UNCONSCIOUS TRAINING

When you train, some of what you do is conscious and some is outside of conscious awareness. Typically your participants are unaware of the second part, namely, that you are doing some things unconsciously. But you do. In fact, the more you know about the structures and the processes of human thinking, feeling, languaging, acting, relating, etc., the more you know regarding what and how you are doing things that will affect people unconsciously.

There is power and danger in this. The power is that you can influence people outside of their awareness, thereby as Erickson would say “walk around resistances and misunderstandings.” The danger in this is that you can influence people unconsciously. Now as you know, if you do that to your advantage and to their disadvantage— you have manipulated in the worse sense of the word. If you do it to the participant’s advantage— their growth, development, self- actualization — then you have worked gracefully around their awareness and they will think, “You are a magician.” They will think of you in the same way that we think Perls, Satir, and Erickson who did what we think of as “magical” things with clients.