Dr. Milton Erickson taught me as a student, patient and co-therapist that it takes many years to make things simple. We must learn how to empower each person’s unconscious potentials and utilize these natural abilities for increasing awareness, acceptance, letting go and finding their own best answers inside themselves. These are the skills we will focus on together for ourselves and for our patients.
Modern medicine and cognitive psychology usually involve a highly rational belief system that minimizes the importance of autonomous therapeutic processes. This belief system has created an expectation that everything can be accomplished on a conscious and voluntary level, even though such voluntary efforts can sometimes obstruct natural healing processes.

To support these statements and to illustrate the range of possible treatments, this workshop will describe patients who were treated with self-hypnosis and medical hypnosis after being referred to me from the Kaiser Permanente (KP) Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego. We will have the opportunity to answer three questions:
• What are self-hypnosis and medical hypnosis?
• How do self-hypnosis and medical hypnosis work, especially when no specific directions or suggestions are given?
• When should self-hypnosis and medical hypnosis be used?