Good Enough Mother gets attacked: Monster Spray

A number of years ago I attended a clinical hypnosis workshop on the west coast. The faculty was among the best in the field and our classes were kept small. Over dinner one evening, several us attendees began to share some of our tricks of trade for treating kids. I said that I found Monster Spray most useful. It was my secret weapon which was discovered by accident one day when I was working with a small boy who had horrible nightmares.

I asked the boy to draw a picture of his scary dream on the chalkboard. He drew a big monster with great big teeth. I said we need to get rid of him. I meant, get rid of that bad monster completely. I grabbed a bottle of diluted window spray and handed it to the kid to spray at his monster drawing. I then handed him a towel to wipe away his monster. He really got into spraying and wiping away his monster. I found out that this ended his monster nightmares forever. I tweaked the formula a bit, and soon Monster Spray became a staple of my arsenal against bad dreams of all sorts: witches, giants, angry T-rex, giant spiders, wolves, and spookies. A variant was a take-home little spray bottle which was filled ceremoniously in front of the kid from my great big bottle of Monster spray. The kid would buy a bottle from me using one of the pennies or nickles which Mom and Dad had" just happened" to have given him earlier in the day for being a good kid. The kid could then kill off any monsters that lurked under the bed or inside closets at home.

The next morning our workshop instructor Dr. Trance was discussing common difficulties we might encounter with kids and how we could use the child's fantasy world to construct a therapeutic metaphor. He mentioned in passing his son's recurring nightmares, at which my colleagues snapped their heads in my direction crying out "Monster Spray!". Dr. Trance asked what monster spray was and I explained. He got very incensed and was highly critical because he felt the child should select the metaphor with which to eliminate the monster. That's fine, methinks, but monster spray works like a charm. I then pointed out that the dreams were already a product of the child's unconscious mind. He nearly sprang from his chair yelling at me "There IS no unconscious mind!!! There are only unconscious processes!" Inside I'm thinking "Hey bud, haven't you read any Erickson?" but this was not a moment for logic. The rest of the morning he continued to glare at me and he seemed to hate my guts. Needless to say, the lunch break was most welcome.

But after lunch, Dr. Trance was suddenly very kind to me and went out of his way to be helpful to me. I took it for an apology.TA thinks he was mad because I'd figured out a simple way to get rid of a child's bad dreams and he hadn't. I'm wondering if a bottle of Monster Spray appeared soon after at the Trance household to help young master Trance. I don't treat many kids these days, but my bottle of Monster Spray is displaced prominently in my office. You'd be surprised at the number of adults who ask me about it. When the story is told, they shake their heads saying " I sure wish I had some of that stuff when I was a kid".