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| Stephen Gilligan |
I was particularly pleased to be able to take part in the first week of Dr Stephen Gilligan’s ‘Trance Camp’ starting on the 6th July 2003 at the Quails Inn resort, San Marcos, nr San Diego.
The reason was a mixture of
simple curiosity and a desire to improve my hypnotic and NLP skills.
Stephen was one of the original group of Richard Bandler, John
Grinder, Leslie Cameron, Judy Delozier, Frank Pucilek, David Gordon et
al, who were around at the time NLP was born. John Grinder mentioned
Stephen at his recent London New Code NLP training.
Stephen was one of people to
model Milton Erickson and in fact left his NLP colleagues to become a
true long term Erickson student. He comments that one of Erickson gifts
was the idea of utilisation -'that anything could be used for
positive growth, no matter how sick, crazy and unaesthetic it may
appear'.
Having fairly recently been to
seminars with both John and Richard, I was again struck with the
similarity of what they were all saying, albeit with different styles.
If I had to compare the difference with a few describing words they
would that Stephen was slower, deeper and more generative.
It's difficult to pick out
specifics from the week however I was drawn to the to one of his basic
concepts:
- Identity is the basic distinction of self
- Trance is the naturalistic learning state activated whenever identity is disrupted, and within which identity is re-generated
- Hypnosis and therapy are forms of ritual space that provide a container for trance experience to be useful
Also the basic energies
(states?) for the practitioner to weave are:
- Tenderness
- Fierceness
- Playfulness
One example of a simple
exercise that I found useful was this utilisation exercise. The addition
of the feedback or receiving back step makes it significantly more
effective.
- Pacing statement (“This is so” - eg "You're sitting in a chair")
- Pacing statement (“This is so” - eg "and you may have noticed the carpet is blue")
- Pacing statement (“This is so” - eg "and you're listening to what I'm saying")
- Leading statement (“This can be so” - "and you're beginning to feel really comfortable")
- Receiving back (“And what are you aware of now”)
- Feeding back feedback (“And you’re aware of X”)
- Repeat!
I can report that I felt
comfortable that I had clearly achieved by own objectives during the
week. That I had both improved my own NLP and hypnotic skills, and
thoroughly recommend 'trancecamp' to anyone with similar objectives.
Stephen has an
excellent website with more
information for those interested. I can also recommend his book
'Therapeutic trances' for those interested in
Erickson hypnotherapy.
Highly recommended.