Dr Milton H Erickson (1901 - 1980) and Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Milton Erickson - American M.D., psychiatrist and psychotherapist - has been acclaimed internationally as the leading practitioner of hypnosis.

He was born in Nevada, in a farming family, and even as a young boy showed he had a different way of perceiving the world, and had an ability to notice things that were not obvious to adults. At the age of 17 he contracted polio and lapsed into a profound coma - he eventually awoke, completely paralysed. Over subsequent months/years, he learned how the muscles of his body worked, how people communicated with words, and also communicated without words. Being paralysed, he had ample opportunity to just watch and listen. He regained the use of his body. He was colour blind and tone deaf, and strange as it may seem to more fortunate individuals, he claimed that those two impediments enabled him to learn a great deal about people and their responses.

He became a physician and a psychiatrist, and taught and practised from the 1920s; more than any other person in this field he explored and demonstrated the vast potentials that hypnosis has to offer. He was an authority on hypnosis and brief strategic therapy, and was an outstandingly creative psychotherapist. He has been described as 'the most creative, perceptive, and ingenious psychotherapeutic master of all time'.

In his fifties he contracted another strain of polio and was again paralysed. He regained the use of most of his body but was left somewhat crippled. He authored over 150 articles on hypnosis and co-authored several books.

He taught many things but among his teachings there were two that were particularly important:

1. 'Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy/hypnotherapy should be formulated to meet the individual's need, rather than expecting the person to fit the system'.

2. 'Every person has within himself/herself all the resources necessary to get over any problem, and the duty of the therapist is to enable the person to access and utilise those resources'. Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Two fellow Americans - Richard Bandler and John Grinder - collaborated in the late 1970s to create a model of the way Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, and Virginia Satir achieved change. This model was called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). It is used as a communication and learning model, and for change work in therapy.

The directive method of NLP has been blended with the Indirect/Interspersal approach of Ericksonian hypnosis to form the unique and effective N-SHAP model of therapy.