2005-06-18 Great Reading for Ericksonian Hypnotherapists

Thompson began her career as a dentist, and studied under Dr. Milton H. Erickson in 1953. She went on to become an internationally recognized speaker and trainer in medical hypnotherapy. She participated in the Erickson Foundation as a lecturer, workshop leader, and panel member. Colleagues admired her linguistic skills, integrity, ethics, and spirituality. She spoke and taught on the power of imagination, motivation, and belief as essential elements in the practice of psychotherapy.

Her unusual style of delivering suggestions became her trademark. Her "word play" was engaging, trance-inducing, and confusing all at the same time, yet somehow always to the point, speaking to the mind via several levels of meaning. She employed puns, double-entendres, rhyme, and alliteration in spell-binding ways.

Thompson advised using the client's own interests and common, every-day occurrences as metaphors for suggestions about problem-solving and personal growth. She debunked the common expectation that hypnosis requires relaxation, suggesting that hypnotherapists give clients the latitude to experience trance idiosyncratically. Thompson reminded her audiences to see the client's point of view and guide the client to tap into his or her own potential.

The text features methods and demonstrations for pain management, describing how she helped clients prepare for surgery by teaching them to control anxiety, pain, and even bleeding. Thompson spoke on how hypnotic pain management can help cancer patients and the terminally ill. She described her own experiences in pain control during rhinoplasty, dermabrasion,root canals, and an auto accident in which she had broken bones.

You can read her discussions on amnesia, time distortion and post-hypnotic suggestion. There are several papers on hypnosis in dentistry, in which Thompson explains the relationships among psychology, hypnotherapy and dentistry. She was an expert in approaches to bulimia, tongue thrust, gagging reflex, bruxism, hemophilia, root canals, dry sockets, and temporal mandibular jaw dysfunction.

Kane and Olness poured devotion and painstaking effort into this book, locating, examining, and transcribing hours of tape-recorded interviews, panel discussions, and seminars. I enjoyed this book, consuming it like a smorgasbord of ideas. With a notebook at my side, I madly scribbled notes to myself about how I could adapt some of Thompson's methods in my own work. In my home library, I have a shelf reserved for favorite hypnotherapy books. This book will go on that shelf. I know I will turn to it again and again, seeking Thompson's advice for difficult cases. Through The Art of Therapeutic Communication, Kay Thompson continues to teach, to heal, to motivate, and to inspire.