Monday 31 December 2012

What do cooking recipes, troy and the bible have in common?

Dear reader,

today after dinner we sat together for a bit longer and the talk came to cooking and recipes. My dad mentioned that we still have an old recipe book of recipes his mom collected and wrote down over 60 years ago.

My sister said that she had seen recipes, where certain kinds of dough as part of the recipe was mentioned, but without an instruction as how to make the dough. The knowledge of how to make the dough was taken for granted.

My dad then said that he heard once that for a long time, people didn't know where troy was located. There hadn't been old cards or descriptions of that. When troy existed, everybody knew it anyway. My sister first couldn't quite believe, that people of younger times first didn't know, where troy was.

As I heard them talk, I remembered the book on the gospels, which I had given my dad a couple of days ago. One problem, which we face today, when it comes to interpreting the bible texts is, that some of that knowledge was simply known and taken for granted back then. That's why the preachers and prophets didn't have to explain themselves and were able to simply use certain words and everybody understood and knew. I explained that to the others and we agreed that in all three cases, there was knowledge taken for granted and (maybe) in these days, had to be discovered again first. (My sister took care of that by writing down some basic recipes in one of her books.)

Until next blog,

sarah

Sunday 16 December 2012

Ericksonian birthday or christmas presents

Dear reader,

Sidney Rosen has in his book "My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson" one story ("Calluses"), which is about a construction worker, who had fallen and was left totally paralysed and in pain. He asked Erickson, what he could do. Erickson said, that there's not much he could do. Develop calluses on his pain nerves, so he wouldn't feel the pain so much. Erickson suggested to him to collect comics, jokes and funny sayings and make scrapbooks out of them, which he could give to fellow workmen when they were in the hospital. That's just what the man did.

That's just what I did last year for one of my aunts with a strenuously collected collection of comics with Snoopy from the Peanuts. My aunts had a dog for many decades. Not anymore, because it's a bit easier to travel without one. I asked my dad, if he believed she'd enjoy reading comics. He had doubts. After I told him what I had in mind, he believed she'd like it for sure. So I collected and glued a thin notebook full of those comics and wrote her a card saying basically, that my dad had told me she won't read comics. But this one here was a very special one. She called me later to say thank you and that she reads one or two pages every day.

Our daily newspaper has a quote on the front page, which relates to one of the bigger articles on the page. I collected some of them over the past months for another notebook, which I had stumbled upon in our flat some time ago. No one wanted that notebook anymore, but it was small and nice and read. My friend and colleague from work likes read and quotes. The notebook is just big enough for one quote on each page and the pages are perforated, so you could rip them out. So I spent the past days now sorting the quotes fitting in such a way that one on the front the one on the back of a page were in some way or another somewhat related to each other. Yesterday I went through them one final time and cut the quotes straight. I wrote down many of them for myself, so I'd have them, too. I was up until half past two in the morning yesterday. Time passed unnoticed. I had written in german and listened to Derren Brown in english reading his book. It must have been hypnosis. Apart from the fact that time had passed so quickly, I couldn't remember consciously either which quotes I had written down or what I had heard Derren Brown say even a short time later when I was in bed. Amnesia. Trance is a natural phenomena and I don't think about it much, that I hardly can remember consciously the quotes or the audio book. It had been fun and after all the book is finally ready before christmas. That's what's really important.

I want to give the reader a warning: such notebooks, even small thin ones, need time and if you don't already have a big collection of quotes, you should plan long ahead of time for such a present. I have taken my time with those two books for that reason. I had to. The newspaper only came once a day and I couldn't use every comic or quote in it. Planing period: at best months ahead.

Until next blog,

sarah

Thursday 13 December 2012

When there's snow outside, I think...

Dear reader,

it's been snowing for a few days here now and when there's snow outside, I think of two Erickson stories:

One of those stories can be found in Sidney Rosen's book "My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton Erickson, M. D." and it's called "Walking on Glare Ice". During the war one day Erickson was on his way to work: the induction board in Detroit. On his way he saw a veteran with an artificial leg, who seemed worried that he needed to walk over glare ice. The man feared he might slip and fall on the ice. Erickson told him to stay there. He'd come over and show him how to walk on glare ice. Erickson came over and the man could see he had a limp. So he wasn't just a babbler. Erickson told the man to close his eyes and Erickson made him walk this way and that way and up and down, until the man was utterly confused. Then Erickson led him to the safe side of the ice and told him to open his eyes again. He was surprised that the ice was behind him and had no idea how he got to that other side.

Erickson told him, "You walked as if the cement was hard. When you try to walk on ice the usual tendency is to tense your muscles, preparing for a fall. You get a mental set. And you slip that way. If you put the weight of your legs down straight, the way you would on dry cement, you wouldn't slip. The slide comes because you don't put down your full weight and because you tense yourself."

The second anecdote is mentioned, among other places, in the book "Hypnotic Realities: The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of Indirect Suggestion" by Milton H. Erickson, Ernest L. Rossi and Sheila I. Rossi. As a child Erickson liked to go to school early after it had snowed. On the way he left a crooked path. On the way home he had fun watching other students and passengers not going a straight path, although they knew there had to be a straight path. They all followed Erickson's path crooked path in the snow instead.

Until next blog,

sarah

Wednesday 5 December 2012

The purple wizard of the desert

Dear reader,

today is a big day. I fulfill my promise to write about Milton Erickson. He was born december, 5 1901 in Aurum, Nevada. His birthday seemed more appropriate to me to write about him than his day of death: march, 25 1980 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Erickson was born into a farmer family with 7 sisters and only 1 brother. Erickson took his time when he started to speak as a child. His mom was fine with that though. She simply said, "When the time arrives, then he will talk." He was 4 years old when he started talking. He had a rough time at school first. He'd start reading a dictionary not at least going through it starting with the first letter of the word he was looking up, but started reading with at the letter "a", until he finally came to the letter and word he actually wanted to look up. Hence his nickname "Dictionary". He was dyslexic.

In 1919 he graduated from high school, but everyone thought this would be the end for him. Erickson got a polio infection (his first) and was completely paralysed when he overheard the doctor in the next room telling his mom that "The boy will be dead by morning." Erickson found out through much, much practice that he could control one of his eyes and make it move the way he wanted and he spent many hours getting his mom's attention and he was able to communicate to her to move the chest in his room some way. What he couldn't tell her was that the chest was blocking his view from the window and he wanted to see the sunset, before he died. Well, he only saw part of it He was unconscious for 3 days.

He needed to learn everything again. His youngest sister was just about that age where she'd start to learn how to walk, so Erickson was able to look and learn from her. This time consciously. Erickson himself said the polio infection gave him a "terrific advantage" over others. Even when he was sick in bed, unable to move, he studied his family and other people in the house. He found out that his siblings could say "yes", but mean "no" or say "no", but mean "yes". So he learned the basics of careful observation, phrasing and body language. When he was reasonably able to walk again, Erickson and one of his friends decided to go on a canoe tour. Luckily his family wasn't present at the actual time of departure, because on short notice his friend cancled the tour. I think his family wouldn't have let him go alone. When Erickson had to move the canoe, he needed help. He made an experiment out of that for the tour to never ask for help directly, but always create a situation in which others would ask him or offer help. That's how more often than not people would find him sitting learning german vocabularies for his medical studies, until someone would come along.

Even as a student he was interested in hypnosis and worked in hospitals, in psychiatric hospitals first. His boss once told him that the walking cane he needed to walk, was helpful and made him likeable for both patients and colleagues. The female patients wouldn't feel threatened by a man with a walking cane and male colleagues wouldn't see him as serious competition. In 1947 he had an unfortunate accident on his bike and although he didn't like to get vaccinations, he decided to get a tetanus vaccination this time. He got an anaphylactic shock, which he was lucky to survive and which gave him pollen allergies for the rest of his life. That was the reason for him to stop working in hospitals and move to Phoenix, where the desert climate was nicer for him with the allergies.

In 1953 he got a post-polio syndrome on top of the discomfort he already had to deal with. He worked closely with many well known therapists, among them Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead. John Grinder and Richard Bandler, who created neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and analysed and used Erickson's hypnotic language patterns for that. My friend John is one of those methods, as I explained in earlier posts already.

As maybe you could tell from my, this post here already, there are many stories around Erickson. Even if I spend the next posts to tell some of those, it would take some time. Erickson was a genius story teller. But he didn't just tell stories for entertainment, but to help and heal in an indirect way.

Many people then and now know Erickson from his older days when he was half paralysed in a wheel-chair, hard of hearing, had double vision and suffered from chronic pain. It's impressive to see him even in short youtube videos. Even in those you can sense he was full of lust for life and energy of life although (or maybe because?) he suffered so much. I think, his obvious physical problems made him more believeable for his patients. Who would you believe more readily, when he tells you that pain control is possible: a seemingly young, healthy, energetic doctor, or a sickly elderly man in a wheel-chair? ;-)

These are only a very few aspects of Erickson's life and work. Many stories and aspects I know and thought of as I wrote this, I left out. One single post isn't enough by far.

If you're interested in learning more about Erickson, I can warmly recommend to read Sidney Rosen's collection of Erickson stories My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson. If you want to get a glimps of what Erickson was like with his students, I recommend his 5-days-seminar, which his student Jeffrey Zeig recorded. The written version of that is published under the title A Teaching Seminar With Milton H. Erickson. If you have further questions or want more suggestions, just write to me. For now this will be it about Erickson. But I'm sure this won't be the last post, where I'll mention him.

Until next blog,

sarah