Product reviews for The Art of Therapeutic Communication

This collection captivates! It integrates the personal with the professional, the scientific with the poetic, the pragmatic with the inspired, and provides a dimension of beauty rare in a practical teaching guide.

In this text, you will encounter Dr. Kay Thompson as the first woman to be a member of the American Board of Dentistry, a president of the Pennsylvania Dental Association, and a president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis; you see her in action as a woman willing to take charge, a pioneer. Her skills as a dentist, hypnotist, hypnotherapist, and mentor stand beside her roles as beloved wife, colleague, and friend.

Through transcriptions of her workshops, Kay shares with humor and passion her controversial assumptions and special clinical techniques, especially useful for hypnoanesthesia, control of pain and bleeding, but also for the transcendence of ordinary awareness at home and at work that they inspire in the reader.

Sections are organized so that professionals from different backgrounds can pick and choose from the treasure trove of techniques. Chapters cover Hypnotherapy, The Language of Hypnosis, The Nature of Trance, (which includes Kay's innovative Dual Inductions), Suggestion and Utilization, Therapy with Pain, Holistic Dentistry, Ethics in Caring, Clinical Demonstrations, (with a charming companion CD), and the Personal Impact of Hypnosis on Kay's life "How I got to be what I am becoming." The book concludes with others' memories of Kay and their memorable memorials.

Appropriately, the book opens with Kay's review of the history of hypnotherapy and her expression of gratitude for 25 years of study with her mentor and friend, Dr. Milton H. Erickson, M.D., the father of Hypnotherapy.

Kay warns against the trend to over-simplify, or even trivialize Erickson's groundbreaking work. Transforming her admonishment into a hypnotic suggestion, she said, "It does not make sense for the imitators to sentence us to make sense of the essence of the essential scent that we sent for, since that one was not the scent sent for us and the sensitivity of the particular scent changes with the wearer."

Like Erickson, Kay practiced a physician heal thyself, model of therapy. Going through her own surgeries without anesthesia she practiced the self-hypnotic techniques she learned from Dr. Erickson, breaking the lock-step of clock time, and entering into subjective time, where pain management is possible.

"To be truly Ericksonian," Kay summarized, "you must be yourself."

Scattered throughout the chapters are Thompson's controversial tenets, that are so accessible and elegantly stated as to appear simple. Here are eleven highlights from this volume.

1. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.
2. Laboratory measures of hypnotizability tell us little about the ability of a highly motivated person in a real life situation to enter into an altered state, to cope.
3. There are many different states of trance, not just one.
4. Client motivation is essential to the effective reception of a suggestion.
5. Utilization by the subject/client/patient is more important than the hypnotist's suggestion.
6. To mobilize our confidence against our own vulnerability and fear of the failure of our suggestions is the clinicians first step.
7. Carefully designed linguistic and metaphorical sleights of hand can help people sustain the unconscious concentration that can produce a shift in mental state.
8. When we know a patient can do something like stop bleeding during surgery and they actually do it, and all we did was say, "Stop bleeding," these liminal phenomena deserve our perpetual amazement.
9. Pain is a warning signal. "When everything that can be done and should be done, has been done, there's no longer any reason for pain."
10. Hypnosis does not follow neurological or physiological
    pathways.
11. Objectivity does not preclude compassion.

Kay loved to challenge the misconception that many professionals have of dentists. "Hypnosis is an oral art," she said, somewhat tongue in cheek; "as a dentist, I REALLY KNOW how to get inside a person's head." She emphasized that the mouth is the emotional learning center for the body.

Throughout the book, but especially in the section on pain, Kay shares her secret points of entry into dialogue with a person's physiology, where the regulation of temperature, blood flow, and unconscious rules takes place.

If you are looking for the specific words to use to entrance your clients, this is the book that will provide you with a wealth of Kay's poetic hypnotic tongue twisters for the unconscious mind.

These plays of word and image distract the conscious mind, so that the unconscious mind can stay focused. The focused unconscious keeps the client in the right mental state. As Kay put it, "You keep refocusing their attention so they can concentrate."Trance vs. our usual distracted state."

These word-vehicles use what we might think of as a subtle time-filing system. They keep the skeptical, conscious mind, back in clock time, where it is prevented from meddling with the unconscious or receptive process, that is safely tucked away in subjective time. Some Kay brain-puzzles:
"When you get off the plane, it's still plain to see that that pain from the plane is still there."
"You can become so entranced with really knowing all there is to know about how to make the memory of that experience change into something that it wasn't when it began, only because you hadn't thought about it as being what you didn't think it was."
"While you are breathing, I want you to do something you are not going to be able to do."
"You have all the time you need in the time you have."
"It's been such a long time that you've had anything but a short time""
With Kay's inductions, the conscious mind trips over itself trying to follow, and gives over to the consciousness that can receive a suggestion that the conscious mind would reject in disbelief.

Kay didn't miss an opportunity to weave into her suggestions aphorisms for life: "The way you get from yesterday to tomorrow is by going through today."

Kay elucidates steps for dealing with pain. First we recognize it as a warning. Once we have done what we can to take care of the problem, we keep feeling, but not feeling pain. We transform the pain into something else like hot or cold, kinds of pressure, a sensation in another body part. Then pain can be become a plane we take off in, a pane of glass we can see through clearly, a pain-ting of something very beautiful we can later share with others.

Kay shines through this text as the grand lady of post-hypnotic suggestion and healing.
"You can be pleasantly surprised at how comfortable you will be as long as normal healing is progressing."
One is forever struck by the ethicality in each suggestion, "as long as normal healing is progressing." She makes no false promises of cure. "You have all the time you need in the time you have." Like her mentor, Kay did not elicit private information from her volunteer subjects in workshops to make her work more dramatic. Respect was her bottom line.

Milton Erickson felt great joy to watch his students fly from his fold. Truly, through this collection, Kay's spirit flies on, released from its corporeal cage, to a higher standing of diligence, brilliance and love.

As Dr. Kay Thompson gave respect, so this text testifies that she merits respect, for the woman and the work.