The Funny Thing About Scripts
Perhaps scripts is not the correct word. Notes, maybe.
When I get a new client, as they make the appointment, I immediately start jotting notes and putting together potential ideas (I suspect most of us work this way). And then I go to my other client notes and look at what I did in the past for similar situations. Most of the time it becomes a search for metaphors that were helpful in the past or stories to embed. Once found, these are inevitably tossed out and new ones come to mind. It is as though the voice of my intuition says, "No, that will never do for this client." Then new ideas come to mind, and most of the time they are a lot more fitting.
With that in mind, it seems like scripts become obscure directly after they are written. There are some that are truly brilliant and may do well most of the time, but it really makes me queasy when I see courses out there that are nothing more than teaching students how to use an index to find the right script.
3 comments:
I think scripts make very good teaching tools, in that they show *an* approach to a given problem. I read scripts to get ideas, file those in my little subconscious file cabinet, and then when I have a client that data is there to draw from.
There are some, I've heard, who use scripts with clients but I can't understand how they read a script and keep a watch on the client to assess how they're responding to it. And how do they adapt when something in the script isn't getting the expected response?
-Michael Raugh, C.H.
A fellow writing friend of mine recently did a podcast (hypnosis related) and went into a very nice discussion of scripts and their usefulness in some situations while stressing the most important aspect of being a great hypnotist, bar none:
Observation.
A great hypnotist (even a good one, bleh) spends nearly as much time if not more time observing the client than doing anything else. Every moment you're with the client you should be giving your observatory skills pretty much priority over everything else because your best work will be done when it's tailored on-the-fly and in-the-moment based on what they're doing, saying, looking at, etc.
When you learn to do that, to take rapport to that superhuman level where you literally know what they're about to do, or so, or even where they're going to look, then doors open to move forward through that simply never even appeared in your conscious thoughts, that's another one of those "AHA!" moments that we all cherish so much.
There have been a few times in my life where I nailed a rapport like that, and they are so rare and entirely too far inbetween. My Wife and I share such a rapport at various times: we'll do the same thing, say the same thing, or react exactly the same way to a stimulus and the people that witness it will just think "They're weird."
But it's a lot more than that... so much more that words could ever convey.
With scripts a lot of that is lost, and no one script will ever work for every single client, that's a practical impossibility. I've read scripts to get new ideas or get the gears turning, but I've never worked with someone while reading off a page or script verbatim.
Erickson did an experiment once where he used a client as a guinea pig of sorts (he did that a lot since experiential learning was his goal anyway). He tried to work with the client in "normal" mode and got nowhere, so he asked the client to sit still and just let him read off a paper he was working on, which happened to be a multipart confusion induction that sounded like so much gobbledygook but, of course, since Erickson was a master storyteller, the client never saw it coming.
Sure enough, it worked, and Erickson repeated the "test" several times, having success with each of them. Amazing. :)
Have fun, always...
Paul
Both of you, Michael and Paul seem to be on the same page.
I do agree that they are excellent learning devices and great for inspiration, but it is scary to see a few hypnotists plug along even when they do not get the expected response - in that they continue as if the response happened.
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