The Confusion Technique 2

One windy day as I was on my way to attend that first formal seminar on hypnosis conducted by Clark Hull in 1923, a man came rushing around the corner of a building and bumped hard against me as I stood bracing myself against the wind. Before he could recover his poise to speak to me, I glanced elaborately at my watch and courteously, as if he had inquired the time of day, I stated "It's exactly 10 minutes of two," although it was actually closer to 4:00pm, and I walked on. About a half a block away I turned and saw him still looking at me, undoubtedly still puzzled and bewildered by my remark. I continued on my way to the laboratory and began to puzzle over the total situation and to recall various times I had made similar remarks to my classmates, and acquaintances and the resulting confusion, bewilderment, and feeling of mental eagerness on their part for some comprehensible understanding.

Particularly did I recall the occasion on which my physics laboratory mate had told his friends that he intended to do the second(and interesting) part of a coming experiment. I learned of this, and when we collected our experimental material and apparatus and were dividing it up into two separate piles, I told him at the crucial moment quietly but with great intensity, "THAT SPARROW REALLY FLEW TO THE RIGHT, THEN SUDDENLY FLEW LEFT, AND THEN UP, AND I JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT."

While he stared blankly at me, I took the equipment for the second part of the experiment and set busily to work with the equipment for the first part of the experiment. Not until the experiment was nearly completed did he break the customary silence that characterized our working together. He asked, "How come I'm doing this part? I wanted to do that part." To this I replied simply, "It just seemed to work out naturally this way." "Don't you just love this man. MY HERO"

The above clip from history can be found in Milton Erickson's Collected Papers-Volume I.

Thanks for the great explanation of the confusion technique. Just one little question, do you have to wait for a critical moment to start confusing your subject or is it OK ANYTIME to use the technique. by critical moment, I mean is there a special combination of the enviroment, the subject's own mentality and all the surround circustances that would make the confusion more easily achieved?

I'm glad you are enjoying this. There is alot to the principles of the confusion technique, and to simplify it to greatly would limit the possibilities. The critical moment you question about, can be either created or you can wait for it.

I will be writing extensively on the principles of confusion, and what one should realize is that it all ties into anchors. Everything in life is an anchor, or a relation to some previous experience whether it be words or actual happenings, and even the happenings become broken down. What happens in life all of your learnings build upon each other creating to your understanding due to a previous experience.

In NLP, we say that your learnings take on what is termed a 4-tuple of meaning. That is you have a verbal, kinesthetic, auditory, and a visual association to everything. By noticing which of these is in the background, that is the subconscious part of your subject, while they are paying attention to their conscious element of the information presented, one can interrupt the pattern causing a need from the subject to continue with something. We require understandings, to continue our communication, otherwise we turn inside on a trancediravational search for meaning. During this search the operator can input anything that seems somewhat sensible and the subconsiuos accepts it due to the need for understanding.

Example. You ask a child to ckose her eyes and begin to watch her favorite show from beginning to end. As the child begins to watch her show, she is consciously aware of her visual identity. As she is viewing you gently raise her arm and say, "your arm will lower only as quickly as it takes you to watch your show thourly and enjoyably". Now the child is not paying attention to her arm because her kinesthetics are out of her consious awareness, so her arm has become catalyptic, and her subconsious is controlling it due to your direction. As her arm begins to lower you can stop it. This will cause her show to stop, until the movement continues because her memories require the entire 4-tuple to continue. At this point you whisper some kind of direction for later which goes straught through the the consious to the subconsious kind of like a commercail.

Then as soon as you let go of the arm the show commences until the end.

What kind of fun can we have with this? Can you amagine the havic you can cause with your friends kids if you werte to babysit. Anyhow there you have it, in a nutshell. What matters is that what is expected becomes interrupted through an out of consious point of awareness, then you provide anything reasonable such as "that right, you can now close your eyes as you sit in that chair, there, and go into a deep trance now".