"Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bandler Richard Wayne, Grinder John)

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There are many, many useful ways of organizing the whole process called psychotherapy. One of the ways that is quite simple, and therefore elegant, is to treat every psychological limitation like a phobia. A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation. A person who has a phobia made a decision, unconsciously, under stress, sometime earlier in their life in the face of overwhelming stimuli. They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning. Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life, they make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement. You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes, you are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.

The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the responses are so consistent. If a person says "I can't be assertive around my boss," they are essentially saying "Somewhere in my personal history I have an experience or a set of experiences of being assertive. I cannot get to that resource in the context of my boss." When a person responds with a phobic response to a snake, that's a similar situation. I know that at other times in their experience, in their personal history, they have been able to be quite calm and courageous. However, in the context of a snake, they can't get to that resource.

Up to this time in the development of psychology and psychiatry and counseling, people haven't tried to organize information to go directly after things. Freud set up a rule "You must go into history," so we've decided if you can understand how something developed historically, you can work with it. I think you only need to do that once or twice, though. Given that you understand, historically, how people are capable of creating phobias, you don't need a historical understanding of each and every phobia, as long as you understand that there are similar processes at work. The way in which people get phobias is fascinating. However, once you understand something about the structure you can go ahead and change it, because all phobias are going to work in the same way. People have strategies which produce phobic responses. Who here has a phobia?

Woman: I've got one about driving a car across a bridge and falling in the car into the water.

If you were observing her, everything that you need to know about changing her has already happened. Would you like to get rid of it? Is it something that restricts your behavior?

Woman: Oh, I'd love to get rid of it!

Are you sure?

Woman: Of course. Yeah, I'm sure. I just wasn't sure I wanted to share it, but I've already shared it!

But you didn't need to share it! You could have kept it a secret. We don't need any content. In fact, we prefer not to have any. Is there someone else here with a phobia who would be unwilling to talk about it? Any time we ask for volunteers, you keep the content to yourself. None of you knew what Linda was thinking about this morning. That's the format we'll always use for demonstrations, so feel free to demonstrate. One way for us to respect your integrity as human beings, whether it's in private practice or in a group demonstration like this, is for you to keep the content to yourself. We don't need it. We operate with process anyway. Content is irrelevant, and besides that, it's often depressing. We don't want to hear it. And when you tell people the content of your problem, you look like a fool. It's a good thing we interrupted you before you told them what the content was, right? OK. What's your name?

Woman: Tammy.

Tammy. Very good. (He contorts his body and several different intense expressions pass across his face.) Any weird non-verbal analogue is good, especially if you get clients who have been in therapy before. You need to do something to throw them off balance— anything to break up their patterns. Because otherwise they will come in and tell you the same thing they told everyone else. They will come in and tell you a prerecorded message. We once heard a tape recording of a client with the therapist before us, and in the whole first session with us she said exactly the same thing; the same words in the same order. We were fascinated to find out how much she could reproduce. It was almost identical until we intervened in the process. I jumped up and started roaring about God. "God said 'You will change!'" The easiest way to do therapy is to enter the client's reality. This woman was extremely religious, and the easiest way to assist her in making a change was to make myself an intermediary between God and her. That's what all priests do, isn't it? It was acceptable to her. All I did was feed back information that she had given to me from her unconscious—which were the instructions she needed.

Now, Tammy, let's pretend that we don't know that this is about bridges. Would you give me a code word for the phobic response that you have had for some years?

Tammy: Pink.

Pink. She's phobic of pink. Now you have as much information as when she says "I'm afraid of driving across bridges." You still have no idea what the response is, where it came from, or what the dimensions are internally and externally. Secret therapy and code words vividly point out the illusion of understanding another person when they use words that do not refer to sensory-based descriptions.

Now, before we begin, let me ask you something, Tammy. Would you think of a situation in which you expressed yourself with what you regard as a fine representation of your full capabilities as an adult human being, as a mature woman. Sometime in the past few years—it may have been a stressful situation or maybe just a happy occasion— you behaved in a way that you found particularly satisfying. I want you to take your time and find such a situation, and let me know when you have it. Do you understand the request? (She nods.)...

OK. First of all, I hope you all noticed a distinct change in her face, in her breathing, etc. Those of you who were watching her could see that Tammy constructed a visual image. She searched visually and she went up and to her right. She is a normally organized right-hander, cerebrally. She didn't see the situation from inside of it. She saw herself in the situation. As such, her kinesthetic response was not as strong as it would be if she did the following.

Would you make that image of yourself again, and when you see it clearly, I want you to step inside the image so that you are actually back in that situation that represents for you an example of your full capacity as a woman. When you can actually feel in your body again the feelings of competence and strength that you associate with that situation, just reach over with your left hand and hold my hand….

OK. I have no idea what her specific experience is. I do know, however, from the remarkable, dramatic change that Tammy just offered me non-verbally, that she succeeded in carrying out my instructions. And I agree with her. That looks really good. That fits my hallucinations about what competence, etc. is. Tammy, do you happen to know what the original experience was that this phobia is connected to?

Tammy: No, I don't.

OK, that's typical. It's typical that the person only knows that in certain kinds of situations they have a very powerful kinesthetic response—in fact in your case I would describe it as an overwhelming response. That response is so overwhelming that in the past when you have been in these situations you literally exercise no choice. You have found it to restrict your behavior in the past, right?

Tammy: Oh, yes—in my dream world, too.

Most phobic people do not know what their original trauma was, and, indeed, it is not even necessary to know that. I'm going to do it as if it were necessary, but it's just part of the mythology.

Tammy has succeeded for years in making the same response over and over and over again. She has demonstrated adequately that she knows how to do that. A phobia can be thought of as nothing more than a one-trial learning that was never updated. And it worked, by the way. I will often turn right to the person and say this: I want to reassure the part of you that has been making you phobic all these years that I respect what it has done, and I regard that as a valid response. You're here. You survived. If there hadn't been a part to make that effective response to keep you out of certain situations, you might not be here. My desire is not to take away the choice of being phobic but to update it so that you can also make other responses which are more congruent with your full resources as a fully grown woman. We're going to use that same capacity to do one-trial learning to help you learn to do something else.

In a moment I'm going to ask you to do some time-traveling. As you go back I want you to increase pressure here on my hand at any point that you need to be reminded of your competence as a fully grown, mature woman. This is your connection with the present time and all the powerful adult resources that you have as a fully grown person. Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm.)

That's all you need to do to anchor the phobic response. Or you can ask a different question: What is the last time that you had an intense response like that?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm again.)

I got the same response that she gave a moment ago when I said "Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?"—the same facial expression, the same breathing. That's now anchored on her arm. This anchor constitutes a stabilizing factor to help us go back and sort through her personal experience to find the original experience. It's not necessary to do it this way; this is one way to do phobias.

Your holding hands with me constitutes your connection to all the strength and resources you have as an adult woman. There were experiences in your past, namely those connected with this phobia, which we're going to go back and relive, but in a way that involves no discomfort at all, a way that involves total comfort. And I call to your mind the notion of dissociation that we talked about yesterday. We told you during the exercise you did yesterday afternoon to be sure you step inside the picture so that you recover the full kinesthetics. The opposite holds true here. For years Tammy has been exposed to certain kinds of real life situations and responded with a lot of emotion, a lot of kinesthetic feelings over and over again. To have her go back and relive that experience again and have those feelings again will simply reinforce it. That's ridiculous. And most people's unconscious minds say "Bullshit! We aren't going back there; that hurts!" and they are called "resistant clients," right? Respect that resistance as a statement that says "Look, make some new arrangements so we don't have to go through the pain again."

The specific arrangements might go like this: I'd like you to close your eyes, Tammy. You can vary the pressure in your hand any time you need more strength. You can draw it directly from here, and that's also a way for me to know where you are. In a moment I'm going to reach over and touch you here on your arm. That's going to help you remember a little bit of the feelings of pinking. I don't want you to go through the feelings again. I want you to take these feelings—only as much of them as you need—and drift back until there comes before your eyes a scene in which you see yourself over there at a younger age in a situation which has some connection with how you first learned to respond that way.

At some point while you see those images which are connected intimately with these feelings of pinking, I'm going to say "What do you see now?" I would like you to stabilize the image at that point. Likely it will be an image of yourself at a younger age, dressed in some particular way, in some colors, in some context. I don't know what any of that will be and at the moment you don't either, because you don't know where this came from. As soon as I ask you to stop the image, I want you to form a snapshot and just hold it stable. I don't want you to run any movies yet, because we need to make one more arrangement to make you even more comfortable before you run the movie.

Remember that you can modulate how much of these feelings (He touches the phobia anchor on her arm.) you are going to use to drift back until you see a clear focused visual image connected with these feelings, that represents where this original learning took place. That's right, you draw on all the strength you need here, as you drift back through time, even further, take your time ... even more. There's no rush. Be perfectly comfortable. Now look at that image. And simply nod your head when you clearly see an image of yourself at a younger age....

Tammy: I see myself at a younger age but I'm not in any situation. I'm just—

That's fine. Can you see what color shoes you are wearing?

Tammy: Black.

OK. Now I want you slowly to look at the surface that's right under the shoes. From there let your eyes slowly notice what is around you as you stand there in those little black shoes. Remembering to breathe, remembering to use these feelings of strength and competence. You've demonstrated adequately that you know about those old feelings. Now I want you to demonstrate that you can have these feelings of strength as you watch that image. Remembering to breathe; oxygen is essential for this whole process. That's right. When you have the still image, just nod….

OK. Now, I would like you to hold that image constant, just a snapshot. Relax your right hand—not your left. Your left can be as tight as you need it to be in order to get access to these feelings of strength that you need. And you are breathing nicely now. Continue your breathing.

Now, I would like you slowly to float up and out of your body so that you can actually see yourself sitting here holding hands with me, ridiculous as that may sound. Take all the time you need. And when you have succeeded in floating out of your body so that you can see yourself from above or the side or the front or the back, just nod that you have succeeded. Excellent.

Now, staying in that third position, I want you to look past yourself sitting here holding my hand and feeling the feelings of strength and adult resourcefulness. This time, with feelings of strength and comfort, I want you to watch and listen carefully to everything that happened to young Tammy way back there, so that you can make new understandings and learnings about what occurred, and therefore have new choices. You are to do this, watching from the third position, having the feelings of resourcefullness and strength connected with my hand here. Knowing that you did live through that and you won’t have to again, let that younger part of you feel the old feelings over there as she goes through that old experience for the last time. When you’ve seen and heard it all, adequate for your making new understandings, simply nod your head and stay there. You can begin the movie now…. (She nods.)

All right, now very, very slowly I want you to float down from the third position and step back in and reunite with your body, sitting here with feelings of resourcefulness and strength….

And now I want you to do something very powerful and important for yourself. Younger Tammy did something very powerful for you; she went through those feelings again for you, and she let you watch and listen with comfort and strength to stimuli which in the past have triggered overwhelming responses. This time you were able to see and hear those without pinking. I want you to walk over to young Tammy in your mind's eye. I want you to reach out and use all of the adult female resources you have, to comfort her and reassure her that she will never have to go through that again. Thank her for living through the old feelings for the last time for you. Explain to her that you can guarantee that she lived through it because you are from her future.

And when you see on her face and in her posture and in her breathing that she is reassured that you will be there to take care of her from now on, I want you to really reach out, take her by the shoulders and pull her close and actually feel her enter your body. Pull her inside. She is a part of you, and she's a very energetic part. That energy is freed now from that phobic response. I would like your unconscious mind to select some particular pleasurable activity that some of that energy can now be used for, for yourself here in the present and in the future. Because energy is energy and you deserve it. Just sit there and relax and enjoy those feelings. Let them spread through your whole body. Take your time. You've got plenty going on inside. I'm going to talk to the group.

Do you understand the anchors? First, she holds hands with me. This is a "bail-out" anchor, a resource anchor that will always get her out of trouble and says "Here, you're grounded right here." It's also a really exquisite biofeedback mechanism. By temperature and pressure and moisture changes in her hand, I get an incredible amount of information about her complex internal experience. An anchor here on her arm stabilizes the phobic feelings to use as a lead to go back and find some visual experience that will serve as a metaphor for her entire set of experiences called "the phobic response."

Once she sees herself at an earlier age over there, using the feelings to lead her back to something she had never known about consciously before, then I dissociate her a second step—I ask her to float up out of her body. You could see the changes in posture and color and breathing and so forth which indicated which position she was operating from.

Once the two-step dissociation has been established, I have her watch and listen with comfort to the old experience. She saw and heard things today which have never been available to her before.

Tammy: That's true.

She was so overwhelmed in the past by the kinesthetic phobic response that she couldn't see and hear what was going on. Consciousness is limited. As she watches and listens to herself at a younger age, the competent feelings of comfort and resourcefulness are being associated with the auditory and visual stimuli from the past.

And when she's gone through the whole thing, then we reintegrate. Every model of therapy, every psychotheology, is built on dissociation and sorting to help people reorganize. Whether you call it "parent-child-adult," "topdog-underdog," using chairs or words doesn't matter as long as you label and sort a person's behavior, dissociating parts of them, one from the other. You have the responsibility as a professional communicator to put your clients back together before the session is over. One easy way to make sure the dissociations that you create are re-integrated before the end of the session is to simply reverse the process by which you create the dissociation.

In this particular case, the dissociation is (1) see yourself over there at a younger age, (2) float up and out of your body. For the integration, (1) float back down and rejoin yourself here—and you could see the tremendous change in her that indicated that she had succeeded in doing that, (2) then walk over in your mind's eye, reach out, comfort and reassure the younger Tammy, thank her for going through this so that you could learn, pull her into you, re-integrate her and feel the feelings of energy.

What we're doing here is structured regression. Primal Therapy claims to get complete regression back to infancy. If that were true, then Primal Therapy would achieve change only insofar as it doesn't work! If Primal Therapy really got complete regression, it would be doing exactly what Tammy has been doing with the phobic response up until today. Complete regression simply means that you relive the experience in all systems. If you do that, you reinforce it.

A partial, structured, regression of the type Tammy and I were working with here allows you the freedom to go back and connect new kinds of resources with the auditory and visual stimuli which in the past have elicited old, uncomfortable, kinesthetic responses. It's impossible for her to go through this experience and still maintain that old response because she's done one-trial learning again. Now she doesn't have to be phobic. I haven't taken that choice away. There may be some context in which being phobic in response to something may be useful. I'm not playing God. I presuppose that people make the best choice in context. My job is to make sure that resources which have been dissociated from a certain context become available in that context. I leave it to the unique human being, with all the various needs they have that I don't even know anything about, to make an adequate selection somewhere along the continuum between resourcefulness and terror. And she will. Those resources have been dissociated in the past, but they are now integrated and they are now both responses to the same stimuli.

Man: You are making certain assumptions about integration and a lot of things that have happened.

Right. Is there any particular assumption you'd like to challenge?

Man: Um, all of them.

Good. Pick one.

Man: That she feels any different now than she did before.

OK. Let me give you a way of testing. (He turns to Tammy.) Let me ask you a question. (He touches the phobia anchor. She turns to him and smiles: "Umhm?") That's fine; you answered it. Does that make sense to you, sir? Do you remember that the last time I touched her there she had a phobic response? I had anchored the phobic reaction there, and then I demonstrated that I had control of her phobia. When I reached over and touched her arm she became phobic. Now I reach over and touch her and what does she do? She looks at me as if to say "What do you want?" That is a far more elegant demonstration than any verbal feedback I could get. I'm not saying don't use verbal conscious feedback, but understand that when you ask for that, you are tapping into the least informative part of the person: their conscious mind.

Let me give you another way of testing. Tammy, I'd like you to try something for me. This is just a scientific experiment. Are there any bridges here in town? I would like you to close your eyes and fantasize driving across a bridge, and I want you to do it in a special way. I want you to do it from the point of view of being in a car—not watching yourself—so that you see what you would see if you were actually driving across the bridge. What happens when you do that? ...

Tammy: (She raises her eyebrows, looks slightly puzzled.) I drove across the bridge.

"I drove across the bridge." What could be a more elegant response? If she had told me "I was so happy driving across the bridge," I'd say "What? Wait, it's just an ordinary bridge."

Tammy: But always before when I drove across a bridge, I immediately began to program myself "What am I going to do when the car goes off the side?"

And what did she say this time? "I just drove across the bridge." When you associate the strength and confidence with those auditory and visual stimuli, driving across a bridge becomes just another human activity, the same as the experience that the rest of you have had driving across bridges your whole life. This is also a way of testing our work to find out if it is adequately future-paced. We know what she looked like when she had a phobic response. If the same phobic response comes up, we know somehow the integration didn't happen. We'll find out what happened and re-do it. Her response was "Oh, driving across the bridge." Earlier, with Linda, we were talking about achoring the new response to a cue from the environment. Here we're testing and we're bridging or future-pacing at the same time.

Woman: Can you do this with yourself?

Yes, with two qualifications. Tomorrow we're going to teach a pattern called "reframing" which teaches you how to establish an internal communication system with some sophistication and subtlety. If you have such an internal communication system, you can always check internally to make sure that all parts of you are congruent. If you get a "go-ahead," of course you can do it by yourself. If there's some hesitation, reframing gives you a way of getting congruence, internal agreement.

Another precaution is that you get a really good anchor for a powerful, positive "blast-out" experience, so that if you begin to collapse back into the old unpleasant feelings, you can bring yourself out. Feeling more unpleasantness will not help you in this at all. I had a powerful anchor. Make sure you have one for yourself. I would recommend that you do it with somebody else if you have a very intense phobic response. It isn't that difficult, and it obviously doesn't take that long. Find somebody else, if only to operate the bail-out anchor if you begin to go back into the unpleasantness. You can go slightly into the phobic response and say to your friend "Look at what I look like now, and what I'm breathing like now. If you see that again, squeeze my hand." That would be adequate. You can run the rest of it yourself.

Woman: Can you do this with children?

Children don't seem to have that many phobias. For those who do, this will work fine. Whatever you do with kids, I recommend that you sneak up on it. A friend of mine had a nine-year-old kid who was a lousy speller. I said "Look at this list of ten spelling words." The kid looked at it, and I said "Now close your eyes and tell me what they are—not how to spell them." He had some difficulty doing that; he didn't have well-developed visualization. However, I said "Remember the Wookie in Star Wars? Do you remember when the Wookie opened his mouth and showed his teeth like this?" And he went "Oh, yeah!" and then he was visualizing immediately. I had him print the words out in the Wookie's mouth. There's always some experience somewhere in a person's personal history that has the requisite qualities you need. If you combine that experience with the task that you are trying to do— and especially with children, make a game out of it—there is no problem. "What do you think the Wookie would see if he were watching you go through that thing with your dad?" That's another way of getting the dissociation.

Children are really fast. As an adult you are a lot slower than a child. You are less fluid in your states of consciousness. The primary tool that we offer people who work with children is to use anchoring as a way of stabilizing what you are trying to work on, to slow the kid down enough so that you can cope. Because kids are really fast.

Woman: Why two steps of dissociation?

You don't need it. That's just a guarantee; it's insurance that she doesn't collapse back into the old feelings. If we had only dissociated her one step, if she collapsed she would collapse right back into the old experience, and it would be very difficult to get her back out. By doing it in two steps, if she begins to collapse, she will collapse into the first step and it's easier to get back out. You can tell whether she is up above or back down here by the changes in posture and skin color and breathing, etc. Knowing that, if I see her collapse from two to one, I give a squeeze here, or I say "Now let her feel the old feelings over there.

You watch from up here." Those are ways of insuring that she doesn't just re-experience the bad feelings.

Woman: You asked Tammy to take the feeling and find a picture of herself at a younger age. What if she can't find one?

That's a statement about the therapist, not the client. It should be taken as a comment about what the therapist is doing, indicating that the therapist should change his behavior and do it differently.

Let me answer your question in this way. I don't believe that Tammy actually had the experience that she watched herself go through. She may or may not have; I don't know. But it is irrelevant. Once a very well-known therapist was visiting with us, and we received an emergency referral, a suicidal woman. The psychiatrist had given up, saying "Here, would you please take this woman over? I'm out of choices." Since this famous therapist was staying with us, we thought it would be an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate some of the uses of hypnosis Erickson had taught us. Because for that therapist, at that point in his evolution, hypnosis was a dirty word. He thought it was "manipulative." And we told him "There are ways in which Ericksonian hypnosis is far less manipulative than any insight, conscious-mind therapy we have ever run across. Let us demonstrate with this woman."

So we began to work with this woman. The visiting therapist was sitting there watching and listening. About ten minutes into the session, he got a revelation. It was obvious. I said "Do you have something you want us to do?" I had never had a chance to watch this therapist work live before. He took over and started going "Blood... stairway... childhood, younger brother... mother cries... screams." He developed this incredible fantasy, which he then essentially "sold" to this woman. At first the woman would go "Gee, I don't remember anything like that." Finally the woman went "Uuuuhhhh! That's it! I must have done it!" very much like a family reconstruction, if you've ever been through one of those with Virginia Satir. Suddenly the woman made all these internal connections, and the visiting therapist did all this therapy about this past experience and the woman changed dramatically. Her behavior changed dramatically, and she stayed changed, too. She was a continuing client of ours.

Now, when she came back in two weeks, we couldn't resist. We induced a somnambulistic trance, and established an anchor for amnesia so that we could erase anything we did during that session— because she was doing fine and we didn't want to interfere. We just wanted to check and find out what had happened. We asked her unconscious mind if in fact the experience described by the therapist during the session—or anything approximating it—had ever occurred. The answer was unequivocally "No." However, that is no different than what just happened here. If the experience that Tammy generated has all the elements of whatever the original experience or set of experiences was, it will serve as a metaphor which will be as effective as an actual, factual, historical representation. And from my sensory experience I can guarantee that it was effective.

Woman: What I still don't understand is what you do if the client is stuck because she has an expectation of getting a picture of a childhood incident, and now she's sitting there doing this and she can't get a picture.

OK, that's the same choice point as the congruent "I don't know" that we talked about earlier. Ask her to guess, make it up, lie, fantasize; it doesn't matter.

Actually, age regression is a very easy phenomenon. We said "Go back through time." She had very little conscious idea what we meant by that, but she responded quite easily to it.

Man: What specifically were you seeing on her face?

The same response that she originally demonstrated when we asked her about the feelings of the phobia. I watched her age regress until I saw a very intense example of it. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. There was whiteness around the eyes and the side of the face. There was some kind of scrunching of her chin. There was an increase in moisture on her skin, especially on the bridge of her nose. When that became intensified, I said "Now look at an image, that image there."

If you tell people to go back through time and they frown, that's also a cue. And you might try something tricky like saying "Well, go forward in time." "Go through time, jump back in time." "Go around time." Anything. It doesn't matter. The specific words you use are wholly irrelevant as long as you get the response you want.

Another way to think about it is that everybody with a phobia knows the feelings of the phobia. They have a fragment of the experience, so they can get the rest by overlap. How do you find your car keys when you want to go to the store and you don't know where they are?

Woman: I start feeling around through my pockets.

Man: I go through the house and look.

Man: I search my mind, going back to try to visualize where they are.

Woman: I shake my purse so I can hear them.

OK. If all else fails, you can go back to the front door and walk in again. Now, if you think about the responses we just got, those include the three main representational systems. If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all by overlap. She had the feelings here. The feelings, once anchored, stabilized her state of consciousness. Everything that she accessed as she closed her eyes and went back in her personal history had that set of feelings in common, guaranteeing that whatever picture she selected would be in the class called phobic experiences.

I used the same principle to help her have a complete focused visual

image of herself at a younger age. At first she had only a picture of herself, but no context. I ask her what color shoes she is Wearing. I presuppose that she can see her feet and her shoes, and that she can see

colors. She accepts the presupposition; she says "Black." Since she can see the shoes, then obviously "logically," she can see what they are on top of, the surface she's standing on. I request that. When she gets the surface, it blends into walls and into trees, or whatever the rest of the image was. It's a very easy overlap, or intersection, technique that allows me to assist her in recovering the image by constructing portions of it, a little at a time.

Man: What’s the difference between this techniques and systematic desensitization?

About six months. That's the major difference, which is a very expensive difference. My understanding is that it's straight conditioning. We have simply associated a new set of feelings, namely competence and strength, with the auditory and visual stimuli.

There is another very important difference. We are picking a specific set of feelings and assorting it, instead of just trying to wipe out the set that is there. The people that I've observed desensitization are usually trying to eliminate a certain kind of behavior rather than replacing it with something which is a positive response. They are the kind of people who answer "Not bad" when you ask "How are you feeling?"

We claim that every piece of behavior has a positive function. It's the

best choice a person has in context. It was far better for Tammy to be

phobic about bridges than it was to have no program at all. If you do systematic desensitization, and you don't replace the "negative" behavioral pattern with something positive, it takes a long time because the person will fight. It's their only defense. That's why it takes six months, because a person has to randomly put something else in its place.

Man: There is a replacement, though, with relaxation.

Sometimes it's done that way, but relaxation is not the resource that everyone is going to need in a phobic situation. If you're driving across a bridge, you don't want to become relaxed suddenly. If somebody is in a situation in which they need to cope and you give them feelings of relaxation, they may not cope! There may be real, genuine dangers in that situation, so one of two things will happen: either the symptom will come back later because it's protective, or the person will get hurt. We got a very strong anchor for confidence and for the resources that she has as an adult woman. We used that; we did not use relaxation. She was very alert during this process. Desensitization was an important step, in that people were able to cure phobias with it. I think that it just needs to be dressed up a little bit. Instead of using relaxation and associating it with everything, try associating other things besides relaxation. There are much more powerful resources in people.

There is nothing that we have offered you so far, nor is there anything we will offer you during the rest of this seminar or in an advanced workshop, that isn't already in someone's behavior somewhere. What we've done as modelers is to figure out what the essential elements are, and what is unnecessary. Every therapy has dissociation. Every therapy has the kinds of sorting techniques we're using here, whether it's chairs or knee anchors or words. What is useful to have in every therapy is some way of doing all that: some way of sorting, some way of dissociating, some way of integrating. The names you use are wholly irrelevant, and most psychotheologies are also irrelevant. There's really nothing that different between what we did and what gestalt people do by taking people back through time. TA people do a process called "redecision." They are all very, very similar.

We looked at all those different processes and tried to find out what the essential elements were, and what was extra and unnecessary. Then we streamlined it to try to find something that works systematically. I don't think there's anything wrong with desensitization, except that sometimes it doesn't work. That's because there are a lot of things that are extra, and some things that are essential are not always there. Some people who do desensitization also add the necessary resources unconsciously. But when they teach somebody else to do it, they don't teach that, because it's not in their consciousness. Our function as modelers is to sort those things out.

The other thing is that I don't know what kind of desensitization you are referring to specifically. Some use meters and machines. I am a far more sophisticated biofeedback mechanism than any set of machines. I use really sophisticated sensory apparatus and internal responses as a way of amplifying or diminishing certain parts of the response that I am receiving. That's part of what makes one-trial learning possible in the kind of work we've been doing here with anchoring.

Man: What if a client is unable to use visual imagery?

It is not essential that people visualize to be able to do the phobia process, because the same formal pattern can be done auditorily or kinesthetically. The pattern of this technique does not require visualization. We wanted to use all systems as a demonstration. We don't need to do it with all systems. You could also first take a little time to teach the person how to visualize, using overlap.

Woman: Could you do this process without touching?

Sure, you can use a tonal anchor or a visual anchor. You can do it without touching. However, I would recommend that you do it with touching. Kinesthetics is an irresistible anchoring system. When somebody is touched, they feel it. When you make a visual sign at someone, they may look away or close their eyes.

Man: So the bail-out anchor could be a certain tone of voice?

Yes. Tonal anchors in this society are the most powerful because most Americans do not hear consciously. The number of people in this country who hear is almost nil, slightly more than the number of card-carrying musicians.

In England it's considered important to make class distinctions. In order to make class distinctions, you have to be able to hear different accents and tonalities. So English people are more acute at hearing tonal changes. Anyone who is bilingual or polyglot, and who has learned a tonal language, will have a good sensitivity to those kinds of changes.

Most people in the U.S. do not actually hear the sequence of words and the intonation pattern of what they, or other people, say. They are only aware of the pictures, feelings and internal dialogue that they have in response to what they hear. Very few people are able to repeat back, in the same intonation, what you say to them. We hear people literally. We do not add anything or subtract anything from what they say. That is a rare human experience, and for a long time we didn't realize that; we thought everybody heard words.

The real beginning of all this work started when we began taking people's words as a literal description of their experience, not just a metaphor. We started communicating back as if they were literally the way they had described themselves, and we found out that was the case. When someone says "When I focus on those ideas they feel right, but I tell myself it wouldn't work," that is a literal description of their internal experience.

Now we would like you to pick a partner, preferably somebody you have not had much contact with. It's easier to operate at the process level with strangers because their behavior is less apt to be an anchor for some behavior in you. We assume that you are all going to get changes with one another, given your usual patterns of communication. Try something new. The whole point of going through the exercise is to be exposed to new material and to do it, to discover how well it fits with your own personal style as a communicator. Until you engage all your sensory channels in playing with this material, you won't have it. Understanding fully is to be able to comprehend it in all representational systems, including behavior.

We'd like you to practice the two-step visual/kinesthetic dissociation process that we did with Tammy here. You don't need a full-blown phobia. You can use this process with any unpleasant response, to become familiar with the pattern. This, or the "change history" process will work for nearly any presenting problem that I know of. Anchoring will get you almost everything. When you're done, use bridging or future-pacing to be sure that the new response will be triggered by the context where it's needed. Go ahead.