The Practitioner’s Guide to Mirroring Hands: A Client-Responsive Therapy That Facilitates Natural Problem Solving and Mind-Body Healing

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 utilised 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 resolution and comfort. This enables the client to engage with their deeper therapeutic self and connect to the natural flow, cycles and self-organising 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 other therapies might not. The authors punctuate their detailed description of how Mirroring Hands is conducted with a range of 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 book begins by tracing the emergence of Mirroring Hands from its origins in Rossi s experiences with Milton H. Erickson and by presenting a transcribed discussion between Rossi and Hill as they challenge some of the established approaches to psychotherapy, health, and well-being. Building upon this exchange of ideas, the authors define and demystify the nature of complex, non-linear systems and skilfully 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 non-directive language principles and 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.
Through its enquiry into client-cue observation, symptom-scaling, and rapport-building, The Practitioner s Guide to Mirroring Hands shares a great store of wisdom and insight that will help the practitioner become more attuned to their clients inner worlds. Hill and Rossi draw on a wealth of neuroscientific research and academic theory to help bridge the gap between therapy s intended outcomes and its measured neurological effects, and also open the door to the study of quantum field theory to inspire the reader s curiosity in this fascinating topic. An ideal progression for those engaged in mindfulness and meditation, this is the first book on the subject specially written for all mental health practitioners and is suitable for students of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and hypnotherapy, as well as anyone in professional practice.