Milton Erickson, for example, was one of the most successful healers that ever lived, yet all he ever did was just talk to his clients. He just told them stories. There was obviously something within those stories that unlocked the problem, but exactly what we can never really know as those patterns are inaccessible to our conscious brains. It was all happening on a deeper, unconscious level, one that he himself didn’t really understand.

Erickson, though, had an exceptional background. Largely crippled as a child, he spent most of his childhood days in a chair on the porch of his parents farm. From there, he learnt how to manipulate brains to be able to get some of what he wanted from the environment. He became very observant and a master communicator, using the only tool he had - his voice. Learning those skills so young, they quickly became unconscious and developed unconsciously, therefore operating at a depth far below what he or others could consciously access later in life.

Similarly, though to a lesser degree, the other therapists studied also had little rational understanding of what it was they did that generated their results. They might of had beliefs regarding this, but most of those beliefs were quickly found to be mistaken. The books ‘The Structure of Magic’ 1 and 2 delve deeper into this for anyone interested - I think they’re available as Pdfs online. Here, I just want to explain a couple of underlying principles that are increasingly overlooked.

Healing, in this context, largely refers to the removal of pain. If we can remove pain, the person's level of happiness rises automatically, generally speaking. There can be exceptions to this, especially if there’s confusion regarding identity, but, by and large, pain detracts from our experience of this life thing, so we want to expel pain from within as much as possible. The problem is rarely the problem, the problem is the pain that the problem generates - remove the pain, and there’s no problem.

As we go through this life thing, we all get wounded, we all carry scars. Couldn't be different. The difference is in our attitude towards them, the meaning we give to them.

When a wound doesn't heal, generally the most fruitful and organic approach, is to change the meaning the wound has for the person. Change it from malign to relatively benign, and the pain is automatically reduced. But this is not so easy to do and is beyond the scope of most therapists. To be able to facilitate such an intervention, the therapist themselves must have a broad and flexible perspective and be operating from a model that understands that it’s the pain that's the core problem and that the pain reflects the meaning assigned. Then, even if they understand, they need to go through the steps required to permit such a shift to occur.

If we take a past traumatic event that still echoes pain, we can visualise it as existing as a sort of tangled knot within that person. Many of the tangled strands are the meanings interwoven into the event, which then amplify the pain. Typically, the original pain has a direct, painful association that can be dialed down by different means, but this organic pain has become greatly amplified by the tangled threads of meaning interwoven through it.

Obviously, we want to untangle that mess; we want to separate out the strands of meaning that are amplifying and confusing the core issue. But to do this, we have to be allowed to do this; we have to have some slack in the strands to be able to untangle them. If the person is gripping them tightly, we cannot begin to untangle anything as the person is resisting. Anyone who has ever tried to untangle knots knows that first the strands must be relaxed; we cannot untangle stressed strands.

This is why hypnosis or psychedelics are often effective in generating positive change as the person relaxes their grip on the relevant strands once their focus is shifted elsewhere. Erickson's rambling and bizarre stories achieved the same purpose. Trying to logically follow the illogical story changed, or confused, the person's default equilibrium of motivations/tension. Stress shifted elsewhere, generating slack in the relevant strands. Erickson also, indirectly or directly, gave instructions regarding how the person could discard most of those strands and rearrange the remaining ones positively.

Again, there are few, if any, people in the world that can communicate directly with the unconscious as Erickson was able to, but the point is that to able to change meaning we must first sidestep resistance. Which brings me back to the drum I constantly beat - flexibility. Largely, a problem is a problem because the person lacks the flexibility to untangle it themselves. Some people get extremely upset by events that others shrug off. The problem is not the event, it's the response to it. Help the person generate flexibility in their system, and most problems will simply disappear. Stop gripping those strands, and they’ll untangle themselves or just disintegrate.

But to get flexibility, we need to simplify. There’s no point in trying to realign strands that are just infections. There’s no point in wasting energy trying to accommodate a cuckoo's egg. Step away from our tangled and overgrown web for a bit and see what is actually us and what isn’t. Do that, and most of the problems we’re trying to untangle no longer exist. But, and again, unless we understand that, at base, it's all pleasure and pain and that a specific pain is not experienced in a vacuum, but rather we're experiencing the taste of the cocktail that particular painful flavour forms just one part of, we lack an accurate enough model to make meaningful interventions.

Most people, even psychologists, refuse to accept that, at base, it's all just pleasure and pain. Such a model is rejected, not because it's inaccurate but because it's not noble enough for both our collective and individual egos. We pretend there's something else, something deeper, something glorious and unique to us homo sapiens, because, somewhat ironically, it's much more pleasant to believe this. For most of us, and for our cultures, it's fine and probably beneficial to have those ideals, but psychologists need to be able and willing to look behind the colourful veil. Typically they're not, which is why mainstream psychotherapy has such a poor success rate.

Mainstream therapists, as with most mainstream medical doctors, are only trained to address symptoms using a 'paint by numbers' approach. Dealing with meaning is somewhat out of bounds in mainstream psychotherapy, as it’s getting into the blurry and highly charged area of values and ego. It’s a can of worms, and so it’s not surprising it’s largely avoided. This means there’s very little effort to introduce meaningful flexibility. People are coming in for change, which first requires the flexibility to change. If they already had the required flexibility, they wouldn’t be knocking on the door in the first place.

Having said that, walking into a psychologist's clinic and throwing a big, tangled mess onto his or her desk is like going to a medical doctor with symptoms that come from an unhealthy diet and lifestyle. It’s just stupid; what can they do other than try to suppress symptoms? They’re not your Mum, sort the basics out first and then go back if you still need to, but most of the time you will no longer need to.

Fortunately, if we want to improve the quality of our lives, we can do 90% of what is required just by detoxing. That’s always the first step. Forget sifting through the trash; just throw it out. Walk away, and what is innately you, will come with you. What isn’t won’t. Now we no longer have to carry that baggage. Experience that less is more, and it all becomes very easy.

In a nutshell;

Change the meaning, and we change what that event represents to us, which changes how we're responding to it. But to change the meaning, we must overcome the resistance the person will have to changing their beliefs and values that has generated that particular meaning in the first place. That meaning doesn't exist in a vacuum. We need some slack to allow the knots to untangle themselves, or be untangled. Given that the specific painful meaning, is wrapped up in other meanings - like a Russian doll - it's actually much easier, and much more thorough, to just release our grip on all of it. 90% of it is just a tangled pile of inaccurate and contradictory beliefs and values that other people programmed into our brains long ago anyway. Whatever nuggets of real gold is among that pile of fools gold, we can reclaim at our leisure. But we're claiming them; we stop living like drones motivated by a mishmash of secondhand programming.