Steve Andreas > Articles > Nonverbal (Contextual) Implication

Introduction

In a previous article, I described verbal implication as follows: a statement is made that is the opposite of the desired outcome. This statement is made about a different context, which is one part of a categorical “either/or” that divides space, time or events into two categories. The result is that the listener (usually) infers the desired outcome in the present context. For example, “Your conscious mind will probably be very confused about what I am saying” implies that “Your unconscious mind will understand completely.”

Nonverbal implication works somewhat differently, by creating a nonverbal context that elicits the desired response. Here are a few examples from Erickson's work.

With several women who were incontinent due to physical reasons, he put them into trance, and then had them experience sitting on the toilet urinating, and then imagine the bathroom door opening and a strange man's face appearing (“Strange man” is a context for not urinating, eliciting an autonomic response of constriction.)

A woman was in intractable pain due to inoperable cancer, and drugs and surgery had not helped. After considerable pacing, Erickson asked her, “Now tell me, madam, if you saw a hungry tiger in the next room, slowly walking into the room and eying you hungrily and licking its chops, how much pain would you feel?” (Extreme danger is a context for not feeling pain.)

A mother always spoke up and answered for her anorexic daughter when Erickson asked the daughter questions. Erickson told the mother to get out her lipstick and hold it very close to her lips and notice how her lips tended to move when he asked the daughter questions. (Putting on lipstick is a context in which the lips are kept motionless—and therefore unable to speak.)

A man who couldn't drive outside the city limits without passing out and vomiting was told to put on his best suit, drive to the city limits and stop by the last telephone pole he thought he could reach. Then he was to start his car, accelerate, and then put it in neutral so that it would gently coast to a stop when he passed out. If he felt faint, he was to stop the car, and get out and lie in the roadside ditch until he regained consciousness. (His best suit implies not vomiting, and not lying in the ditch where it would get dirty. Having to put the car into neutral implies some control, or at least delay, in passing out, and passing out implies a delay in driving out of town, rather than its impossibility.) He passed out repeatedly in the car, but Erickson's report makes no mention of his vomiting or lying in the ditch. (An additional implication in Erickson's instructions is that passing out becomes the beginning of driving out of town, not the end of it.)

A “horribly fat girl,” prudent and prudish, came in and said that even after she lost weight she would still be about the ugliest girl in all creation. In the first session, Erickson spent most of his time handling and looking at a paperweight, glancing up at her occasionally. At the end of the session he said to her. “I hope you'll forgive me for what I have done. I haven't faced you. I know it's rude. I've played with this paperweight, it's been rather difficult to look at you. I'd rather not tell you, but since it's a psychotherapeutic situation, I really ought to tell you. Perhaps you can find the explanation. But actually I have the very strong feeling that when you get reduced, at least everything I see about you, that's why I keep avoiding looking at you, indicates that when you get reduced you will be even more sexually attractive, which is something that should not be discussed between you and me.” [1] (She is sexually attractive—nonverbal implication supported by verbal presupposition.) Since in the context of therapy, Erickson shouldn't notice or talk about her sexual attractiveness, the fact that he did, along with his rudeness in not looking at her, playing with a paperweight instead, etc. all imply the truth of what he says.