I made it a point to get acquainted with her. She told me, after much prodding, about a horrible experience she had when she was ten years old. In a car accident, she had been thrown through a windshield. A frightening experience for a ten-year-old girl. Her mouth was cut by the windshield glass and there was a lot of blood on the hood of the car. A lot of blood that was frightening to a ten-year-old could be a very small amount of blood, but, to her, it was an enormous quantity. She grew up with the idea that her mouth was terribly scarred- and that's why she kept her mouth covered, because she did not want anybody to see that horrible scar.

I got her to read a history of cosmetology and she came across beauty spots-spots that were crescent shaped, circles, stars, and so on. She read about how a woman would place a beauty spot near the feature she considered attractive. I induced her to draw me some beauty spots. Then I induced her, in the privacy of her room, to make a life-size copy of her scar-it turned out to be a five-pointed star, the size of a beauty spot. Yet she still saw it as larger than her whole face.

So I persuaded her to go on a date with one of the students. She was to carry two heavy handbags in order to keep her hands down, from the face. On this date, and on subsequent ones, she discovered that if she allowed a goodnight kiss, the man would invariably kiss her on the scarred side of her mouth. Even though she had two sides to her mouth the man would always, invariably, kiss her on the scarred side. She dated one man but didn't have the nerve to let him have a good-night kiss. The second man kissed her on the right side of her mouth. So did the next, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth. What she didn't know was that she was curious and when she was curious she always tipped her head to the left, so that a man had to kiss her on the right side of her mouth!
Every time I tell that case history, I look around. You all know about subliminal speech, but you don't know about subliminal hearing. When I tell that case history, every woman puckers her lips-and I know what she is thinking of. You watch the neighbor come in to see the new baby. You watch the lips. You know just when that neighbor is going to kiss the baby..."

That is the end of Dr. Erickson's story. There are multi-levels to this story. What is Dr. Erickson suggesting to his patient and what is the message to his students? Most often, he would end these stories by exclaiming to his students, Now, that's the way you do psychotherapy.