My own connection go hypnotherapy comes from my involvement with NLP. In the 1970s, Milton H. Erickson, MD, was considered the greatest hypnotherapist in the history of the field. The founders of NLP studied audiotapes and videotapes of Dr. Erickson working with his patients. That led to a number of books which described his behavior with patients and some of the concepts Erickson used, consciously and unconsciously, to guide how he helped them.

I was fascinated with the verbal patterns in what we called the "Milton Model" for guiding people to learn through hypnotherapy. In the 1980s and 90s I taught the section devoted to Milton Erickson's skills, among others, for the NLP Comprehensive 24-Day Practitioner Program to new practitioners. This gave me a grounding in the patterns Erickson used. While I met Erickson briefly in the 1970s, my main contact with him was through his books, articles, tapes, the NLP models, and a close affiliation with psychiatrist William L. Mundy, MD, my office partner for 25 years, who was a student of Erickson's in the mid-1970s.

While it is a paradox, I found that the use Milton Erickson's verbal patterns to guide individuals and groups offer greater freedom to those I guided. That happened because I take an approach that the best kind of hypnosis is self-hypnosis. By learning the language of self-respect and self-guidance, my clients can substitute these patterns of language for those they have been using that limited them or caused problems to continue. Then some key problems can get solved by using more self-respecting, self-guiding, empowering language.

As a client who is learning through hypnotherapy, there are a great many learnings and abilities that you can recall and activate within yourself, and new learnings and accomplishments that you can achieve in the outer world. And these can come about as a result of changing the way you speak to yourself. And that is a great thing to learn.