Indirect Suggestion

A hypnotic suggestion that bypasses the conscious mind's critical faculty by being delivered in an indirect, ambiguous, or embedded form rather than as a direct command. Indirect suggestions go directly to the unconscious mind and are not evaluated as much as direct suggestions. Developed and systematized by Milton Erickson, indirect suggestion encompasses a wide range of language patterns including embedded commands, metaphors, phonological ambiguity, truisms, and open-ended suggestions. The Milton Model in NLP is largely a codification of Erickson's indirect suggestion techniques.