The Practitioner's Guide to Mirroring Hands

Richard Hill and Ernest L. Rossi's The Practitioner's Guide to Mirroring Hands: A Client-Responsive Therapy that Facilitates Natural Problem-Solving and Mind Body Healing describes in detail how Mirroring Hands is conducted, and explores the framework of knowledge and understanding that surrounds and supports its therapeutic process.

Foreword by Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D.

Mirroring Hands is a practical therapeutic technique that can be utilized by all practitioners for the benefit of their clients. With a tranquil state of focused attention as the starting point, the practitioner invites the client to explore an issue by projecting it into their hands; with one hand representing the difficulty or disturbance, the other becomes the natural container for the opposite reflections resolution, ease and comfort. This enables the client to engage with their deeper therapeutic self thereby facilitating the shift into a therapeutic consciousness and connect to the natural flow, cycles and self-organizing emergence that shift the client toward beneficial change.

In this instructive and illuminating manual, Hill and Rossi show you how Mirroring Hands enables clients to unlock their natural problem-solving and mind body healing capacities to arrive at a resolution in a way that many other therapies might not. The authors offer expert guidance as to its client-responsive applications and differentiate seven variations of the technique in order to give the practitioner confidence and comfort in their ability to work within and around the possibilities presented while in session. Furthermore, Hill and Rossi punctuate their detailed description of how Mirroring Hands is conducted with a diverse range of illustrative casebook examples and stage-by-stage snapshots of the therapy in action: providing scripted language prompts and illustrative images of a client's hand movement that demonstrate the processes behind the technique as it takes the client from disruption into the therapeutic; and from there to integration, resolution, and a state of well-being.

The Practitioner's Guide to Mirroring Hands begins by tracing the emergence of the Mirroring Hands approach from its origins in Rossi's studies and experiences with Milton H. Erickson and by presenting a transcription of an insightful discussion between Rossi and Hill as they challenge some of the established ways in which we approach psychotherapy, health, and well-being. Building upon this exchange of ideas, the authors define and demystify the nature of complex, non-linear systems and skillfully unpack the three key elements of induction to therapeutic consciousness focused attention, curiosity, and nascent confidence in a section dedicated to preparing the client for therapy. Hill and Rossi also supply preparatory guidance for the therapist through explanation of therapeutic dialogue's non-directive language principles, and through exploration of the four-stage cycle information, incubation, breakthrough and illumination, and verification that facilitates the client's capacity to access their natural problem-solving and mind body healing.