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Generative Trance: The Experience of Creative Flow
Stephen Gilligan

This book describes an entirely new way of conducting hypnotherapeutic interventions—Stephen Gilligan's generative trance. The first generation of trance work, the traditional hypnosis that still holds sway in most places, considers that both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind of the client are, to put it bluntly, idiots. So trance work involves first 'knocking out' the conscious mind and then talking to the unconscious mind like a 2-year old that needs to be told how to behave.

 

Milton Erickson created the second generation of trance work. He approached the unconscious as having creative wisdom and each person as extraordinarily unique. Thus, rather than trying to programme the unconscious with new instructions, Erickson saw trance as an experiential learning state where a person's own creative unconscious could generate healing and transformation. At the same time Erickson, for the most part, carried the same low opinion of the conscious mind. Thus, Ericksonian hypnosis looks to bypass the conscious mind with indirect suggestions and dissociation and depotentiate it with confusion techniques.

Reviews

"Steve Gilligan is the closest I`ve experienced to being with Milton Erickson since Erickson`s death in 1980. His new book, Generative Trance, delivers a tour-de-force of the latest thinking of third-generation hypnosis in a charming and organized way. This is the definitive overview of a new approach in psychotherapy and change work. I continue to learn from Gilligan and look forward to returning to this book, again and again, to gain even deeper insights."

 

BIll O'Hanlon, Arthor

Taproots, An Uncommon Casebook, A Guide to Trance Land and Solution-Oriented Hypnosis

*****
There is a revolution taking place in psychotherapy that sheds the limitations of naïve models of therapy and change. Stephen Gilligan is one of the most important leaders in this transformation of practice, particularly as it applies to hypnosis. His "generative trance" marks a major advance in helping us resourcefully relate to all that clients and therapists bring to a session. We enthusiastically recommend it to both your conscious and unconscious mind!"

 

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D. & Hillary Keeney, Ph.D.

*****

This latest book by Steve Gilligan puts into practice the Ericksonian principles he has taught brilliantly for decades. He extends his self-relations model in several important ways, especially in the memorable sections on welcoming and weaving the identity parts into generative trance in order to allow new parts of the self to be born through generative transformation. Though not a simple book, Generative Trance provides several easy-to-follow frameworks, including the four steps of generative trance and the five key generative methods presented in the book s second section. Specific scripts are offered to help the reader learn to vocalize hypnotic suggestions so that their receivers connect with positive intentions, with the five somatic dimensions of generative trance, and can explore and engage with generative fields where creative acceptance and transformation can take place. If you want to learn deeply from a true hypnotic artist, do not miss this book!

--Maggie Phillips, Ph.D. Co-author of Healing the Divided Self and Finding Freedom From Pain

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