lntroduction
The purpose of this paper, which is based on the Ericksonian model of hypnosis, is to set up a link and make a comparison between certain processes and elements used both in hypnosis and in coaching. These disciplines feature the use of language as one of their central procedures, both in structural terms (as to what supports the models) and in the way they articulate their processes. In this article, I would like to establish some essential definitions and clarifications of coaching, hypnosis, trance, and meaning making, in order to reveal more clearly relationships between them.
I would define coaching as "the group of guided processes that will help an individual to achieve a specific and beneficial transformation". We can understand hypnosis as "a dissociated state of consciousness that forms part of the physiology of the central nervous system" What might development generated through coaching have to do with such a dissociated state?In hypnosis, the expert provides "suggestions" as a tool for mental processing, taking advantage of the internal state of the client (called "trance"), which is the group of psycho-physiological expressions (e.g., a different color of the skin, change on blood pressure, shallow breathing, etc.) that are realized in an individual when his/her mind is completely concentrated or focused on a given experience.
Cognition playing into this can be clarified if we distinguish social-emotional meaning making from "thinking" in the broad sense. There are many definitions of what we call "cognition", whose etymology comes from the Latin word cognoscere, i.e. "to know'. With Kant, I like to define cognition as the ability to process (and make sense of) a given sensory experience. (This is a more narrow definition than is used in Laske's CDF.) Through cognition in the broad sense (far beyond interpreting sensory experience) we generate the knowledge required for establishing our own identity, hierarchy of values, beliefs, points of view and learnings within the framework of our construction of subjective realities.
The link of emotions to cognition is certainly central and presently not fully understood due to lack of inquiry. We don't know whether we can ever dissociate from our thinking. However, neuroscience studies have certainly shown that human beings cannot dissociate from their emotions. Their self is defined by them. When we want to dissociate ourselves from an experience that would protect us from a specific emotion, our consciousness has already gone through its own emotion (we assume) to do what it is doing.
But emotions do not exist in a cognitive vacuum. We have known this from ancient Greeks to the time of Alfred Korzybski - the creation of realities is based on the construction of meanings as well as concepts which are internal to each individual and, in that sense, subjective. But while the former may stay internal, the latter - concepts - strive for "objective" knowledge of the world outside of the individual.
Trance is Always Present
In this context Milton Erickson's views of hypnosis are of interest. In terms of his model of hypnosis "everything is trance". We may observe an individual's states of trance or absorption/concentration in a given experience, in almost any activity people carry out. Either when we are fully concentrated while watching a movie or a football game, or when we are going through times of sadness or joy, our conscious mind is able to direct all its attention and cognition so as to be focused on a particular experience. (This is what we call "attention").
Trance manifests as a process due to which there is an expanded absorption, thus a deepening, of an experience.Present research assumes that the depth of a trance is directly related to the degree of absorption achieved by the conscious mind (causing the unconscious mind to be increasingly "present"), and also that depth of trance is inversely proportional to the presence of the mind's conscious cognitive capabilities at a given moment. For instance, when a person becomes truly focused on a particular experience, he/she starts "forgetting" - in the sense of not having, or choosing to have, consciousness about - his/her immediate reality. For instance, a telephone ring might simply not be heard since attention is focused elsewhere.This makes it reasonable to assume that working with trance will help us access (and make use of) the exclusive attention of our patient's or client's unconscious mind, at the same time that his conscious mind is investing the cognitive energy inherent in absorption into a particular experience. (Here is an interesting link to what Brendan Cartmel, in the February 2011 issue of this newsletter, called "concentration meditation", OL). Thanks to this absorption process the conscious mind, while active, suspends its critical faculty of analyzing what a therapist is presently offering in the form of suggestions. As a consequence, the conscious mind may eventually adopt what its unconscious subsystem is offering to it. This act of adoption could embody the potential that a “higher" social-emotional way of meaning making could enter the conscious mind, not in a straightforwardly and directly conscious way, but by gradual absorption, or "unconsciously", over time.
How to Work with Trance States
As mentioned, in the Ericksonian hypnosis model, trance is always present...The challenge for the clinical hypnosis specialist - and this is where his/her art lies - is based on detecting the flow of trance states and generating insight into where and how they can be used developmentally. As hypnosis experts, we know we must use the client's existing trance in a given moment, in order to shape it into a different form.
Consequently, when a client presents with a complaint which suggests the need for a remedy, we must work on what s(he) perceives as a "negative" trance, in order to turn it into a positive, generative trance. In my mind, this transformation has nothing to do with what is sometimes thought of as the "placebo effect" of hypnosis. Rather, it is due to the profound transformation of a human's way of being that can take place in response to verbal suggestions made by an hypnosis expert, the meanings attributed to these words internally, and the emotions resulting from such attribution.
Knowing how to properly use trance in order to connect trances carrying old emotional meanings with new trances and thereby generating new emotional meanings potentially facilitates change, without our necessarily knowing how this change is taking place. I do not doubt that expertly using a person's hypnotic phenomena will help the client/patient to "walk" from one emotional meaning to a new component that will lead him to perceive the world in a different way. Whether this amounts to development in the social-emotional sense of CDF and can be measured through assessment has so far not been established.
Relationship of Work With Trance to the Constructive Developmental Framework
A basic premise of the CDF is that change is not equal to development, and that the latter derives from potentialities of a person's mind that unfold over the human lifespan. In terms of this framework as well as in the sense of Integral Coaching [ICI, from French ICI meaning "here" and also ICI meaning in Spanish Inpact Coaching Integral], changes within an individual are not necessarily tied to, or lead to, developmental transformation. However, changes occur within a broader life context, and may trigger processes that actually are, or eventually become, developmental.
Clearly, here one needs to think in dialectical terms. We can then consider that a behavioral transformation of beliefs/values/criteria of identity - as aimed for by coaching and psychotherapy - may not only influence a systemic set of variables defining a person, but may also influence, or even determine, the way in which transformations provoked by shaping trance spread and develop over time, resulting in developmental effects in the social-emotional sense. (In fact, this could be a marker for the difference between social-emotional and cognitive development, in that the latter does not seem open to persuasion but in its critical as well as constructive form rather resists it).
That is to say, human beings will not only view occurring behavioral changes from an ontic perspective, but also according to the developmental potentials embodied in their social-emotional meaning making within a social environment, and their way of thinking and understanding of motivation (internal needs and social pressures).
The process of increasing consciousness regarding the way a person creates his/her world is inseparable from the way in which conceptual thinking acts as a generator of new meanings. In coaching, such meanings, developed by a client, are studied by a coach or therapist. In conjunction with conceptual - logical or dialectical - thinking a person will generate structures that provide him or her with insight as to where s(he) is positioned in the social (and even the natural) world, and what makes her "be" where s(he) finds herself'
It is here that using Laske´s constructive Developmental Framework as well as models of Integral coaching (ICI) could enable coachees to make connections between their socio-emotional and cognitive development' we as experts in developmental listening and thinking can thus attempt to raise clients' awareness of their meaning making. By using emotions, therefore, clients can generate new connections between meanings they are making and, through dialectical thinking, can arrive at "insights" embodying new generative possibilities for living. How this can be supported by using dialectical thinking is a study still in its infancy'.
What Do Degrees of Evolution of an lndividual Depend On?
It seems clear that the evolution of states of social-emotional and cognitive development varies from individual to individual, and that such states are context-dependent. However, they are anchored in what we would call a *center of gravity" of meaning making of an individual, a central grounding of which we also speak in hypnosis.
In the past, the idea has been that cognitive factors are dissociated from emotional factors. This is no longer maintained today. Research has provided much evidence that these processes (cognition and emotion) are not only related, but also have a parallel development that varies over people's life span' This intrinsic linkage between emotional and cognitive factors would seem naturally to result in different kinds of trance, - presently an un-researched topic.
Conclusion
In hypnosis, we use trance as a means to access emotions and to produce generative states in which emotions become connected with new social-emotional meanings. This approach is quite similar in terms of processes (not in terms of contents) to what happens in using CDF-based and Integral coaching where a connection is made between socio-emotional and cognitive development, for the sake of generating new ways of being in the world, as pioneered by psychotherapy a century ago.
Given the existence of different models of how human social-emotional and cognitive factors interact, what is important it seems to me, is searching for and discovering the many commonalities between different models with regard to what they teach about how humans change, and to understand how these models' in one way or another, direct us to analogous pathways for practically bringing about change, and perhaps even development' in people.
Understanding patterns of emotional meaning making and using our knowledge about them in assisting individuals takes us closer to achieving a state where our clients' thinking, as well as our own, is more integrated with our emotions. If we are aware of this fact, we will become increasingly better able to build a world we really want to live in.
Paul Anwandter (http://www.paul-anwandter.com) is a coach, an Electronic Engineer, entrepreneur, author of many papers and 6 books, among them: “Introduction to ICI Integral Coaching”, "ICI IntegraI Coaching Applied to Business" and "Self-hypnosis: Train your mind". He is also a Teacher of Clinical Hypnosis & Advanced Hypnotherapy, Master Trainer of ICI Integral Coaching, an International ICC (International coaching community) Coaching Trainer and a NLP Master Trainer. One of the most interesting projects developed by him has been the setting up of the magazine ICIMAG (http://www.icimag.cl), a digital magazine that delivers information considering a Coaching vision.
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