As an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I majored in psychology and was evidently quite successful. I enjoy recounting the story of how my advisor encouraged me to apply for graduate school despite my lack of funds, leading to my acceptance into a Ph.D. track with a full scholarship. During the early 1970s, the clinical psychology program at Madison was strictly behavioristic, focusing on Pavlovian stimulus-response models. At the time, I served as a research assistant for bio-feedback projects, where I prepared subjects with electrodes and used computer monitors to help them learn to regulate their own heart rates.
While I now recognize that bio-feedback has advanced significantly, my younger self was eager to work directly with people in a therapeutic setting, which led me to withdraw from the program after eighteen months. The 1970s were a period of rapid growth for emerging psychotherapies, and although the university did not offer such courses, I spent much of my time studying the work of Milton Erickson with fellow students.
Years later, while practicing acupuncture, I observed that many patients naturally entered trance-like states during their treatments. They often experienced a distorted sense of time and space, which are common phenomena associated with hypnosis. These observations inspired me to combine acupuncture with hypnotherapy to achieve superior therapeutic results. Consequently, from 2016 to 2019, I attended intensive training sessions at the Milton Erickson Foundation in Phoenix, culminating in a seminar with Jeffrey Zeig held at Milton Erickson’s home which is also the Milton Erickson Museum. Although all the other attendees were seasoned psychotherapists, I was unique in my background as an acupuncturist.
My experience with the Milton Erickson Foundation proved to be one of the most profound and enriching periods of my life, and I now apply these lessons to my daily practice. Unlike traditional "show" hypnosis, which relies on authority and commands, the Ericksonian approach is a collaborative and conversational process. It guides patients into a state where they are liberated from negative psychological patterns, creating an environment where healthy changes in ideation and behavior become possible.