Excellence in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy: Methods That Transform Lives and Create Breakthrough Results with Every Client

Most hypnosis training teaches you a model that puts the hypnotist at the center of the session. You hold the script. You lead the induction. You do something to the client, and hope it lands.

Milton Erickson did something entirely different. And after forty years of clinical practice, Dr. Richard Nongard has spent this book showing you exactly what that difference is and how to make it yours.

Excellence in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy is a complete, practical guide to the most flexible and effective approach in the field. It is built around a single conviction that Erickson held throughout his entire career: every client already has within them the resources to solve any problem they face. Your job is not to install those resources. Your job is to create the conditions in which the client can find them.

This book teaches you how to do that.

You will learn the ARE process, the three-principle framework of Absorb, Ratify, and Elicit that runs through every effective Ericksonian session. You will learn the language patterns that create change without resistance, the body language and somatic approaches that most hypnotists never discover, and the trance utilization principle that turns skeptical and resistant clients into your most compelling success stories.

You will learn the February Man, Erickson's most psychologically sophisticated technique for deep identity-level change. You will learn the Crystal Ball across a dozen clinical applications, from phobias and chronic pain to sobriety and the seventy-five-year-old client whose doctors told him he was done. You will learn somatic hypnosis, clinical applications for ADHD, bruxism, alcoholism, sleep disorders, and weight management, and a complete self-hypnosis practice you can use in your own life every single day.

This is not a book of scripts to recite at passive clients. It is a book about becoming a different kind of practitioner. One who is genuinely present. One who uses whatever the client brings. One who trusts the person in the chair.

The clients whose stories fill these pages are real. The forty years of practice behind every principle in this book is real. And the results, when you stop fighting your clients and start working with them, are real too.

You cannot do this wrong. As long as you genuinely care about the people you work with, the Ericksonian approach will always find its way. This book gives you the framework, the language, the techniques, and the clinical confidence to let it.

There is no such thing as an unhypnotizable client. There are only clients you have not yet learned to meet.

This book will change that.