skepticism about hypnosis, Erickson asked her, "Now tell me, madam, if you saw a hungry tiger in the next room, slowly walking into the room and eying you hungrily, and licking its chops, how much pain would you feel?" Immediate and extreme danger is a context in which people don't notice pain.
A man who couldn't drive outside the city limits of Phoenix without passing out and vomiting was told to put on his best suit, drive out on the flat desert to the city limits, and stop by the last telephone pole he thought he could reach. Then he was to start his car, accelerate to about 15 mph, and then put it in neutral so that it would gently coast to a stop when he passed out. If he felt faint, he was to stop the car, and get out and lie in the roadside ditch until he regained consciousness. When I first read these instructions years ago, they made no sense to me at all, yet they are filled with nonverbal implication, and they were effective in freeing that man from his limitation. He drove many miles to a neighboring town before returning home. Pause now to re-read those instructions and see how many nonverbal implications you can find. . . .
Wearing his best suit implies not vomiting, and not lying in the ditch where it would get dirty. Having to put the car into neutral implies some control, or at least delay, in passing out, and passing out implies a delay in driving out of town, rather than its impossibility. Passing out also became the beginning of driving out of town, not the end of it. The man passed out repeatedly in the car, but Erickson makes no mention of his vomiting or lying in the ditch.
A "horribly fat girl, prudent and prudish," came in for a first session and said that even if she lost weight she would still be about the ugliest girl in all creation. Erickson spent most of the hour-long therapy session handling and looking at a paperweight, only occasionally glancing up at her briefly. At the very end of the session he said to her:
"I hope you'll forgive me for what I have done. I haven't faced you. I know it's rude. I've played with this paperweight; it's been rather difficult to look at you. I'd rather not tell you, but since it's a psychotherapeutic situation, I really ought to tell you. Perhaps you can find the explanation. But actually I have the very strong feeling that when you get reduced, at least everything I see about you, that's why I keep avoiding looking at you, indicates that when you get reduced you will be even more sexually attractive, which is something that should not be discussed between you and me."
Since in the context of therapy, Erickson shouldn't notice or talk about her sexual attractiveness, the fact that he did, along with his rudeness in not looking at her, playing with a paperweight instead, etc. all nonverbally implied the truth of what he said.
If we summarize the essential ingredients in nonverbal implication, that will make it easier to learn to use it deliberately and systematically.
Nonverbal Implication:
1. Is provided by some element of the nonverbal context.
2. This context can be either real, or imagined/hallucinated, but it must be vivid
and compelling.
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