Milton Erickson created a powerful legacy in the field of psychotherapy. He pioneered remarkable therapeutic approaches for accepting and utilizing the person's reality, using resistance creatively, seeing and developing the symptom as a solution, seeing how the attempted solution was the problem, developing healing trances from a person's presenting reality, and accessing a person' creative capacities. As one of Erickson's most important students, Stephen Gilligan has furthered this work in many creative ways. Over the past 5 years he has developed Self-relations psychotherapy, a post-Ericksonian approach that expands Erickson's legacy with clinical methods that

(1) access the creative unconscious without formal trance,

(2) connect the creative unconscious to somatic centering processes,
and
(3) integrate the "Erickson function" of effectively utilizing any process into the client's cognitive competencies.

Self-relations psychotherapy is a remarkably powerful approach that can be applied across many clinical situations.

This powerful workshop examines the relationship between these two approaches. The first day will provide an overview model of how problems and solutions develop within a person's life cycle, and suggest 6 generative principles for translating problems into solutions. Techniques for implementing these skills will be presented, including: accessing the creative centers of both therapist and client; keeping a person's cognitive self present while accessing problem states; developing therapeutic trances without trance phenomena; therapeutic methods for translating symptoms into solutions; and love as a mature skill.

The second day will show how these various skills can be implemented into a specific method of psychotherapy.

Participants will learn how to:

--hook up with the creative unconscious before receiving the "symptom as solution";
--translate the symptom description into a "solution in progress";
--create a safe "sanctuary" for the "symptom as solution";
--access and connect competent ego states to the symptom;
--identify and disconnect "alienating" negative influences from the symptom;
--transform the symptom into a solution;
--test the effectiveness of the solution;
--and incorporate the client's competent cognitive skills into a an ongoing relationship with their creative unconscious.

Lecture, demonstration, guided process, and practice will allow participants to experience and learn how to apply the powerful effectiveness of the self-relations model.