The Practitioner's Guide to Mirroring Hands

A client-responsive therapy that facilitates natural problem-solving and mind-body healing

Ernest L. Rossi, Richard Hill

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785832468
• eBook ISBN: 9781785832918
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Richard Hill and Ernest L. Rossi's The Practitioner's Guide to Mirroring Hands: A Client-Responsive Therapy that Facilitates Natural Problem-Solving and Mind Body Healing describes in detail how Mirroring Hands is conducted, and explores the framework of knowledge and understanding that surrounds and supports its therapeutic process. Foreword by Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D. In this instructive and illuminating manual, Hill and Rossi show you how Mirroring Hands enables clients to unlock their problem-solving and mind body healing capacities to arrive at a resolution in a way that many other therapies might not. The authors offer expert guidance as to its client-responsive applications and differentiate seven variations of the technique in order to give the practitioner confidence and comfort in their ability to work within and around the possibilities presented while in session. Furthermore, Hill and Rossi punctuate their description of how Mirroring Hands is conducted with a range of illustrative casebook examples and stage-by-stage snapshots of the therapy in action: providing scripted language prompts and images of a client's hand movement that demonstrate the processes behind the technique as it takes the client from disruption into the therapeutic; and from there to integration, resolution, and a state of well-being. This book begins by tracing the emergence of the Mirroring Hands approach from its origins in Rossi's studies and experiences with Milton H. Erickson and by presenting a transcription of an insightful discussion between Rossi and Hill as they challenge some of the established ways in which we approach psychotherapy, health, and well-being. Building upon this exchange of ideas, the authors define and demystify the nature of complex, non-linear systems and skillfully unpack the three key elements of induction to therapeutic consciousness focused attention, curiosity, and nascent confidence in a section dedicated to preparing the client for therapy. Hill and Rossi supply guidance for the therapist through explanation of therapeutic dialogue's non-directive language principles, and through exploration of the four-stage cycle that facilitates the client's capacity to access their natural problem-solving and mind body healing. The advocate Mirroring Hands as not only a therapeutic technique, but also for all practitioners engaged in solution-focused therapy. Through its enquiry into the vital elements of client-cue observation, symptom-scaling, and rapport-building inherent in the therapist/client relationship, this book shares great wisdom and insight that will help the practitioner become more attuned to their clients' inner worlds and communication patterns. Hill and Rossi draw on a wealth of up-to-date neuroscientific research and academic theory to help bridge the gap between therapy's intended outcomes and its measured neurological effects, and, towards the book's close, also open the door to the study of quantum field theory to inspire the reader's curiosity in this fascinating topic. An ideal progression for those engaged in mindfulness and meditation, this book is the first book on the subject specially written for all mental health practitioners and is suitable for students of counseling, psychotherapy, psychology, and hypnotherapy, as well as anyone in professional practice.

Chapter 1

The History of Mirroring Hands

Ernest Rossi in Conversation with Richard Hill

Figure 1.1. Richard Hill and Ernest Rossi in conversation, June 2016

In June 2016, I met with Ernest Rossi and his wife, Kathryn Rossi, at their home in California. The main reason for the visit was to explore the writing of this book. We met every day over seven days, recording over 25 hours of interviews and conversations. In the second session on day 1 of my week with the Rossis, I asked Ernest Rossi, “What is the history of the Mirroring Hands approach? How did it emerge from your ‘apprenticeship’ with Milton Erickson?” I have reproduced the bulk of the answer. The transcript has been edited for clarity and some additional commentary has been added. Italicized words indicate emphasis.

In this transcript, and throughout the book, Richard Hill is represented by RH and Ernest Rossi by ER.

From the Rossi/Hill Conversations, 2016

Los Osos, California, June 1, 2016, 2pm

RH: Maybe this is the opportunity, what do you think, in among all the questions that I have, one was, really, to hear from you about the emergence of this Mirroring Hands approach.

ER: Oh … what’s the essence, profoundly the essence …

RH: Yes!

ER: I remember once being introduced from the lectern, “And now Ernie Rossi will show his approach with the hands” (we laugh). Isn’t that silly?

RH: And that was … that?

ER: I think, “He doesn’t get it.” So, what doesn’t he get? We have two sides … you know all this stuff about the left and right hemisphere? It’s all true from the quantum field theory perspective of consciousness and cognition, empathy, personality, brain plasticity, molecules, and gene expression. all the way down to the quantum level. It’s built in here (ER indicates his head).

RH: Yes, I’m very familiar with much of that …

(ER pauses as he contemplates where to begin.)

ER: I was with Milton Erickson many times when David Cheek was there, so it was a threeway conversation between us … just like I was there many times when Ravitz was there … and I learned in these informal shop-talk trialogues a lot that the public’s perception of therapeutic hypnosis seemed to have no appreciation of …

* * *

Erickson might reasonably be considered one of the major thinkers about modern psychotherapy and therapeutic hypnosis. He qualified as a psychiatrist in the 1920s and conducted extensive research in the field of therapeutic hypnosis. The Milton H. Erickson Foundation, led by Jeffrey Zeig, Ph.D., continues the legacy of Erickson through education, a huge archive, and the organization of an annual conference to celebrate his work and the ongoing evolution of psychotherapy.1 Erickson’s publications are best recorded in the 16 volumes of The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. (2008–2015) edited by Ernest Rossi, Kathryn Rossi, and Roxanna Erickson-Klein.2 He was a master teacher. The people who spent time with him, learned from him, and developed their work in association with him are a “who’s who” of modern psychotherapy.

Ernest Rossi regularly visited Erickson, often monthly, and usually for about a week, beginning in 1972 until Erickson’s passing in 1980. Many significant people would visit Erickson, so being in the Erickson household was a fertile ground for any developing student, researcher, or writer. Leonard Ravitz, a psychiatrist from Yale, was a student of Erickson from around 1945. Ravitz was involved in the pioneering work of the measurement of human electrodynamic fields and the variations between the left and right sides of the body. In the 1950s, he and Erickson applied this technique to subjects during hypnosis. Let it suffice to say that the apparatus had similarities to other electrodynamic measuring apparatus such as an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain activity, or an electrocardiogram (EKG/ECG) machine, which measures the electrical activity of the heart. He and Erickson mentored Rossi in the use of the measuring apparatus and they conducted a number of experiments with patients, on themselves, and with family members during the mid-1970s, much of which is documented in Ravitz’s book Electrodynamic Man.3 During my visit with Rossi, we conducted several experiments, including the first ever measurement of two people in trance, using a modern version of the apparatus. Rossi and I became the “left” and “right” sides of a dyad connected by the holding of hands to create the circuit. The details of our solo experiments and other experiments conducted previously are detailed in Chapter 14.4 The important aspect to note is that the measuring electrodes were adhered to the palms of each hand. The voltage was recorded as a line on a strip of paper that showed the variations over the time of the experiment. The right and left sides were recorded as different lines, so it was possible to see the variations happening in each side and the differences in activity between the two sides of the body.

Dr. David Cheek was also an important mentor for Rossi. He began his medical career as a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics. He became very interested in hypnosis and developed the process of “ideomotor signalling.”5 Cheek first learned this from hypnosis training seminars presented by Erickson in the 1950s. In essence, the positive, or “yes,” attribution was given to one finger and the negative, or “no,” to another. The subject is trained to raise one finger or the other as a response. During trance, it was found that one or the other of these fingers would rise or move in a non-conscious way – “almost by themselves” – indicating a connection with implicit, unconscious regions of the subject. These movements may agree with the conscious dialogue or may disagree to indicate discord or incongruence between the conscious and non-conscious worlds of the subject. The non-conscious, or non-selfdirected, action is similar to hand levitation which is also an ideomotor response that occurs “by itself ” and is a behavior during hypnosis that can indicate a state of trance. The important aspect to note is that the different finger responses reflect opposite and mirror aspects of the situation being investigated.

* * *

ER: So, I’m reading the literature and sitting with these guys and I realize that in the literature, there is a term – the ideomotor – the idea gives rise to a push, an activity … that’s what I connected with. I’m intrinsically a top-down person. It’s the idea that evokes (ER indicates with his hands a movement down the body from his head).

This was one of the things I found brilliant about Cheek that the rest of the hypnosis world did not understand. Apparently, there were some high science guys who pride themselves on their “science” and “experiment” and “research” in the field of hypnosis who demolished Cheek.

What they found was unreliability in the movement of the fingers. Cheek says, “This is your ‘yes’ finger and this is your ‘no’ finger and this is your ‘I don’t know’ finger.” These guys did some experiments and found the subjects to be unreliable, “Cheek is not scientific!” (ER describes this with high pantomime.) They turned the whole world of hypnosis and psychotherapy against the idea of the “ideodynamic.”

But … if you stop to think about it … ideo means “idea,” but it also means “the individual.” So, what kind of simple-minded mechanism would it be if every time I say, “Yay,” your yay finger goes up, and every time I say “Nay,” your nay finger goes up? In other words, human complexity is involved, not human unreliability.

These scientific types were looking for some objective science, just like in the 1890s – the beginning of experimental psychology in Würzburg, in Germany – and they said, “Ah, psychology is a science, an experimental science” and it’s been futzing around with the subjective humanities ever since … Really, these so-called scientists were talking about the experience of the world only from their left hemisphere – the verbal, the mathematical – rather than the right hemisphere – the episodic and experiential. So, it was an effort to see the truth. I saw the truth in Erickson and I saw the truth in Cheek. But, I saw that the finger signals could be unreliable and it concerned me too.

So, I did a book with Cheek,6 and I developed all those paradigms, all those techniques, all those boxes in the book, and they really are still good. I haven’t used them that much because I moved on to other things, but I was looking for something else because there was one thing that did bother me – the finger signals – as some people just didn’t show them.

Somehow, when you were in the atmosphere of Cheek, he carried such an authority that the subject’s finger really did go up by itself. Other people, the scientific types, said it wasn’t by itself, Cheek was “programming” you. So, I was looking for something that was less programmable, so to speak …

You’re really asking what were the steps that led to my inventing the Mirroring Hands technique … It was the idea of the ideodynamic – the essence of that so-called “trance” thing – it was also the ideodynamic that was a split between my point of view and Cheek’s. He called it “ideomotor,” but if there is ideomotor, there must be ideosensory, and I thought the word “ideodynamic” included both of them. When I wrote the book, I used the word ideodynamic, but he really never went for that.

RH: How did you get to using the hands?

ER: I think it really just came out of body language. (ER demonstrates the use of one hand and then the other while in discussion.)

So, I thought, “Why not use the whole hand?” Now, that’s the connection with Erickson, who invented the hand levitation approach in therapeutic hypnosis. I’m not exactly sure of when, in my memory, but I believe that I put the ideas of Erickson and Cheek together to create the mind–hand mirroring approach to therapeutic hypnosis. Erickson did this (ER raises his arm off the chair like a hand levitation) but, actually, this was kind of hard for a lot of people, but maybe …

(ER’s eyes sparkle in a numinous a-ha moment of discovery) … Oh, now I recall the connection …

This was one of the earliest ideas about what hypnosis was – that it was a manifestation of electromagnetism. I think … I don’t know if it was me or somebody else … sometimes I really do think, “Was that really me or did I read that somewhere?” Anyway, those old historical books on h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1: The History of Mirroring Hands
• 2: Thinking IN the Systems of Life
• 3: Unlocking Natural Connections
• 4: Language Principles
• 5: The Rhythms and Cycles of Life in Therapy
• 6: What Is and What Can Be
• 7: Natural, Comfortable, and Sensitive Observation
• 8: Holding Both Sides of the Mirror
• 9: Curiosity and the Elephant in the Room
• 10: Clearing Out the Negative, Preparing for the Positive
• 11: Symptom Scaling for Enlightenment
• 12: Improvising, Drama, and Mirroring Hands
• 13: Personal Access to Your Growing Edge
• 14: Research and Experiments
• 15: Down the Rabbit Hole
• Appendix A: The Nuntius Nuclei: A New Neuroscience for Curiosity
• Appendix B: An Integrated Quantum Field Theory of Physics, Math, Biology, and Psychology
• References
• Index
• Copyright