Varieties of Double Bind in Ericksonian Hypnosis
The double bind provides an illusory freedom of choice between two possibilities, neither of which is really desired by the patient but both of which are actually necessary for his welfare.
Wise parents have used the double bind for ages in overcoming their children’s reluctance about going to bed. When told they must go to bed at eight P.M., they have the feeling of being coerced and resist. The double bind question: “Do you want to go to bed at a quarter to eight or at eight o’clock?” gets the vast majority to respond by selecting of their own “free will” the later of the two choices.
Milton H. Erickson said about such binds, "My clients can accept my suggestions how ever they want." He wrote that, often, psychiatric patients are resistant and withhold vital information indefinitely. Erickson would deal with such resistance by emphatically admonishing such patients that they were not to reveal that information that week — in fact, he was insistent that they withhold it until the latter part of the next week. This type of time bound double bind is described in his treating Joe a 12 year old boy who wetted his bed.
Erickson noted that the strength of their subjective desire to resist led them to fail to evaluate adequately his admonition; they did not recognize it as a double bind requiring them both to resist and to yield. They would often take advantage of the double bind to disclose the resistant material without further delay.
I use a resistance yielding bind during hand levitation by saying, "Now try in vain to consciously push your hand down as your unconscious pushes that hand up noticing that the harder you try in vain to consciously push your hand down the more your hand moves up." It is interesting to observe the struggle on the client's face as they resist and then typically they smile a big wonderful smile and allow their arm to continue to go up. I next get conscious unconscious congruence by suggesting (example given for weight management -- change last suggestion appropriately), "Now that you have noticed that when your conscious and unconscious are doing different things your unconscious wins allow your hand to float down so that by the time it is down you know that from now you will allow your conscious and unconscious work together to allow you manage your weight."
Erickson continued that his patients achieved their purpose of both communicating and resisting. They rarely recognized the double bind, but often commented on the ease of communicating and handling their feelings of resistance.
Erickson gave the history of his discovery of the double bind in an article (The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, January 1975, 17, 143-157) on double bind thus: When I was a boy on the farm, it was not uncommon for my father to say to me, “Do you want to feed the chickens first or the hogs, and then do you want to fill the wood box or pump the water for the cows first?” What I realized then was that my father had given me a choice; I as a person had the primary privilege of deciding which task I was to do first.
Erickson notes that what he did not realize at the time was that the primary privilege of choice depended totally on his secondary acceptance of all the tasks mentioned. This was the double bind. One had to accept the given tasks by being given the primary privilege of determining their order. This double bind is now a standard part of "sales technique" when the sales person looks in her appointment book and says, "Do you want to come on Wednesday two p.m. or Friday at four."
Erickson continued that, one winter day, in early childhood, the weather below zero, his father had led a calf out of the barn to the water trough. After the calf had drank its fill, they returned to the barn, but at the doorway the calf stubbornly braced its feet into the mud, and despite his father pulling on the halter, the obstinate calf would not budge. The more Erickson's father pulled, the more the calf resisted.
In Erickson's own words: "I was outside playing in the snow and, observing the impasse, began laughing heartily. My father challenged me to pull the calf into the barn. Recognizing the situation as one of unreasoning stubborn resistance on the part of the calf, I decided to let the calf have full opportunity to resist, since that was what it apparently wished to do. Accordingly I presented the calf with a double bind by seizing it by the tail and pulling it away from the barn, while my father continued to pull it inward. The calf promptly chose to resist the weaker of the two forces and dragged me into the barn."
Later Erickson started using his father’s alternate-choice double bind on his unsuspecting siblings to get their help in the performance of farm chores. He also used this type of double bind on himself to force himself do his homework at high school and in college improved his skills of us of the double bind as a motivational force for the self and others. Later as he began reading autobiographies of famous people extensively and discovered that this way of managing behavior was age-old. It was an item of psychological knowledge that properly belonged to the public domain.
As he started to be interested in hypnosis he began to realize that the double bind could be used in a variety of ways. Erickson discovered that in hypnosis the double bind can be direct, indirect, obvious, obscure, or even unrecognizable. The double bind can be a remarkable force, but dangerously double-edged. In negative, enforced, and competitive situations the double bind yields unfortunate outcomes. If one uses the double bind in a negative manipulative way (for personal advantage) it will backfire by creating ill will. It should be noted that if sales persons use any hypnotic sales technique in a manipulative way they will get buyer's remorse but if hypnotic persuasion is used in a loving compassionate win-win way it is not manipulative.
Erickson wrote that in college he was interested in debating, but when he use the double bind he always lost. The judges sought him out after the debate to tell him that he had actually won but that he had so aroused their antagonism that they could not help voting him down.
Erickson wrote, "When I entered psychiatry and began hypnotic experimentation at the clinical level (the experimental level had been previously explored extensively), the double bind became an approach of extensive interest for eliciting hypnotic phenomena and therapeutic responses."