Milton H Erickson Quotes

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.

I have no intention of dying. In fact, that will be the last thing I do!

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

We all begin to die from the moment we are born. Some do it faster than others. All we can do is enjoy our lives.

Erickson is careful to elicit signs of limitations, rigidities, narrow “sets.” Then, using the patients’ own beliefs, he will set about getting them to break the prohibitions.

century: “As man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines.

you say the right thing at the right moment. But you have no business knowing it ahead of time because as surely as you know it consciously, you start to improve on it and ruin it.

La terapia es como una bola de nieve que se deja caer desde la cima de una montaña. A medida que rueda aumenta y aumenta de tamaño y se convierte en una avalancha que se amolda a la forma de la montaña.

You always call it hindsight. Two weeks too late to think of the right retort to make. You lead with your unconscious; you make that retort immediately... Trust your unconscious; it knows more than you do.

Every person, old or young, male or female, automatically slows down as if the air had become thick and difficult to penetrate. Do you know at what building?—a bakery! That powerful olfactory stimulus slows you automatically.

Trance helps depotentiate our old programs and gives us an opportunity to learn something new. The only reason why we cannot produce an anesthesia at will, for example, is because we don’t know how to give up our habitual generalized reality orientation that emphasizes the importance of pain and gives it primacy in consciousness. But if we allowed young children to experiment with their sensory perceptual processes in a fun way, they might easily develop skills with anaesthesia that could be very useful when they needed it. This would be an interesting piece of research, indeed.

I was returning from high school one day and a runaway horse with a bridle on sped past a group of us into a farmer's yard looking for a drink of water. The horse was perspiring heavily. And the farmer didn't recognize it so we cornered it. I hopped on the horse's back. Since it had a bridle on, I took hold of the tick rein and said, "Giddy-up." Headed for the highway, I knew the horse would turn in the right direction. I didn't know what the right direction was. And the horse trotted and galloped along. Now and then he would forget he was on the highway and start into a field. So I would pull on him a bit and call his attention to the fact the highway was where he was supposed to be. And finally, about four miles from where I had boarded him, he turned into a farmyard and the farmer said, "So that's how that critter came back. Where did you find him?" I said, "About four miles from here." "How did you know you should come here?" I said, "I didn't know. The horse knew. All I did was keep his attention on the road.

Whenever you do something, if you notice that it doesn’t work, stop whatever it is that you are doing and do something else.—MILTON H. ERICKSON If you think about different situations in your life in which you made no progress, you will probably realize that the reason you got stuck in the first place was that you were stubbornly attempting the same failed solution over and over again. The simplest solutions are often the hardest to find.

In a different room, but comparable to the first, subjects were met individually, and it was explained that they were to seat themselves comfortably with their hands in their lap in a chair before a writing table on which was a pad of paper and a pencil. They were to look continuously at the pencil until their hand picked it up and started to write involuntarily. They were to concentrate secondarily on the lifting of the hand and primarily on seeing the pencil begin to write, and to do nothing more.

In Uncommon Therapy, Jay Haley

Therapeutic Metaphors, by David Gordon,

next book, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.10 Like Satir and Bateson, Erickson found the work impressive.

Healing is the activation of inner resources during the process of recovery.