There’s a shift that happens somewhere in a hypnotist’s development.
Early on, you may be hoping nothing distracting or surprising interrupts your sessions. No sirens, no phone, no dog, no knock at the door. You want a clean forty minutes and you’re quietly braced against anything that might take it from you.
Later, you stop bracing. A car alarm goes off and some part of you thinks: ‘good, I’ll take it.’
Utilization is the name for what gets you there. It means accepting whatever the environment, client and the session hand you, and building from it. Erickson’s name is on the idea, and our guide to conversational hypnosis frames it as one of the core moves.
Why You Brace In The First Place
Depending on how you were trained, you may have picked up the idea that hypnosis needs certain conditions. A quiet room. A comfortable chair. Nobody interrupting. That’s fine as a preference. Held as a requirement, it makes every noise outside your window a threat to the work.
And if you’re tense, the client is sitting right there, and may well notice.
The Client Is Having The Same Thought
When a leaf blower starts up outside, there’s a decent chance your client is thinking something like: well, that’s going to ruin it. They have their own idea of what hypnosis is supposed to look like, and it probably involves quiet.
Now they’re waiting to see what you do with it.
If you tighten up, you’ve confirmed the worry. If you name the sound and hand it a job, you’ve told them something else: hearing it is fine, and they can carry on doing what they were doing.
“And you can hear that leaf blower going, and it’s fine to hear it. Noticing that you can hear everything going on out there and can still be this comfortable may help you relax further.”
Two things happen in that sentence. The noise stops being evidence that something is going wrong. And the client’s own ability to notice it gets turned into evidence that something is going right.
You made it okay for yourself. And you made it okay for them.
Say It Inside The Suggestion
Name the thing inside a sentence that already gives it a job, instead of announcing it on its own. “There’s a lawnmower going” is a bulletin. It hands the client a beat in which to decide the session has been interrupted. Fold the naming and the suggestion together: “and as you notice the sound of the lawnmower changing, you can relax your breathing even more.”
Bet Only On What’s Going To Happen
In cases in which a noise or visual event will continue, attach the suggestion to something you can safely predict.
The sound of a lawnmower is going to change. Louder, quieter, stopping, starting up again. So when you link relaxing to noticing the change, the change turns up, and the suggestion is borne out.
What Utilization Actually Is
Noise out the window is the easy case. The idea is bigger than that.
The tidiest definition I’ve come across is Dan Short’s, from a peer-reviewed paper working out what Ericksonian therapy actually consists of. He defines utilization as making practical use of “client attributes, capabilities, interpersonal dynamics, and situational factors, towards some meaningful end,” engaging “circumstances, habits, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, symptoms, unproductive behavior, or resistances in service of the overarching goals of therapy.”
Put more plainly: using what happens in the session environment toward the client’s goals.
Look at that list for a second. Symptoms. Resistances. Unproductive behavior. Circumstances. That’s not a slot in the session where you do a particular thing. It’s a stance you hold across the whole of the work.
Short draws one more line worth having. Acceptance on its own isn’t utilization. He calls acceptance “a necessary element” but says “it alone is not sufficient” — utilization “takes acceptance one step further by turning it into goal-oriented action, an action tailored to fit the immediate situation.”
In other words, acceptance is only step one. Using it to do good is next.
The direction of that action is the tell. Traditional therapy, he writes, “aims the focus of attention inward, ‘How do you feel about that?’” Utilization aims it outward: “What are you able to do about that?”
So putting up with the leaf blower isn’t utilization. You have to build something out of it.
What You Can Use
The environment gives you the most obvious material. Sound mostly: traffic, a door, a phone, somebody’s dog. Also the chair, the temperature, the light through the blinds.
Then there’s what the client does, and this runs from the very small to the very large.
At the small end: a hand that’s shifted. Breathing that’s slowed on its own. A swallow, a sigh, eyelids that flutter, a laugh at how odd this feels, tears that arrive earlier than either of you expected.
At the other end sits behavior that’s central to who somebody is. Short’s starting assumption is that all behavior has value if you give it a fitting context and something worth aiming at, and he reaches for a deliberately extreme example to make the point: hallucinations, which he notes have “played a defining role in the leadership of some of history’s most influential individuals,” Joan of Arc among them. Nothing gets ruled out in advance as pathology to be cleared away before the real work can start.
His test for what’s worth reaching for is the useful part: take something “central to the client’s sense of self” and aim it at a meaningful end. A sigh is material. A stubborn streak somebody has carried their whole life is better material.
Either end of that range, describe what you can actually see or know. “That breath you just took, and the one after it” is something you observed. “You’re feeling sad” is a guess about what’s going on inside somebody.
And there’s what they bring in from the rest of their life. Work, skills, hobbies, whatever they’re already good at. The case of the depressed woman and her African violets is the clean version: Erickson didn’t invent a resource for her, he found one she already had and pointed it somewhere useful.
Get comfortable with this and the bracing eases off, because you’ve got somewhere to put whatever arrives. Short of the building catching fire, there’s not much a session can hand you that can’t be turned toward what the client came for.
And the client gets the better end of that. Nothing that happens in the room has to mean the session is spoiled, because you keep showing them it doesn’t.
How To Train For Utilization
Environmental Utilization
It’s a good idea to have a few outcomes in your back pocket during a session. For many sessions you would like a client to ‘relax’, ‘go deeper’, or ‘listen carefully’.
Now, in any environment (a coffee shop, your home, a meeting) narrate things you notice that other people would be sure to notice as well, or would if you draw their attention to it. It could be the sound of the coffee cups clinking, or the pouring of coffee. The aroma. The hum of the air conditioner, the way the light falls on the floor, through the window.
You can us your Ericksonian language patterns here, if you know them. At any rate, tie the thing you want to have happen to the verifiable thing. “As you notice the way the light falls on the floor, you can go deeper.” “You can hear the sound of the coffee cups clinking, and that means you can relax.”
Utilizing Traits — Problems As Resources
If a client has smoked every day for 25 years, what ability does that presuppose? I would say consistency. If a client gets angry when their dog barks, what ability does that presuppose? well, they can feel strong emotions, for one.
I had a client once who would often think that people were plotting against her. She would imagine things that were possible but probably hadn’t happened and get anxious about it. What ability is needed in order to do that? A strong imagination that emotionally affects her!
When a client hands you a gift like that, name it. “Wow, you’re consistent.” Later on in the session, you can tie it to their outcome. “And because, deep in your mind, you know how to be consistent, you will be just as consistent with your new behavior than that old habit was.”
If you want this built into full induction structures and drilled properly, that’s what our Ericksonian Inductions training is for.
Enjoy, Keith
Reference
Short, D. N. (2021). What is Ericksonian therapy: The use of core competencies to operationally define a nonstandardized approach to psychotherapy. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 28(3), 282–292. Full text.
