Is there anybody here who has been to see Milton Erickson? He told you stories, right? Did you find that six months, eight months, or a year later you were going through changes that were somehow associated with those stories that he was telling?

Man: Yes.

That's the typical report. Six months later people suddenly notice they've changed and they don't have any idea how that happened, and I then they get a memory of Milton talking about the farm up in Wisconsin or something. When you were with Erickson did you have the experience of being slightly disoriented, fascinated and entranced by the man's language?

Man: I was bored.

Milton uses boredom as one of his major weapons. If Milton were here, one thing he might do is bore you to tears. So you'd all drift off into daydreams and then he has you. I get bored too quickly myself to use that as a tactic. Milton, sitting in a wheelchair and being seventy-six years old, doesn't mind spending a lot of time doing that. And he does it exquisitely.

We have, during these days together, succeeded brilliantly in completely overwhelming your conscious resources. This was a deliberate move on our part, understanding as we do that most learning and change takes place at the unconscious level. We have appealed explicitly to each of both of you, that your unconscious minds would make a useful representation necessary for your education, so that in the weeks and days and months ahead you can be delightfully surprised by new patterns occurring in your behavior.

And we suggest to your unconscious mind that you make use of the natural processes of sleep and dreaming, to review any experiences that have occurred during these two days, and sort out those things that your unconscious believes will be useful for you to know, making a useful representation at the unconscious level, meanwhile allowing you to sleep deeply and soundly, so that in the days and weeks and months to come, you can discover yourself doing things that you didn't know you learned about here, so as to constantly increase, at the unconscious level, your repertoire in responding to people who come to you for assistance…. And you didn't even know they were there. Not at all.

The last time that I went to see Milton Erickson, he said something to me. And as I was sitting there in front of him, it didn't make sense. Most of his covert metaphors have made... eons of sense to me. But he said something to me which would have taken me a while to figure out. Milton said to me "You don't consider yourself a therapist, but you are a therapist." And I said "Well, not really." He said "Well, let's pretend ... that you're a therapist who works with people. The most important thing ... when you're pretending this ... is to understand... that you are really not ….You are just pretending.... And if you pretend really well, the people that you work with will pretend to make changes. And they will forget that they are pretending... for the rest of their lives. But don't you be fooled by it." And then he looked at me and he said:

"Goodbye."

There are several organizing assumptions that we use to put ourselves in a state which we find useful to operate in as we do therapeutic kinds of work. One is that it's better to have choice than no choice, and another is the notion of unconscious choice. Another is that people already have the resources they need in order to change, if they can be helped to have the appropriate resources in the appropriate context. A fourth one is that each and every single piece of behavior has a positive function in some context. It would be wanton and irresponsible of us simply to change people's behavior without taking into account a very important notion called "secondary gain." We assume that the pattern of behavior somebody is displaying is the most appropriate response they have in the context—no matter how bizarre or inappropriate it seems to be.

The context that your clients are responding to is usually composed of about nine parts of internal experience and about one part of external. So when a piece of behavior looks or sounds bizarre or inappropriate to you, that's a good signal that a large portion of the context that the person is responding to is something that is not available to you in your immediate sensory experience. They are responding to someone or something else internally represented: mother, father, historical events, etc. And often that internal representation is out of consciousness. Linda and Tammy can verify that the responses that they changed when they came and worked with us here, were responses to events that occurred sometime in the past.

That shouldn’t surprise any of you. I’m sure you all have been through experiences that support that statement. Our specific response to that understanding is to realize that all of us are complex and balanced organisms. One way to take that complexity into account when you go about assisting someone in making some change, is by using a pattern that we call reframing. Reframing is a specific way of contacting the portion or part—for lack of a better word—of the person that is causing a certain behavior to occur, or that is preventing a certain other behavior from occurring. We do this so that we can find out what the secondary gain of the behavior is, and take care of that as an integral part of the process of inducing a change in that area of behavior.

This is best illustrated by an example. A woman came to us referred by a psychiatrist. She wanted to lose 45 pounds. She had lost this weight in the past, but every time she lost it, she regained it. She could get it off, but she couldn't keep it off. We discovered through reframing that there was no part of her that had any objection to her losing weight. However, the part of her that caused her to overeat was doing that in order to protect her marriage. Can you make that connection? If you can't, let me explain a little further. In the opinion of this part of the woman who was overweight, if she were to lose the weight and weigh what she wanted to weigh, she would be physically attractive to men. If she were physically attractive to men, she would be approached and propositioned. In the opinion of this part she did not have adequate resources to make good decisions for herself in response to those propositions. She wasn't able to say "No." There was no part of her that wanted her to be overweight. There was, however, a part of her that used her being overweight to institutionalize the choice of not having to cope with a situation that it believed she couldn't cope with effectively, and that might lead to the end of her marriage. This is known as "secondary gain."