Post Written By Eugene Morgan
Milton Erickson doesn’t tell his patients that they will need more flexibilility; instead he sets up the patients to do something to break up the inflexibility.
Rigidity can create a lot of anxiety in our lives. We all have rigidity, some more than others. Some of us wonder why we can’t or we won’t make changes that will help us in the long run.
One reason that we refuse to make changes in our lives is rigidity. Rigidity is a form of generalization. Once upon a time in our earlier lives we experienced a negative event.
That one negative event built a prototype in our minds, which created a generalization for future similar events. For example, a dog bites a child; therefore, the child will always fear every dog that he or she meets.
It’s not true that all dogs the child will meet will bite. So what needs to change is the prototype of the original event.