FROM THE BLOG: When the Buddha Disappears by Being Found

Hypnosis, Erickson and Clean Language

A client does not come to a therapist only with a problem. He also brings with him the stage on which the problem is already set.

He already has some idea of what is wrong with him, what kind of help he needs, what the therapist should address, and in what form change should take place. This is not merely a verbalized thought, but a predictive structure: a way of expecting, preparing, asking, resisting and keeping the problem in a recognizable form.

If the therapist steps too quickly onto this already formed stage, he may become one more actor in the client's familiar drama. The basic configuration of the problem may then be reinforced precisely because it is being handled in the very form in which the client has already learned to recognize it.

Milton H. Erickson was careful not to step onto this stage too quickly. He did not always take hold of the problem in the form in which the client presented it. He confused, shifted attention, answered from the side, said things that sounded strange, and often refused to grasp exactly the handle the client's mind had already placed there.

This can be called a technique, but then we are once again looking at the finger and not the moon. At a deeper level, perhaps the point was that Erickson did not want to reinforce the client's already constructed explanation. The client had already arranged the situation internally: here is the problem, here is the helper, here is the expected way of dealing with it. Erickson's task was sometimes to turn off the lights so that the whole arrangement would become visible.

In this respect, his logic resembles the koan tradition of Zen. A koan does not answer the question, but makes the old structure of the questioning mind unusable. The novice comes seeking enlightenment and brings with him an image of enlightenment. The master listens, pulls the rug from under him, and watches whether the novice manages to jump before his old certainty hits the floor.

But something more must be added to this comparison.

If the novice arrived at a Clean Language monastery and said he wanted to experience enlightenment, the monk might not strike him with a stick or answer with a riddle. He might ask:

"And what kind of enlightenment is that enlightenment?"

The novice would answer something. Perhaps enlightenment would be like a clear space on a mountaintop. Perhaps it would be a quiet light in the center of the chest. Perhaps it would be like a door opening inward. Or perhaps it would be like mist withdrawing just before the sun appears.

The monk would listen and ask:

"And when it is like a door opening inward, where is that door going?"

The novice would answer. The monk would nod and say:

"So that is where it is going."

Then he would continue raking the sand.

The enlightenment the novice was seeking is revealed to be precisely the kind of enlightenment his own mind had already formed. It does not immediately need to be explained, corrected or replaced with a better concept. It needs to be followed.

In this sense, Clean Language is both a modern and a very radical method. It does not offer the client a shareable truth, a common Buddha. It does not explain, interpret or replace the client's experience with the therapist's Buddha. It asks what kind of X it is.

This question can be decisive. Not because it quickly leads to the right answer, but because it returns the client's words to their own experiential landscape before the therapist has time to place them on his own map. And as we know, the map is not the territory.

For the student of hypnosis, this contains an essential lesson. He often brings with him his own Buddhas: scripts, techniques, masters, theories of trance, the unconscious mind, rapport, and sometimes even an explanation of what hypnosis "really" is. These may be very useful, but they can also become a shared image that is offered to every client.

Clean Language reminds us that the client's Buddha is never the same as the therapist's Buddha.

The client does not bring only a problem to the session. He brings his own way of forming the problem. If the therapist interprets and comments on it too quickly through his own understanding, he loses precisely the material he should have been working with.

Erickson saw the stage of the client's mind: its roles, expectations, tensions, the direction of resistance, and the points to which the client had already learned to hold on. He saw how the client held his problem together, what kind of response he expected, and how that expectation was already part of the structure of the problem.

Clean Language approaches the same phenomenon from another direction. It does not primarily confuse the stage, but allows the client to describe it in his own words. It follows the client's language, metaphors, spaces, directions, boundaries, movements and relationships. What matters is the therapist's ability to delay his own predictions long enough for the client's own experience to organize itself into view.

This is why "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" takes on a double meaning in hypnosis and therapy.

The first Buddha belongs to the therapist. It is not only his technique, theory or master, but the whole tradition of recognizable signs of hypnosis that has been passed on as if it captured the phenomenon itself. Inductions, deepenings, closed eyes, signs of relaxation, hand levitations, outward manifestations of trance, certain tones of voice, and the idea of what hypnosis should look like can all become Buddha.

They can help direct the gaze, but they can also bind it to the surface: to the signs that have been learned to mean hypnosis. Then the therapist may fail to grasp the actual event — the way the client's attention, expectation, body, imagery and meaning begin to organize themselves in the client's own way. We easily look for what we have learned to recognize. But the client does not need the therapist's ready-made recognition system. He needs a space in which his own inner order can emerge on sufficiently unforced terms.

This is precisely the arrangement that must be challenged. Mental states do not bend neatly into definitions, nor do they necessarily follow the signs by which they have been taught to be named. A client may be deeply moved internally without a single classical sign of trance. Another may look hypnotic without anything essential having changed. A third may enter a decisive inner state precisely at the point where external observation offers hardly any striking sign of it.

The therapist's Buddha is born when he begins to mistake the sign for the phenomenon.

The second Buddha belongs to the client: his image of the problem, of change, of help, and of what is supposed to happen now. It does not necessarily need to be shattered. Sometimes it is enough to ask:

"And what kind of Buddha is that Buddha?"

Then the Buddha begins to disappear by being found.

Perhaps this is where the deep structures of Erickson, Zen and Clean Language touch one another. Change does not arise from giving the client the right image in place of the wrong one. It arises when the therapist stops offering a shared image, and the client's own image becomes so precisely visible that it can no longer be taken for granted.

The Zen master may cut off the expectation. Erickson may confuse the ready-made arrangement. Clean Language may allow the Buddha to appear so precisely that it ceases to be Buddha.

And perhaps the student of hypnosis must therefore first kill his own legend of hypnosis. Not only the legend of Erickson, but also the inherited image in which hypnosis is recognized by outward signs and named stages. Only then can he see what Erickson did: not as a series of tricks to be imitated, but as a rare capacity not to reinforce too quickly the world the client had already begun to construct.

When the legend steps aside, what remains is not emptiness.

What remains is a human being sitting in front of another human being, beginning to reveal what kind of world he lives in.