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Like everyone else, Milton Erickson had his own criteria about what kinds of lessons are important for people to learn so that they can enjoy happy and productive lives. The three that seem to permeate his work most often are learning to be flexible, to have a sense of humor about oneself and the world, and to look to the future. — David Gordon, Phoenix
Stephen Wolinsky (1992) postulates that the dysfunctional ways in which we interact with our surroundings are essentially based on states of trance. These trance states, which are observer-created, are the vehicle by which we select how our subjective world is perceived, interpreted, internalized and hence experienced. Of necessity, we do not interact with reality but with the maps and scripts we have internalized. Turning the normal psychological approach on its head, in Wolinsky's view the task of the therapist becomes one of observing and identifying the self-generated problem state or hypnotic trance and de-hypnotizing the person out of the trance he or she is already in. Often, based on personal or family history, we are maintaining a state of trance that limits our resources and flexibility to respond appropriately to the current situation, both external and internal.
Wolinsky's thoughts about trance are in many ways a dramatic example of postulates from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) about how we model and interact with the external world. In their summary of NLP technology, Kostere and Malatesta (1990) note the three universal modeling processes: generalization, deletion, and distortion. By these processes, each one of us builds models or maps of the world, and it is by way of these models that we organize and communicate experience. A model, by its nature, focuses on certain aspects of the external world and excludes others. While such mental maps allow us to reduce the sheer magnitude of experience to a manageable level, if they do not correspond well to what they represent, they can lead us to error. Kostere and Malatesta comment: “A model is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but can be evaluated only as to its usefulness in making available specific outcomes. Models inherently provide both limitations and resources”.
In cultures with oral traditions, stories were often used to enlighten and subtly teach the listener. Stories could often speak directly to the unconscious mind, circumventing entrenched conscious resistance and avoiding direct confrontations. David Gordon (1978,1981) has extensively documented the use and structure of such metaphor and story by psychologist Milton H. Erickson to gain phenomenal results in his therapeutic interventions. Erickson strongly believed that patients came to him already possessing the resources they needed, but that they were prevented by their maps and beliefs from appropriately accessing their resources. His task then became to discover a way to increase their flexibility and choice. Even beyond what resources we can access, the maps we use may have substantial impacts on how we process information within our brain. Impacts that can effect how we conceptualize and practice massage.
Art instructor Betty Edwards (1979) noted while teaching that it was difficult for her to draw and discuss drawing at the same time. It was as if these two activities required two different modes of thought, similar to using two different intelligences in the sense of Howard Gardner's work. Ultimately, this led her to think of drawing as an activity that occurred in the right hemisphere of the brain while verbal-linguistic modes occurred in the left hemisphere. More significant to the art of drawing, Edwards observed that attempting to draw while in a left-brained mode resulted in simplistic drawings that were more symbols for the object being considered than accurate representations of what was being seen. In today's world of computer desktops, the left-brained drawings might be considered as icons for the observed object. Edwards further noted that by slowing down the process and paying attention to the lines and textures, literally boring the left-brain with details, she could induce a switch to a right-brain way of seeing that greatly improved a student's artwork. Suddenly her students began seeing and reproducing the actual lines and shading rather than the symbolic representations.
In an fascinating parallel, Clyde Ford (1999), whose work as a chiropractor has led him into working with survivors of abuse and trauma, has also taken steps from the symbolic to the specific. Ford notes the maze of different somatic techniques and then makes the following conclusion.
Somatic therapy is often dogmatic in insisting on technique. There is an underlying belief that the right technique produces the right outcome—physically or emotionally. Like searching for the Holy Grail, practitioners expend much effort searching for the perfect technique. … In response to this confused state of affairs, I ask myself what the body knows. Can the body possibly know that at any particular moment I'm using acupressure as opposed to functional integration or Rolfing? Of course not. Can the body know I'm interested in a particular emotion when I touch an area? What, then, does the body know? When stated in this way it's possible to describe somatic therapy without reference to specific technique. There is a somatic language of touch, movement, and awareness our body knows well. Perhaps it would be better if we attempted to understand what the body knows and not impose upon the body a technique of our choosing.
Ford continues with his thoughts to discuss primitive elements of the language of touch. He considers the two objects of the language to be touch or no-touch and the rules of touch to be duration, pressure, and direction. Underneath these explicit elements are the further nonverbal communications of the therapist's intention and willingness to guide and travel with the client. I consider this particular discussion by Ford to be an extremely useful starting point, yet also an incomplete one. While Ford has included duration, pressure, and direction of touch, these are, in the language of mathematics, necessary but not sufficient. To gain a more complete language, we return to the thoughts of Sandra Cerny Minton (1989) and Constance Schrader (1996) to look at space and time.
Minton and Schrader both breakdown our use of space into various components of how we occupy and move through it. For example, Schrader uses the components of level, shape, direction, dimension, perspective, and focus. In addition, drawing on the work of anthropologist Edward Hall (1990), she considers the areas of interpersonal space: intimate, personal, social, and distant. Hall has noted that the physical dimensions of each of these interpersonal areas vary greatly with culture. Similarly, Minton characterizes use of space as including size, level, focus, and pathway.
Now we have the elements we need to construct a more complete language of touch, yet one that stays at the tangible level advocated by Clyde Ford. In addition to his objects of touch and no-touch, we introduce the objects of movement or no-movement. Considering the element of time in our application of touch and movement, we find that we must go beyond simple duration and pressure to include tempo and rhythm. Considering physical space we add focus (location), amplitude or area of contact, and trajectory.
We can more precisely define and add variance over time to the pressure, duration, and direction that Ford uses. Additionally, we have explicitly acknowledged that the emotional context of a particular use of space and time can have significant variations for our client based on their personal, family, and cultural backgrounds. Overlying all this and congruent with Betty Edward's observation, we are staying at the organizational and mental level of direct observation and experience rather than retreating into the symbolic level of applying named techniques. This more primitive map has profound effects on how we approach and think about our work. One of these effects of our use and awareness of direct experience is the extent to which we have flexibility to vary and customize our work. This is the subject of our next stop on this journey together.
© Keith Eric Grant — The RamblemuseSM, November 1999. All rights reserved.
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