The Everyday Trick Mrs. Erickson Kept in Her Back Pocket

In 1962, Milton Erickson’s wife went into hypnosis in front of a room of doctors, and described exactly what it felt like.

Calgary, June 1962

The doctors in the room had come to learn technique. Over two days in June 1962, the Calgary Medical and Dental Hypnosis Society had brought Milton Erickson to Alberta, and they had asked him to spend at least half a day on how to induce hypnosis, plus guidance on treating psychosomatic problems.

But at one point it wasn’t Milton who held the floor. It was his wife.

Elizabeth Erickson sat in front of the audience and fixed her eyes on something small: light reflecting off a ring. She preferred to keep her eyes open, she explained, and to choose a fixation point that caught the light, something irregular in shape, usually a piece of jewellery. And then, calmly, she began to describe her own mind as it slipped into trance.

First, she said, the things at the edges of her vision went blurry and lost their meaning. They were still there, but she didn’t put them together into objects unless she chose to. A table leg was only a table leg if she stopped and thought about it.

Then she turned her attention to sound. That was fading too. A ticking clock, an air-conditioner humming, traffic outside, all became background noise with no meaning unless she paid attention to it.

Then her body. Her hands and feet grew blurry and vague. Her field of vision closed in until it was much smaller, fuzzy at the edges, though her hands and her ring stayed perfectly clear. By now even the air-conditioner was nearly all she could hear, and her arms and legs felt detached, disconnected.

And then something stranger. The light changed. Everything seemed to have an edge around it, a light bluish red. She said she could stay in that state indefinitely just watching it, because it was fascinating.

At that point she announced: “I am in a good hypnotic state right now.”

Milton began asking her questions. Was she enjoying it? Yes. Did she know where she was? She asked whether he wanted her to work it out. No, he said, just answer spontaneously. Then no, she said, but she could figure it out if it were important. Were her arms and legs disconnected? Yes, she said, but she could connect them up again if there was any point to it.

Then Milton turned to the doctors and told them something she hadn’t mentioned at all. There was profound anaesthesia in her legs. She wasn’t particularly interested in that. She was interested in the light.

The woman behind the name

To most people who know the Erickson story, Elizabeth is a background figure: the wife of the most famous hypnotist of the twentieth century. That picture is badly incomplete.

She met Milton, in her own words, when she attended a scientific meeting as a university student. When she married him, she became an instant mother to his three small children. Family lore, recorded in the Erickson Foundation’s tribute to her, has it that Milton first spotted her from a window, and declared on the spot that he was going to marry her.

Her biographer, the therapist Marilia Baker, describes the many roles Elizabeth played: psychology student, author, editor, proofreader, hypnotic subject, wife, hostess and mother. She worked alongside her husband at the dining-room table producing the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, and helped care for the many patients Milton treated in their own living room. She also published research with him. A 1941 paper by “Erickson and Erickson” on post-hypnotic behaviour was still being cited by leading researchers decades later.

In 1948, when Milton’s health forced the family to leave Detroit for the warm, dry air of Phoenix, she moved with him and their five children. By the time Milton died in 1980, there were eight children in the family: four sons and four daughters.

And she was, as Calgary shows, something rarer still: a gifted hypnotic subject who could describe trance from the inside, precisely, while it was happening, to an audience of physicians.

What she was describing

What Elizabeth described in Calgary matches, almost point for point, what researchers would later measure.

In 1974, the psychologists Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson identified a personality trait they called absorption: “openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences”. It describes a capacity for total attention, one that fully engages a person’s perception, imagination and thought. Absorption went on to become, by any standard, the most frequently studied correlate of how responsive people are to hypnosis.

Elizabeth’s account is a vivid picture of absorption at work: a single point of light holding her whole attention while everything else faded into meaningless background.

The link isn’t perfect. As the hypnosis researcher John Kihlstrom has noted, absorption is a real but modest predictor; it can’t tell you how any one individual will respond. But hearing Elizabeth describe her world shrinking to a ring and a glimmer of light, it’s easy to see why researchers keep returning to it.

Then there’s her anaesthesia: complete, apparently effortless, and of no interest to her at all. Milton explained it to the doctors in practical terms. Her experience was like a patient under a saddle block, a type of spinal anaesthetic. Because she had lost awareness of her legs, he said, an anaesthetic effect came with it.

The light at the edge of things

One part of her account remains genuinely mysterious: the bluish-red edge of light around everything.

Elizabeth thought it was physical, not psychological. She suspected it had to do with her eyes converging as though focused on her hand, while the lens stayed completely relaxed, something she didn’t think she could do in an ordinary waking state. Milton went further, telling the doctors it was linked to anatomical changes in the eye during hypnosis that he believed had been described in the scientific literature.

Even the Erickson family can’t confirm that part. In a note on the transcript, his daughter Roxanna Erickson-Klein explains that Milton was referring to eye features associated with visual hallucinations, but that it is uncertain where in the literature he found what he described.

So the light remains what it was in 1962: a careful observer’s honest report, with no settled explanation. That’s worth saying plainly. Not every detail of a fascinating story has to be explained to be worth telling.

Three ordinary uses

People often asked Elizabeth what she actually used hypnosis for, apart from demonstrations. Her answer was refreshingly practical. She had three uses.

1. Calm. The best use, she said, was simple relaxation. If you’re tense, keyed up or overloaded, two or five minutes of dropping into an autohypnotic state, she said, calms you down beautifully.

2. The name on the tip of your tongue. She hated not being able to remember something. Her solution was to go into trance, mull it over a little, and wake up. What she was trying to remember, she said, would almost invariably pop into her head. And then she added something honest: that frequently happens anyway, but she thought hypnosis helped it along.

That caveat turns out to be scientifically spot on. The tip-of-the-tongue state was first studied in the laboratory by the Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill in 1966. They read people definitions of rare words, and found that people stuck on a word could often still recall fragments of it. Later, in 1991, Deborah Burke and her colleagues asked people of different ages to keep diaries of these moments. They found that the most common way a stuck word gets resolved, at every age, is that it simply pops up. And when asked, older adults said they were more likely to just relax and think about something else.

In other words, Elizabeth’s trick works with the mind, not against it. Stop straining, relax, and the word often surfaces on its own. Whether hypnosis adds anything beyond ordinary relaxation is unknown. She herself only thought it might.

There’s also an important limit. A forgotten name is something you can check the moment it arrives. More important memories are another matter. Research has shown that hypnosis can bring back more memories, but also more errors, and greater confidence in both. (We look at that in Hypnosis and Crime: Famous Cases and Controversies.) Elizabeth’s trick is perfect for the name of an old neighbour. It’s not a way to settle what really happened in the past.

3. Deciding. Her third use was the most personal. She said she found it exceedingly difficult to make decisions. For every good reason on one side, she could think of an equally good one on the other. So she would go into trance, and instead of trying to decide, let all the pros and cons drift into her mind. When she woke, she often found that everything had settled into place, and sometimes the answer was obvious. At the very least, it was easier to weigh the possibilities.

Milton elaborated for the doctors. In trance, he said, you could line up the arguments for and against a choice, from a research plan to whether to go to a party, and appraise them in a passive, objective way, without being emotionally caught up in them.

It’s a fascinating idea, and one that modern psychology has put to the test, with surprising results. In 2006, a team led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis reported that for complex choices with many attributes, people made better decisions after a period of distraction than after careful deliberation. They called it the “deliberation-without-attention” effect.

It caused a sensation. But it didn’t hold up. Many later studies tried and failed to replicate it. In 2015, a large replication study of 399 people, designed to give the effect its best possible chance, found no evidence for it. A meta-analysis found that earlier positive reports came from small, underpowered studies. The researchers concluded that there was no reliable support for the claim that diverting your thoughts leads to better decisions than deliberating.

That doesn’t mean Elizabeth’s experience was imaginary. Stepping back from an agonising decision may well make it feel clearer and less fraught, and she herself only claimed it made the possibilities easier to weigh. But it’s a useful reminder: how a mental technique feels and what it measurably achieves can be two very different things.

Waking for the doorbell, but not the dog

One question Elizabeth said people always asked was how she knew when to wake up.

Again she had three answers. If she went into trance for a specific purpose, she woke when it was done. If she had a set amount of time, say ten minutes, she simply told herself she’d wake in ten minutes, and found she could keep track of time well.

The third answer is the most revealing. However deep she went, she said, there were certain things she would always wake for. If the building caught fire, she had no doubt she would wake up. When nobody else was home, the telephone, the doorbell or one of the children coming in would rouse her, but traffic or the dog barking didn’t bother her at all. And when Milton was using her to demonstrate hypnosis in his home office, she was completely at his service, and wouldn’t wake until he was finished.

That’s a remarkable description of a mind that keeps watch even while absorbed: selecting what matters, ignoring what doesn’t, and staying ready. It’s the same insight that later led Ernest Hilgard to his famous “hidden observer” experiments, and it undercuts one of the oldest myths about hypnosis: that a person in trance is helpless and unaware. (You can read about related research in Famous Hypnosis Experiments and What They Found.)

A family of hypnotic subjects

Elizabeth was quick to say her way wasn’t the only way. Her daughter Betty Alice, she told the doctors, went into trance much faster than she did, using a different method. Betty Alice closed her eyes and let one hand float up; when it reached her face, she was in a marvellous trance. Elizabeth preferred her eyes open and a point of light.

Milton added a lovely family detail. Betty Alice told him it was painful to watch her mother go into trance, because she was so slow about it. But, as he reported her saying, if her father wanted her to slow down to illustrate a point, she would do it.

His conclusion for the doctors was one of his core teachings: always let your patient find their own spontaneous way of doing things.

Back to the ring

Picture the scene again. A room full of physicians in Calgary. A woman with her eyes on the light in a turquoise ring, describing her world narrowing, sounds fading, her limbs drifting away, a strange blue-red glow at the edges of things.

In the transcript, one detail is easy to miss. While Milton lectured, he asked whether she had paid attention to what he was saying. Not particularly, she replied, but she thought she could go back and figure it out.

That might be the best summary of what Elizabeth Erickson showed those doctors. Trance wasn’t something done to her, and she wasn’t lost or helpless inside it. It was a place she knew how to visit, for small and ordinary reasons: to calm down, to find a name, to sit with a hard decision. And she always knew the way back: for the doorbell, for the children, or when the job was done.

The Woman Inside the Trance

Calgary, June 1962

The woman behind the name

What she was describing

The light at the edge of things

Three ordinary uses

Waking for the doorbell, but not the dog

A family of hypnotic subjects

Back to the ring

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