ABOUT
Michele Klevens Ritterman, PhD
Psychologist, Teacher, Consultant

Therapeutic Pioneer
Dr. Michele Klevens Ritterman is best known as the mother of the Systematic Synthesis of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy with Structural/Strategic Family Contextual Therapy. As such, she pioneered the conceptualization of the symptom itself as a trance state, and therapy as a process of helping individuals or families to awaken from the symptom trance.This non-desirable state may be suggested by recurrent sequences of self-talk; family messaging; any influential social system - workplace, social media, class, religion, ethnicity - that transmits messages received unconsciously. 

Whether on not these messages are transmitted intentionally or unintentionally, they directly impact the vulnerable individual or group even at the level of psychophysiology. In families, the sequences are often observable for the therapist, and they culminate in the triggering of aspects of the recipients symptoms, as Dr. Ritterman demonstrates in detailed transcripts in her books. 

Dr. Ritterman was a most-beloved, long-term private student and friend of Dr. Milton Erickson, widely considered the father of Hypnotherapy. It was Dr. Erickson, who, upon hearing her idea that the symptom itself is an unconsciously suggested trance state, suggested to her that she "spend the rest of her professional life elaborating that concept.” So she did.

Dr. Ritterman was also a life-long student and friend of Dr. Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, Braulio Montalvo, and Harry J. Aponte,  the fathers of Structural and Strategic Therapies. These men were the pioneers in family psychosomatic research that demonstrated that family members can alter one another’s blood chemistry. Such a change might lead to a dangerous rise in the free fatty acid of the bloodstream of a super-labile diabetic child, causing ketoacidosis shock.  

It had been Jay Haley who sent her to his mentor of seventeen years, Milton Erickson, to learn from him. Dr. Erickson had long demonstrated that the hypnotherapist can help a person transfer blood or sensations from one part of the body to another. It was Dr. Ritterman who synthesized these understanding, and then as Dr. Minuchin wrote of her work, that advanced the field of psychotherapy when “it transcended the boundaries of family therapy.” To include the impact of broader social systems on the psychophysiology and health of individuals. One of her early publications was on her promising training of the mothers of Hemophiliac boys to learn to hypnotize their sons to stop a bleed.

She was also profoundly influenced by Walter Bradford Canon’s 1942 publication on “Voodoo Death”, and other medical research that had not been properly integrated with psycho-therapeutic understandings.  Canon describes how one’s immediate community turning against a person can cause sudden cardiac arrest; and Broken Heart Syndrome is a known cause of heart attack like symptoms and occasional death during severe loss and grief. These are clear examples of “suggestion” triggering automatic physiological states. 

Dr. Ritterman emphasizes the need to understand that the therapist is not the only person making suggestions to a client. The stronger and less verbal, more immediate co-presence between therapist and client, the mutual transparency and awareness of psycho-physiological responsibility, the more likely a a lasting healing. As one client who had been in therapy for decades wrote, “No one had ever come inside with me and really seen who I am.” She finally had a “witness” and was no longer alone.

Harry J. Aponte, Mentor and PhD H.C., MSW, LCSW, LMFT Clinical Associate Professor, Couple and Family Therapy Program, Drexel University in Philadelphia and former director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, wrote of her “You have been through much, but it has been fertilizer that has enriched your heart as manifested in your writings and in the special person you are. Thank you for sharing so much of you with me."

In fact, each of Dr. Ritterman's mentors admired, encouraged and acknowledged her work as advancing the field of psychotherapy. 

Dr. Ritterman is featured in Alex Vesely’s film about Dr. Erickson The Wizard of the Desert (2015).

Books
Dr. Ritterman's ground-breaking book Using Hypnosis in Family Therapy (2005) is now a classic. Written in the late 1970’s, the book remains in print in the English, Italian, and Spanish. Hope Under Siege (1991) is published in English and German. Her third book, A Woman’s Wisdom (2007), may be downloaded from this website; a fourth book The Tao of a Woman (2009) is currently available in English, Portuguese and Spanish. These two books focus on the role of helpful self-talk in beginning therapeutic counter-inductions to the Symptom Trance, defined as an awakening from the unhelpful trance state. Other published works include the story Dr. Ritterman wrote when she was ten years old about having self confidence in the face of bullies, her children's tale The Cow with the Ponytail (2016) and a volume including her published and never before published poetry: Unwinding (2021). The title is from Buckminster Fuller’s idea that "Fire is the Unwinding of the sun from a log.”

When Using Hypnosis in Family Therapy, the first systematic synthesis of Ericksonian style Hypnotherapy and Family systems contextual therapies and more, first came out a distinguished colleague in Italy, Camilo Loriedo, wrote that it was “a classic book filled with serial ideas that continue to blossom in this always fertile field." 

Braulio Montalvo, another mentor and friend wrote “This is the most useful integration of ideas in hypnosis with family therapy an enduring resource."

A colleague in Mexico wrote: "What the family has been doing ineffectively and counter productively can be turned around for their benefit. The awareness of this aspect of family communication we owe to Ritterman…she shows the flexibility and marvelous creative potential of hypnosis with family."
--Daniel Araoz

And Contemporary Psychology wrote: "Ritterman’s book is an important contribution to both family therapy and clinical hypnosis. Indeed this is the first book to be devoted to family hypnotherapy. All students of family therapy will benefit greatly from this book, regardless of the general therapeutic model they use. Family therapists owe it to themselves to read this volume.”

The book is still in print in English, Spanish and Italian.

Presentations 
Dr. Ritterman's workshops, keynotes and extensive publications span more than fifty-seven years and twelve countries. The works have been published in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, French, German and Portuguese. Videos and articles highlighting her speaking engagements, classes, and interviews can be found on this website.
 
Teaching
Dr. Ritterman's model of psychotherapy unearths healing material from within. Less-used psycho-physiological memories and sensations of the client are explored to be uniquely mobilized in the production of Therapeutic Counter-Inductions. She compares these new sequences of associations with “train tracks.” Rather than the typical focus of therapies more “adversarial” approaches, based upon "eliminating symptoms", she prefers to use Symptom Cueing. This method allows for the mind-body to perceive and utilize the start of an unhelpful sequence and automatically "switch tracks” to access new positive modes of feeling and doing. Instead of “naturally” going down the track that leads to sorrow, at the transition point, the person naturally takes a different route.