Phoenix Theraputic Patterns by David Gordon

Author:David Gordon
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-11-02T07:00:00+00:00

97 The Touchstone

ties of thorny plants to be found in the desert, while at Squaw Peak they faced a difficult ascent which when scaled offered a new view of the desert. The experiences Ericsson assigned them, then, were ones which had inherent within them certain metaphorical connotations and relationships that Ericsson considered would be useful in providing additional appropriate contexts for their deliberations.

As is evident in virtually all of the case histories described in this book, Erickson's intuitions about what kind of experience would be likely to generate the learnings that were needed are phenomenal. The response of Erickson's students to his competence at knowing what experiences to go for has usually been to chalk it up to that arcane commodity know as "intuition". As a commodity it is treated by most individuals as one of those things that you get so much of and is of a certain quality . . . and that's it. You've got it or you don't. Erickson's intuitive capabilities are certainly astounding and rare, but they are not the result of a fortuitous allotment. Rather it is something that he has earned through his own (one suspects ceaseless) efforts at experimenting with people so as to make patterned sense out of the things that we all do to create our personal experiences.

When you LOOK at a problem you look at it in ALL

possible ways. I was in Mexico City visiting a dentist there. He told me his wife was an artist. She denied it and he insisted she WAS. I thought she was self-effacing. I asked to see some of her sketches. And, she brought out her sketches . . . and there was an unusual scroll along the border of each picture. And very nice sketches of faces, flowers, animals and so on. And I picked up the picture and looked at it. I turned and looked at it this way, I looked at it this way, (turning the picture at all angles), I turned and looked at it THIS way. I took a little piece of paper and tore a hole in it about the size of my fingernail, and laid it down on the ornamental border and asked the dentist, "Look". He said, " M y word, there is a FACE

there." I moved it along and there was ANOTHER face.

Sitting in that border were hundreds of faces in every one of her sketches. Her unconscious had put them there, I THERAPEUTIC PATTERNS 98

had been willing to discover them there. She is now an outstanding artist and runs an art gallery in the City of Mexico.

As a professional communicator you both consciously and unconsciously glean all kinds of information about the personal set of beliefs through which your client understands the world. These chunks of information are then mortared by you into a model of that person's world which you then use as a context within which to understand his or her problem. We don't know a set of rules for transforming

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.