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

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Once at a workshop for a TA institute, I said that I believed that every part of every person is a valuable resource. One woman said "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!"

"I didn't say it was true. I said if you believe that as a therapist you'll get a lot further."

"Well, that's totally ridiculous."

"What leads you to believe that that's ridiculous?"

"I've got parts that are not worth a dime. They just get in my way. That's all they do." "Name one,"

"I have a part that no matter what I do, all the time I'm trying to do anything, it just totally tells me I can't do it, and that I'm going to fail. It makes everything twice as hard as it needs to be."

She said that she had been a high school dropout. When she decided to go back to high school, that part said "You'll never be able to do it; you're not good enough; you're too stupid. It'll be embarrassing. You won't be able to do it." But she did it. And even when she did that, when she decided to go on to college, that part said "You're not going to be able to do it."

So I said "Well, I'd like to speak to that part directly." That always gets TA people, by the way. They don't have that in their model. Then I look over their left shoulder while I talk to them and that really drives them nuts. But it's a very effective anchoring mechanism, because from that time on, every time you look over their left shoulder, only that part can hear.

"I know that that part of you is doing something very important for you, and it is very sneaky about how it does it. Even if you don't appreciate it, I do. I'd like to tell that part that if it were willing to tell her conscious mind what it's doing for her, then perhaps it could get some of the appreciation that it deserves."

Then I had her go inside and ask the part what it was doing for her that was positive. It came right out and said "I was motivating you." After she told me that, she said "Well, I think that's weird." I said "Well, you know, I don't think it would be possible for you to come up here right now and work in front of this entire group." She stood up defiantly and walked across the room and sat down. Those of you who have studied strategies and understand the phenomenon of polarity response will recognize that this part was simply a Neuro Linguistic Programmer that understood utilization. It knew that if it said "Aw, you can go to college, you can do it," she'd say "No, I can't do it." However, if it said to her "You're not going to be able to cut the grade," then she would say "Oh, yeah?" and she would go out and do it.

Now what would have happened to that woman if we had somehow gotten that part to stop doing that, but without changing anything else? ... She wouldn't have had any way to motivate herself! That's why we have the ecological check. The ecological check is a way of being sure that the new behavior fits with all the other parts of a person. Up to step six we have essentially created a communication system between the person's consciousness and their unconscious part that runs the pattern of behavior they are trying to change. And we have succeeded in finding more effective alternative behaviors in that area. I don't know, of course, when I've finished that, whether this is going to be beneficial for them as a total person.

Let me give you another example of this. I've seen mousy little people who went to assertiveness training and became aggressive—so aggressive that their husband or wife left them and none of their friends will talk to them anymore. They go around yelling at people and being extremely assertive, so abrasive that they no longer have friends. That's sort of a polarity flip, or a swing of the pendulum. One way to make sure that doesn't happen is to have some device like the ecological check.

When you have completed communication and created alternative new behaviors for the part that originally ran the problem behavior, you ask for all other parts to consider the repercussions of these new patterns of behavior. "Is there any other part of me that has any objection to the new choices in my behavior?" If another part objects, it will typically use a distinctive signal. It may be in the same system, but it will be distinctive as far as body part. If suddenly there's tension in the shoulders, you say "Good, I have a limited conscious mind. Would you increase the tension in my shoulders if it means 'Yes, there is an objection,' and decrease it if it means 'No.'" If there is an objection, that's a delightful outcome. That means there is another part, another resource, that's active in your behalf in making this change. You are at step two again, and you recycle.

One of the things that I think distinguishes a really exquisite communicator from one who is not, is to be precise about your use of language: use language in a way that gets you what you want. People who are sloppy with language get sloppy responses. Virginia Satir is precise about her use of langauge, and Milton Erickson is even more precise. If you are precise about the way you phrase questions, you will get precise kinds of information back. For example, somebody here said "Go inside and ask if the part of you responsible for this behavior is willing to change?" And they got a "No" response. It makes perfect sense! They didn't offer it any new choices. They didn't say "Are you willing to communicate?" They said "Are you willing to change?"

Another person said "Will you, the part of me that is responsible for this pattern of behavior, accept the choices generated by my creativity?" And the answer was "No." And properly so. Your creativity doesn't know a thing about your behavior in this area. The part that's got to make a selection is the part that is responsible for your behavior. It's the one that knows about that.

Man: What if the unconscious creative part refuses to give any choices?

It never happens if you are respectful of it. If you as a therapist are disrespectful of people's creativity and their unconscious, it will simply cease communicating with you.

Woman: My partner and I found that our conscious minds were most unaccepting of change.

I totally agree with that. That's very true of therapists, especially if the choices were left unconscious. It's not necessarily true of other groups in the population. And it figures, because therapists have very nosy conscious minds. Almost every modern humanistic psychotheo-logy I know implies that it is necessary to be conscious in order to make changes. That's absurd.

Woman: I'm confused about awareness and consciousness. Gestalt therapy talks about the importance of awareness, and—

When Fritz Perls said "Lose your mind and come to your senses," and to have awareness, I think he was talking about experience. I think he suspected that you could have sensory perception without intervening consciousness. He wrote about what he referred to as the "DMZ of experience," in which he said that talking to yourself was being as far removed from experience as you could be. He said that making visual images was a little bit closer to having experience. And he said having feelings was being as close as you could get to having experience, and that the "DMZ" is very different than behaving and acting in the real world.

I think what he was alluding to is that you can have experience without reflexive consciousness, and he called that "being in the here and now." We call it "uptime." It's the strategy we've used to organize our perceptions and responses in this workshop with you. In uptime, you don't talk to yourself, you don't have pictures and you don't have feelings. You simply access sensory experience and respond to it directly.

Gestalt therapy has an implicit rule that accessing cues are bad, because you must be avoiding. If you look away, you are avoiding. And when you are looking away you are in internal experience, which we call "downtime." Fritz wanted everybody to be in uptime. However, he was inside telling himself that it was better to be in uptime! He was a very creative person and I think that's what he meant, but it's really hard to know.

Woman: You said we'd see when reframing doesn't work.

I certainly did as I walked around the room! You will try it and it won't work. However that's not a comment on the method. That's a comment about not being creative enough in the application of it, and not having enough sensory experience to accept all the cues that are there. If you take its "not working"—instead of a comment about how dumb and stupid and inadequate you are—as a comment about what's there for you to learn and begin to explore, then therapy will become a real opportunity to expand yourself, instead of an opportunity for self-criticism.

This is one of the things I've discovered teaching hypnosis. I think it's one of the main reasons that hypnosis has not proliferated in this society. As a hypnotist you put somebody into a trance and present them with some kind of a challenge such as "You will be unable to open your eyes." Most people are unwilling to put themselves to that kind of test. People say this to me all the time in hypnosis training seminars: "What happens if I give them the suggestion and they don't carry it out?" And I say "You give them another one!" If they don't get exactly what they intended, they think they must have failed, instead of taking that as an opportunity for responding creatively.

There's a really huge trap there. If you decide before you begin a communication what will constitute a "valid" response, then the probability that you'll get it is reduced severely. If, however, you make a maneuver, some intervention, and then simply come to your senses and notice what response you get, you'll realize that all responses are utilizable. There's no particularly good or bad response. Any response is a good response when it's utilized, and it's the next step in the process of change. The only way you can fail is by quitting, and deciding you are not willing to spend any more time with it. Of course you can just continue to do the same thing over and over again, which means you'll have the same failure for a longer period of time!

There was a research project that I think you all are entitled to know about. Out of a group of people, one third of them went into therapy, one third of them were put on a waiting list, and one third of them were shown movies of therapy. The people on the waiting list had the same rate of improvement! That is a comment about that research project, and that's all it's a comment about. That finding was presented to me as if it were a statement about the world. When I made a comment that the only thing I could discern is that it was a statement about the incompetency of the people doing therapy in the project, it struck them as a novel idea that actually that might be a possibility.

I came to psychology from mathematics. The first thing that made sense to me as I entered the field of psychology is that what they were doing was not working, at least with the people who were still in the hospitals and still in the offices—the other people had gone home! So the only thing that made sense to me is that what they were doing with their clients was what I didn't want to do. The only things not worth learning were what they were already doing that wasn't working.

The first client that I saw was in somebody's private office. I went in and watched this therapist work with a young man for an hour. She was very warm, very empathetic, very sympathetic with this guy as he talked about what a terrible home life he had. He said "You know, my wife and I really haven't been able to get together, and it got so bad that I really felt I had strong needs and I went out and had this affair," and she said "I understand how you could do that." And they went on and on like this for a full hour.

At the end of the hour she turned to me and she said "Well, is there anything that you would like to add?" I stood up and looked at the guy and said "I want to tell you that I think you're the biggest punk I have ever met! Going out and screwing around behind your wife's back, and coming here and crying on this woman's shoulder. That's going to get you nothing, since you aren't going to change, and you're going to be as miserable as you are now for the rest of your life unless you grab yourself by the bootheels, give yourself a good kick in the butt, and go tell your wife how you want her to act with you. Tell her in explicit enough words so that she will know exactly what you want her to do. If you don't do that, you're going to be as miserable as you are now forever and no one will be able to help you." That was the exact opposite of what that therapist had done. He was devastated, just devastated. He left the office and went home and worked it all out with his wife. He did all of the things I'd told him to do, and then he called me up on the telephone and told me it was the most important experience of his life.

However, during the time he did that, that therapist utterly convinced me that what I had done was wrong! She explained to me all these concepts about therapy and about how this wouldn't be helpful, and convinced me that what I had done was the wrong thing.

Man: But she didn't stop you from doing it.

She couldn't! She was paralyzed! But she was right. It wouldn't have worked with her. However, it was perfect for him. If nothing else, it was just the opposite of what she had been doing all that time. It wasn't that what I did was more powerful than what she did, it was just more appropriate for him, given that all those other things hadn't worked. That therapist didn't have that flexibility in her behavior. She did the only thing that she could do. She couldn't do gestalt therapy because she couldn't yell at anybody. It wasn't a choice for her. She was so nice. I'm sure there were some people who had never had anybody be nice to them, and that hanging around her was such a new experience that it had some influence on them. However, that would still not help them make the specific changes that they came to therapy for.

Woman: What we did was to ask the conscious mind of the partner "Will you agree not to sabotage, not to try to—"

Oh, there's a presupposition there that the conscious mind can sabotage! You can ignore the conscious mind. It can't sabotage the unconscious. It couldn't sabotage the original choice that it didn't want, and it's not going to be able to sabotage the new ones either.

What you're doing with reframing is giving requisite variety to the unconscious. The unconscious previously had only one choice about how to get what it wants. Now it's got at leas four choices—three new ones and the old one. The conscious mind still hasn't got any new choices. So given the law of requisite variety, which is going to be in control? The same one that was in control before you got here, and that is not your conscious mind.

It's important for some people to have the illusion that their conscious mind controls their behavior. It's a particularly virulent form of insanity among college professors, psychiatrists, and lawyers. They believe that consciousness is the way they run their lives. If you believe that, there is an experiment you can try. The next time somebody extends their hand to shake hands with you, I want you to consciously not lift your hand, and find out whether your hand goes up or not. My guess is that your conscious mind won't even discover that it is time to interrupt the behavior until your hand is at least half-way up. And that's just a comment about who's in control.

Man: How about the use of this method in groups?

I hope you notice how we have used it here! While you are doing reframing, you spend about seventy to eighty percent of the time alone, waiting for the person to get a response. While you are doing that you can start with someone else. Each of us used to do ten or fifteen people at a time. The only limitation on how many people you can do at one time is how much sensory experience you are able to respond to. You set your limitations by the refinement of your sensory apparatus.

I know a man who does it with groups, and he takes them all together through each step. "Everybody identify something. Everybody go inside. What did you get?" "I got a feeling. ""Intensify for 'yes.'" "What did you get?" "I got sounds." "Have them get louder." "What did you get?" "I got a picture." "Have it brighten." He makes everybody else wait instead. That's another approach. It's easier if you have a homogeneous group of people.

Man: I'm kind of curious. Did you ever do this with somebody who had cancer—have them go inside and talk to the part that is causing the cancer?

Yes. I worked as a consultant for the Simontons in Fort Worth. I had six people who were terminal cancer patients, so I did them as a group, and that worked fine. I had enough sensory experience, and there was enough homogeneity in them as a group, that I could do it that way. The Simontons get good responses just using visualization. When you add the sophistication of all representational systems and the kind of communication system we develop with reframing, I don't know what the limits are. I would like to know what they are. And the way to find out is to assume that I can do anything and go out and do it.

We had a student who got a complete remission from a cancer patient. And he did something which I think is even more impressive: He got an ovarian cyst the size of an orange to shrink away in two weeks. According to medical science, that wasn't even possible. That client reports that she has the X-rays to prove it.

Those of you who went through medical school were done something of a disservice; let me talk about that for a moment. The medical model is based on a scientific model. The scientific model does the following: it says "In a complex situation, one way to find out something about it scientifically is to restrict everything in the situation except one variable. Then you change the value of that variable and notice any changes in the system." I think that's an excellent way to figure out cause-effect relationships in the world of experience. I do not think it is a useful model in face-to-face communication with another human being who is trying to get a change. Rather than restrict all behavior in a face-to-face communication, you want to vary your behavior wildly, to do whatever you need to do in order to elicit the response that you want.

Medical people for a long time have been willing to admit that people can psychologically "make themselves sick." They know that psychological cognitive mechanisms can create disease, and that things like the placebo effect can cure it. But that knowledge is not exploited in this culture in a useful way. Reframing is one way to begin to do that.

Reframing is the treatment of choice for any psychosomatic symptom. You can assume that any physiological symptom is psychosomatic, and then proceed with reframing—making sure that the person has already made use of all medical resources. We assume that all disease is psychosomatic. We don't really believe that's true. However, if we act as if that's true, then we have ways of responding appropriately and powerfully to people who have difficulties that are not recognized as psychosomatic by medical people. Whether it's aphasics that we've worked with, or people with paralysis that had an organic base, that wasn't hysterical according to the medical reports, we still often get behavioral changes. You can talk about it as if the people were pretending to be changed, but as long as they pretend effectively for the rest of their life, I'm satisfied. That's real enough for me.

The question for us is not what's "true," but what is a useful belief system to operate out of as a communicator. If you are a medical doctor and somebody comes in with a broken arm, then I think the logical thing for you to do is to set the broken bone, and not play philosophical games. If you're a communicator and you take the medical model as a metaphor for psychological change, then you've made a grave error. It's just not a useful way of thinking about it.

I think that ultimately the cures for schizophrenia and neurosis probably will be pharmacological, but I don't think that they have to be. I think they probably will be, because the training structures in this country have produced a massive amount of incompetence in the field of psychotherapy. Therapists just aren't producing results. Some people are, but what they are doing isn't being proliferated at a high enough rate. That's one of the functions that I understand us to have: to put information into a form that allows it to be easily learned and widely disseminated.

We also treat alcoholism as a psychosomatic process—like allergies or headaches or phantom-limb pain. The alcohol is an anchor, just as any other drug is. What an alcoholic is saying to you by being an alcoholic is essentially "The only way I can get to certain kinds of experiences which are important and positive for me as a human being—camaraderie, escape from certain kinds of conscious process, or whatever it is—is this anchor called alcohol." Until the secondary gain is taken care of by some other behavior, they will continue to go back to that as an anchor. So there are two steps in the treatment of alcoholism. One is making sure the secondary gain gets picked up by some other activity: they can have camaraderie but they don't have to get drunk in order to get it. You have to find out what their specific need is, because it's different for everyone.

Once you have taught them effective ways to get that secondary gain for themselves without the necessity of alcohol, then you anchor something else to take the place of the alcohol stimulus so they don't have to go through the alcohol state to get to the experiences that they want and need. We've done single sessions with alcoholics that stick really well, as long as we make sure that those two steps are always involved.

Man: Do you make the basic assumption that an individual is consciously able to tell you what the secondary gain is?

Never! We make the assumption that they can't.

Reframing in the six-step format we did here has certain advantages that we talked about. For example, this format builds in a program which the person can use by themselves later to make change in any area of their life.

You can also do this behaviorally. In fact, this is a strategy and outline for behavioral therapy as well as what we've been doing here. In the more usual therapeutic relationship, the therapist takes responsibility for using all his verbal and non-verbal behavior to elicit responses, to get access to resources in parts of the person directly, and to communicate with those parts. The client in the normal therapeutic process will, in turn, become those parts. S/he will cry, become angry, delighted, ecstatic, etc. S/he will display with all output channels that s/he has altered consciousness and has become the part that I want to communicate with.

In reframing we take a step back in that process and ask that s/he create a part that will have the responsibility for maintaining an efficient, effective internal communication system between parts. However, the same six-step format can be used as an organizing principle for doing more usual kinds of therapeutic work. Step one, identifying the pattern, is equivalent in a normal therapeutic context to saying "What specific change would you like today?" and getting a congruent response.

In usual therapeutic work there are a lot of ways of establishing communication with a part, as long as you are flexible. There's playing polarity, for instance. Suppose that I'm with someone who is really depressed. One way for me to contact the part in him that is really depressed is to talk directly to him. If I want to contact the part that doesn't want him to be depressed, I can say "Boy, you are depressing! You are one of the most depressing—I'll bet you've been depressed your whole life. You've never had any experience other than being depressed, never at all."

"Well, not my whole life, but for the past—"

"Oh no, I'll bet it's been your whole life."

"No, not my whole life, last week I felt pretty good for about an hour...."

In other words, by exaggerating the position that is offered to you, you get a polarity response if you do it congruently. And as soon as the person accesses the polarity, you can anchor it.

Woman: I have a client who will say "This is ridiculous! I don't want to do it."

Fine. So what?

Woman: Do you laugh at that point? Or do you, you know ...

No. Well, first of all, I've never had anybody tell me that. And I think that's because I do a lot of "set-ups" before I get into this. I do a lot of pacing, matching, mirroring. So you might take this as a comment that you didn't set up this person sufficiently well.

Or you might take it as a signal that you just accessed the part that you need to communicate with. Their behavior gives one set of messages and the verbalization gives another. If you recognize that the part which is now active and just told you that this is ridiculous is the part you need to communicate with anyway, then you don't do it in the six-step format. You immediately move into the usual therapeutic format. You've already established communication with the part. Reach over and anchor it in the same way we were talking about earlier. That will always give you access to that part whenever you need it. That response is a successful response in the usual therapeutic format.

Whether you do it in the six-step format or in the format of more normal therapeutic encounters, such as I just talked about, you now have established a communication channel. The important thing here is to accept only reports—not interpretations from the person's conscious mind. If you accept interpretations, you're going to fall into the same difficulties that they are already in: the communication between their conscious understanding and the unconscious intent is at variance. If you take sides you are going to lose—unless you take sides with the unconscious, because the unconscious always wins anyway.

If your client refuses to have anything to do with exploring unconscious parts, you can say "Look, let me guarantee that the part of you that you are attacking consciously, the part of you that keeps you doing X, is doing something useful for you. I'm going to side with it against your conscious mind until I am satisfied that this unconscious part of you has found patterns of behavior that are more effective than what you are presently doing." Now, with that it's very hard to get any resistance. That's been my experience.

Step three of reframing is the major component of what most people do when they do family therapy. Let's say that you have a father who loses his temper a lot. Virginia Satir waits until he has expressed quite a bit of anger. Then she says "I want to tell you that in my years of doing family therapy I have seen a lot of people who are angry, and a lot of people could express it. I think it's important for every human being to be able to express what they feel in their guts, whether its happiness, or anger like you just felt. I want to compliment you, and I hope all the other members of this family have that choice." Now, that's pacing: "accept, accept, accept." And then she gets in real close to the father and says "And would you be willing to tell me about those feelings of loneliness and hurt underneath that anger?"

Another form of behavioral reframing is to say "Do you yell at everyone like that? You don't yell at the paper boy? You don't yell at your mechanic? Well, are you trying to tell her that you care about what she does? Is that what this anger is about? I mean, I notice you don't do it with people you don't care about. This must be a caring message. Did you know that this was his way of expressing that he cares what you do?"

"Well, how do you feel about knowing that now?" How many of you have heard Virginia Satir say that? That's a weird sentence; it doesn't actually have any meaning. But it works! That's another example of behavioral reframing. It's the same principle, but it involves content. That's the only difference.

Carl Whittaker has one nice reframing pattern that is apparently uniquely his. The husband complains "And for the last ten years nobody has ever taken care of me. I've had to do everything for myself and I've had to develop this ability to take care of myself. Nobody ever is solicitous toward me." Carl Whittaker says "Thank God you learned to stand on your own feet. I really appreciate a man who can do that. Aren't you glad you've done that?" That's a behavioral reframe. If a client says "Well, you know, I guess I'm just not the perfect husband," he says "Thank God! I'm so relieved! I've had three perfect husbands already this week and they are so dull." What he does is to reverse the presupposition of the communication he's receiving.

We originally developed reframing by observing Virginia Satir in the context of family therapy. We have developed several other systematic models of reframing that will appear in a book titled Reframing: NLP and the Transformation of Meaning. In that book we also apply reframing to alcoholism, family therapy, corporate decision-making, and other specific contexts.

One aspect of reframing was introduced years ago in the process called "brainstorming," a situation in which people simply free-associate and explicitly suspend their usual judgemental responses. When brainstorming is conducted in an effective way, people generate a lot more ideas than they do in other modes of working together.

The primary way in which that works is that a really fine distinction is made between outcomes—what we are going to use this material for—and the process of generating ideas with other human beings. Reframing is the same principle applied more generally.

What I've noticed over and over again in corporate work, in arbitration, or in family therapy, is that there will be a goal toward which a number of members in the system want to move. They begin to discuss some of the characteristics or dimensions, or advantages or disadvantages, of this future desired state. As they do this, other members involved in that negotiation behave as if they feel compelled to point out that there are certain constraints that presently exist in the organization which make it impossible to do that.

Now, what is missing is the time quantifier. Indeed they are correct. There are constraints on the organization or the family which make it impossible, concretely speaking, to engage in that proposed behavior now. If you work as a consultant for an organization or a family, you can teach people to distinguish between responses they are making that are congruent with the description of the future state, and responses that are a characterization of the present state. Once that is done, you avoid about ninety-five percent of the bickering that goes on in planning sessions. You convince the people in the organization that it is useful for them to feel free to restrict themselves to discussing the future state, the desired state, propositions entirely distinct from present state constraints. This is an example of sorting out certain dimensions of experience, dealing with them in some useful way, and then later re-integrating them back into the system.

You also need a monitor. All of you have had the following experience. You're in an organizational meeting or a family system. And no matter what anyone says, there's one person who takes issue with it. No matter what the proposal is, there is someone who behaves as if it were their function in that system to challenge the formulation that has just been offered. It's a useful thing to be able to do, but it can also be very disruptive. What techniques do you have to utilize what's going on at that point? Does anybody have a way of dealing with that effectively?

Woman: You can escalate it; ask them to do it more. So you would use the gestalt thing of exaggerating. What's the outcome you typically get?

Woman: Ah, they stop.

They stop doing it. That's a nice transfer from therapy. She's using one of the three patterns which are characteristic of Brief Therapy therapists, the pattern of prescribing the symptom. For instance, when somebody comes to Milton Erickson and asks for assistance in losing weight, typically he demands that s/he gain exactly eleven pounds in the next two weeks. That might seem to be irrational behavior on his part. However, it's quite effective, because one of two things will happen. Either the person will lose weight—a polarity response— which is the outcome he is working toward anyway, or they will gain eleven pounds. Typically they don't gain ten or twelve, they gain eleven. Since they were able to accomplish that, the behavioral presupposition is that they can control what they weigh. In either case it unstabilizes the situation. I've never heard of people stabilizing. Something always happens. It's the same kind of maneuver that Salvador Minuchin makes when he allies himself with a member of the family to throw the system out of kilter. This is a really nice example of a transfer of a therapeutic technique to the organizational context.

Let me offer you another utilization. As soon as you notice that the challenging behavior is disruptive, you can interrupt the process, and say "Look, one of the things I've discovered is that it's useful to assign people specific functions in a group. In my experience of consulting and working with organizations, I have found that this is a useful way of organizing meetings. One group member keeps track of the ideas, and so on." Then you can assign this person the function of being the challenger. When a well-formed proposition is brought before the group by anyone, or by a sequence of suggestions, his job is to challenge that formulation at some point. You explain that by challenging the formulation, he will force the people making the proposal to make finer and finer distinctions and to hone their proposal into a form that will be effective and realistic. You've prescribed the symptom, but you have also institutionalized it. I've had the experience of simply prescribing the symptom, and at the next meeting the same thing happens, and I have to do it again. One way to make sure that you don't have to make that intervention over and over again is to institutionalize it by assigning the function of challenger to that person.

You've essentially taken over the behavior. Now you can control when the challenges will be made. This is an example of utilization. You don't try to stop the problem behavior, you utilize it. The primary metaphor for utilization is the situation where I never fight against the energy offered me by anyone, or any part of them. I take it and use it. Utilization is the psychological counterpart of the oriental martial arts, such as Aikido or Judo. This is a parallel strategy for psychological martial arts. You always accept and utilize the response, you don't fight or challenge the response—with one exception, of course. If the person's presenting problem involves their running over people then you clobber them, because the presenting problem involves the very pattern that they are using: namely, they get their way. But, of course, that's a paradox, because if they were really getting their way, they wouldn't be in your office.

So let's say that Jim here makes a proposal and Tony is the guy I have assigned to be the challenger. When Tony begins to interrupt, I say "Excellent! Good work, Tony! Now, listen, Tony, what I think you ought to be sensitive to is that we haven't yet given Jim enough rope to hang himself. So let him make a more complete proposal and get responses from other people, and then I'll cue you and you jump right on it. OK?" So I've essentially delivered the message "Yes, but not yet."

Woman: That works if you are the outside consultant coming in, but what if you are already in the system?

If you are an inside consultant or you are a member of the system at the same level of functioning, there may be people who would resent or resist if you state it as your proposal. So you have to frame it appropriately. It's not a proposal coming from you. It's a proposal you are offering that comes from outside, which you think might be useful for you and the rest of the members of the group. You can do it metaphorically. You can say "I spent a fascinating evening the other night with a corporate consultant in Chicago. I went to a conference and the leader told us the following:" Then you present all the information that I just presented to you. If you do that congruently, it will be an acceptable proposal. You can always suggest an experiential test to find out whether it's worth doing. You can ask people to try it for two hours. If it works, people will continue it. If it doesn't, you haven't lost much, and you don't want to continue it anyway.

I would like to point out that discussions where antagonistic positions are being presented are the life blood of any organization if they are done in a particular context. That context is that you establish a frame around the whole process of argument, so that the disputes, the discussions of antagonistic proposals, are simply different ways of achieving the same outcome that all members agree upon.

Let me give a content example. George and Harry are co-owners of a corporation; each owns fifty percent of the stock. I've been brought in as a corporate consultant. Harry says the following: "We've got to expand. You grow or you die. And specifically we've got to open offices in Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Miami this year." And George over here says "Look, you know as well as I do, Harry, that last year when we opened the Chicago and Milwaukee offices, we opened them on a shoestring. And as a matter of fact, they still are not yet self-sufficient. They are still not stabilized to the point that they are turning over the amount of business that gives me the confidence to know that we can go ahead and expand into these other offices. Now how many times do we have to go through this?"

So there's a content difference between these two human beings about the next thing they should do as a corporate entity. One strategy that always works effectively in this situation is to reframe the two responses that they are offering as alternative ways of getting an outcome that they both agree is desirable. So first you have to find the common goal—establish a frame. Then you instruct them in how to dispute each other's proposals effectively, because now both proposals are examples of how to achieve the same outcome that they both have agreed upon.

So I would do something like the following: "Look, let me interrupt you for a moment. I just want to make sure that I understand you both. Harry, you want to expand because you want the corporation to grow and realize more income, right?" I then turn to George and say "My understanding is that your objection to the expansion at the moment, and your focusing on the fact that the Milwaukee and Chicago offices are not quite self-sufficient yet, is your way of being sure that the quality of the services that you offer as a corporation are of a certain level. You are offering a quality product and you want to maintain that quality, because otherwise the whole thing won't work anyway." And he'll say "Of course. Why do you ask these things?" And then I say "OK, I think I understand now. Both of you agree that what you want to do is expand at a rate congruent with maintaining the high quality of services your corporation offers." And they'll both say "Of course." You've now achieved the agreement that you need; you've now got the frame. You say "Good. Since we agree on the outcome that we're all working toward, let's find the most effective, efficient way to get that outcome. Now you, George, make a specific, detailed proposal about how you will know when the Chicago and Milwaukee offices are stabilized at a quality of operation that allows you to feel comfortable about turning resources elsewhere to continue expanding. Harry, I want you to come up with the specific evidence that you can use to know when it is appropriate to open new branches. What will you see or hear that's going to allow you to know that it is now appropriate to open a new office in Chattanooga, and still maintain the quality of the services you're going to offer?"

First I use language that generalizes, to establish the frame. Then I make sure it is anchored in. "Since we all agree about the outcome,... Then I challenge them to take the proposals they've been fighting over—now embedded in a context of agreement—back to the level of sensory experience. I demand that each of them give specific evidence to support that their proposal is more effective in achieving the outcome that they have both agreed upon. Now they will have useful disputes. And I will monitor their language to be sure that they are being specific enough to make a good decision. You can always figure out what would constitute evidence that one proposal is more effective than another.

Let me give you a specific strategy for doing this. You listen to both complaint A and complaint B. Then you ask yourself "What are A and B both examples of? What is the class or category that they are both examples of? What is the outcome that both of these two people will share? What common intention lies behind or underneath both these two particular proposals?" Once you discover that, then you interrupt and state the obvious in some way. You get an agreement between these two people, so that they can then begin to usefully disagree within the context of agreement.

Now that has the same formal properties of what I did with Dick in the six-step reframing. We found a point where his conscious mind and his unconscious mind could agree about a certain outcome that was useful for him as an individual.

Harry and George now agree that whatever they end up doing— either one of their proposals, both, or some alternative to those—the outcome they are working toward is to benefit the corporate entity as a unit. So I ignore the specific behaviors, and I go after an outcome that the two parts of the corporation—or the two parts of the human being—can agree upon. Now, having achieved the frame of agreement, it becomes trivial to vary behavior in order to find a behavior that achieves the outcome that both partners can agree to.

If you have more than two people involved—which is usually the case—you can simplify the situation by organizing the discussion. Just say "Look, I'm getting very confused by the way we're discussing things. Let me organize it a little bit in the following way: I want the rest of you to be exquisitively attentive. You have the job of watching and listening to exactly what these two people are going to propose, and assisting me in the process of finding what's common about what they want to do. You can reorganize it into pairs, and then work with one pair at a time. And as you do that, of course you are teaching the pattern to the observers at the same time.

People have strange ideas about change. Change is the only constant in my thirty-some years of experience. One of the weird things that's happened—and this is a really good example of natural anchoring—is that change and pain are associated. Those ideas have been anchored together in western civilization. That's ridiculous! There's no necessary relationship between pain and change. Is there Linda? Tammy? Dick?

There is one class of human beings in which you may have to create pain in order to assist them in changing, and that's therapists. Most therapists intrinsically believe—at the unconscious level as well as the conscious level—that change has to be slow and painful. How many of you at some point during the demonstrations have said to yourself "That's too easy; it's too fast." If you examine the underlying presuppositions that cause you to respond that way, you'll discover that they are associated with pain and time and money and stuff— some of which are really powerful and valid economic considerations. Others are just junk that have been associated—like change and pain. So you might examine your own belief structure, because what you believe will come out. It will be in your tone of voice, in your body movement, in the hesitation as you lean forward to do this work with someone.

All the tools that we offer you are very powerful and elegant. They are the minimum that I think you need to operate, no matter what psychotheology you were previously trained in.

If you decide that you want to fail with this material, it's possible to. There are two ways to fail. I think you ought to be aware of what those are, so that you can make a choice about how you are going to fail if you decide to.

One way is to be extremely rigid. You can go through exactly the steps that you saw and heard us go through here, without any sensory experience, without any feedback from your clients. That will guarantee that you will fail. That's the way most people fail.

The second way you can fail is by being really incongruent. If there's a part of you that really doesn't believe that phobias can be done in three minutes, but you decide to try it anyway, that incongruency will show up in your non-verbal communication, and that will blow the whole thing.

Every psychotherapy that I know of has an acute mental illness within it. Each one thinks that their theory, their map, is the territory. They don't think that you can make up something totally arbitrary and install it in someone and change them. They don't realize that what they believe is also made up and totally arbitrary. Yes, their method does elicit a response from people, and sometimes it works for the problem you're working on. But there are a thousand other ways to go about it, and a thousand other responses.

For example, TA has a thing called "reparenting" in which they regress a person and give him a new set of parents. And if it's done appropriately, it will work. The TA belief is that the person is messed up because when they were a kid they didn't get certain kinds of experiences, so you have to go back and give them those experiences in order for them to be different. That's the TA theology, and accepting that belief system constitutes the mental illness of TA. TA people don't realize that you can get the same result a thousand other ways, and that some of them are a lot quicker than reparenting.

Any belief system is both a set of resources for doing a particular thing, and a set of severe limitations for doing anything else. The one value in belief is that it makes you congruent. That part is very useful; it will make other people believe you. But it also establishes a huge set of limitations. And my belief system is that you will find those limitations in yourself as a person as well as in your therapy. Your clients are going to end up being a metaphor for your personal life because you are making the ultimate tragic mistake. You believe that your perceptions are a description of what reality actually is.

There is a way out of that. The way out of that is to not believe what you're doing. That way you can do things that don't fit with "yourself," "your world," etc. I recently decided that I want to write a book titled, When you discover your real self, then buy this book and become someone else.

If you simply change your belief system, you will have a new set of resources and a new set of limitations. Having the choice of being able to operate out of different therapeutic models is very valuable in comparison to only being able to operate out of one model. If you believe any of them, you will remain limited in the same way those models are limited.

One way to get out of that is to learn to go into altered states in which you make up models. Once you realize that the world in which you're living right now is completely made up, you can make up new worlds.

Now if we're going to talk about altered states of consciousness, we first have to talk about states of consciousness. You are at this moment in time conscious, true or not true?

Woman: I think so.

OK. How do you know that you're conscious at this moment? What are the elements of your experience that would lead you to believe that you are in your normal state of consciousness? I want to know what it is about this state of consciousness that allows you to know that you are here.

Woman: Ah, I can hear your voice.

You can hear my voice, so you have auditory external. Is anyone talking on the inside at this moment?

Woman: I may have some internal voices.

Do you? While you're listening to me talk, is anyone else speaking? That's what I want to know. And I'm going to continue to talk so that you can find out.

Woman: I... yes.

Is it a he or a she or an it? Woman: A she.

All right. So you have some external and internal auditory experience. All TA people have that. They have a "critical parent," saying "Am I doing this right?" No one else does, though—until they go to a TA therapist, and then they have a critical parent. That's what TA does for you. OK, what else have you got? Are you visualizing while I'm speaking to you?

Woman: No, I'm seeing you on the outside.

OK, so you have some visual external experience. Are you having any kinesthetic experience?

Woman: Not until you mentioned it.

OK. What was it?

Woman: Ahhhhmmmm ... I can feel a tightness in my jaw.

Another way to get this would be to say "What are you aware of?" And you would tell me about your state of consciousness at that moment in time. So we have specified auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. You weren't perceiving any smells or taste, were you?

Woman: No.

OK, I didn't think you were. Now, my definition of altering your state of consciousness is to change it from this to any other possible combination of these things. For example, if you were to only hear my voice and not your internal dialogue, that would constitute an altered state for you because you don't usually do that. Most of the time you talk to yourself while other people are talking. If, instead of seeing externally, you were to make clear, rich, vivid, focused images of anything inside, that would be an altered state. For example, if you were to see the letters and numbers of the alphabet, an orange, yourself sitting on the couch with your hand on your ear in an auditory accessing position, the nodding of your head….

Another thing is that your kinesthetics are proprioceptive. Tightness in the jaw is a lot different than the feeling of the couch, the warmth where your hand touches your face, the feeling of your other hand... against your thigh,... the beating of your own heart,... the rise and fall of your chest... as you breathe deeply. The intonation patterns of my voice,... the changing tonality,... the need to focus your eyes... and the changing focus of your pupils, ... the repeating blinking movements, ... and the sense of weight…. Now, can you feel your state of consciousness alter?

That to me constitutes an altered state of consciousness. The way to do it is to first find out what's there, and then do something that makes something else come into consciousness. Once you are directing an altered state of consciousness, you can begin to make maneuvers that add options, add choices.

Woman: I think at that point I was aware of what was happening and I could stop it if I had wanted to, so—

But you didn't.

Woman: That's right, but I don't know about this argument of whether you can make somebody go into an altered state or not. I'm still not—

Well, it's a stupid argument to begin with, because the only people who are going to resist you are people who know that you are doing it. And then I can get somebody to resist me right into a trance, because all I have to do is to instruct them to do one thing and they'll do the opposite. They'll enter an altered state immediately. An example of that is a thing that mothers often say to children: "Don't laugh."They induce altered states in their children by playing polarity. Kids don't have a choice about that until they have requisite variety.

Who can make whom do what, is a function of requisite variety. If you have more flexibility in your behavior than your hypnotist, then you can go into a trance or you can stay out of a trance, depending upon what you want to do. Henry Hilgard made up one hypnotic induction and administered it to ten thousand people. Sure enough, he found out that only a certain percentage of them went into a trance. The percentage that went into a trance were the ones that were either pre-adapted or flexible enough to adapt to that hypnotic induction. The rest of the people who were not flexible enough to adapt to that particular hypnotic induction could not go into a trance.

Going into an altered state is nothing weird. You all do it all the time. The question is whether you use the altered state to produce change, and if so, how are you going to use it? Inducing it is not that difficult. All you have to do is talk about parameters of experience that the person isn't aware of. The question is "How will you do it with whom?" If you have a person who's very visual, you're going to do something that's very different than with someone like this woman here who talks to herself a lot and pays attention to the tightness in her jaw. For her, entering a state of consciousness where she makes rich, focused images would be altered. But for a visual person that would be the normal state. In an altered state a person has more and different choices than she does in her normal conscious waking state. Many people think that going into a trance means losing control. That's where this question "Can you make somebody go into a trance?" comes from. What you're making them do is to go into a state where they have more choices. There's a huge paradox there. In an altered state of consciousness you do not have your usual model of the world. So what you have is an infinite number of possibilities.

Since I can represent states in terms of representational systems, I can use this as a calculus to compute what else must be possible. I can compute altered states that have never existed and achieve them. I didn't find that possibility available to me when I was a gestalt therapist or when I did other forms of therapy. Those models didn't offer these alternatives. If you want to learn in detail how to induce and utilize altered states, read our book Trance-formations: NLP and the Structure of Hypnosis.

I have a student now who I think is pretty good. One of the things that I appreciate about him is that instead of "working on himself," he takes the time to enter altered states and give himself new realities. I think most of the time when therapists work on themselves, all they do is confuse themselves utterly and completely. Once a woman hired me to do a workshop. She called me up three weeks before the workshop and said that she had changed her mind. So I called my attorney and sued her. She had months and months and months to plan the workshop and do what she had said she would do. She had spent all that time "working on" whether she was ready to do this or not. Her therapist called me up to try to persuade me to not sue her. He said "Well, it's not like she hasn't spent time on it. She's been working on this for months about whether she was ready to do this workshop."

It seems to me that there was one obvious thing she could have done: she could have called me up months and months earlier and told me that she was unsure. But instead of doing that, she tried to work out external experience internally and consciously. And I think that's a paradox, as we've said over and over again. When people come for therapy, if they had the resources consciously available they would have changed already. The fact that they haven't is what brings them there. When you, as a therapist, consciously try to change yourself, you're setting yourself up for confusion, and you're likely to go into all kinds of interesting, but not very useful, loops.

One student of mine came to me first as a client. He was a junior in college at the time, and he said "I have a terrible problem. I meet a girl, things go really fine, and then she comes and sleeps with me and everything is great. But the next morning as soon as I wake up, I think 'Well, either I have to marry her or kick her out of bed and never see her again.'"

At that moment in time I was sort of amazed that a human being had actually said that to me! I will never cease to be amazed about how people can limit their world of experience. In his world there were only those two choices!

I was working with John at the time, and John looked at him and said "Has it ever occurred to you to just say 'Good morning'?" and the student went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I think that stunk as a therapeutic maneuver, because now what's he going to do? He's going to say "Good morning," and then either put his foot in the center of her back and kick her out of bed, or propose marriage. There are more possibilities than that. But as he entered that state of confusion and went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I reached over and said "Close your eyes." And John said "And begin to dream a dream in which you learn just how many other possibilities there are, and your eyes will be unable to open until you find them." He sat there for 5 and a half hours. We went out in the other room. Six and a half hours he was there coming up with possibilities. He couldn't leave because his eyes wouldn't open. He tried standing and walking, but he couldn't find the door. All of the possibilities that he thought of in that six and a half hour period had been available to him all along, but he had never done anything to access his own creativity.

Reframing is a way of getting people to say "Hey, how else can I do this?" In a way it's the ultimate criticism of a human being, saying "Stop and think about your behavior, and think about it in the following way: Do something new; what you're doing doesn't work! Tell yourself a story, and then come up with three other ways of telling the story, and suddenly you have differences in your behavior.

There's an amazing thing about people: when they find something that doesn't work, they do it harder. For example, go to a junior high school and watch kids on the playground. One kid comes up to another one and pushes him. So the other kid sticks his chest out. The next time the kid pushes him he can push him even better because he has a firm chest to put his hand against.

One thing that really hasn't been understood is what's possible if instead of approaching a problem directly, you approach it indirectly. Milton Erickson did what I think was one of the shortest cures that I've ever heard about. The story that I heard was that he was at the VA hospital in Palo Alto in 1957, and psychiatrists were waiting in line with patients out in the hall. They were coming in one at a time, and Milton was doing a little magic, doing this and doing that. Then they went back out in the hall and talked about how Milton wasn't really doing these things and he was a charlatan.

A young PhD psychologist, who was about as straight as you could get, brought in a seventeen-year-old adolescent who had been knifing people and doing anything he could possibly conceive of that was damaging. The kid had been waiting in line for hours and people had been coming out in somnambulistic trances; the kid was going " Ahhhhhhhh ... What are they going to do to me?" He didn't know if he was going to get electric shock or what. They brought him in and there was this man with two canes standing there behind the table, and an audience in the room. They walked up in front of the table. Milton said "Why have you brought this boy here?" And the psychologist explained the situation, gave the case history as best he could. Milton looked at the psychologist and said "Go sit down." Then he looked at the young boy and said "How surprised will you be when all your behavior changes completely next week?" The boy looked at him and said "I'll be very surprised!" And Milton said "Get out. Take these people away."

The psychologist assumed that Milton had decided not to work with the boy. Like most psychologists, he missed the whole thing. Next week, the boy's behavior changed completely, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. The psychologist said that he could never figure out what it was that Milton did. As I understand it, Milton only did one thing. He gave that boy the opportunity to access his own unconscious resources. He said "You will change, and your conscious mind won't have anything to do with it. "Never underestimate the usefulness of just saying that to people. "I know that you have a vast array of resources available to you that your conscious mind doesn't even suspect. You have the ability to surprise yourself, each and every one of you. "If you really congruently act as if people have the resources and are going to change, you begin to induce impetus in the unconscious.

One of the things that I noticed about Milton when I first went to see him, was the incredible respect that he has for unconscious processes. He is always trying to get demonstrations back and forth between conscious and unconscious activity.

In linguistics there is something called "the tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Do you all know what that is? That's when you know a word and you even know that you know the word, but you can't say what it is. Your conscious mind even knows that your unconscious mind knows what the word is. I remind people of that as evidence that their conscious mind is less than the tip of the iceberg.

I once hypnotized a linguistics professor and sent his conscious mind away into a memory. I asked if his unconscious mind knew what the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon was—because he had demonstrated it in many of his classes. His unconscious mind said to me "Yes, I know what it is." I said "Why is it that if you know a word, you don't present it to his conscious mind?" And he said to me "His conscious mind is too damn cocky."

In our last workshop we were doing some things with strategies, and we programmed a woman to forget what her name was. A man there said "There's no way that I could possibly forget my name." I said "What is your name?" And he said "I don't know! I said "Congratulate your unconscious mind, even though you don't have one."

It is amazing to me that hypnosis has been so systematically ignored. I think it's been ignored mostly because the conscious minds who practice it don't trust it. But every form of therapy I've studied has trance experiences available in it. Gestalt is founded on positive hallucination. TA is founded on dissociation. They all have great verbal inductions.

At the last workshop we did there was a guy who was skeptical through most of the day. As I walked by, during an exercise, he was saying to his partner "Can you allow yourself to make this picture?" That's a hypnotic command. He had asked me downstairs if I believed in hypnosis! What I believe is that it's an unfortunate word. It's a name given to lots and lots of different experiences, lots of different states.

We used to do hypnotic inductions before we did reframing. Then we discovered that we could do reframing without having to put people into trance. That's how we got into Neuro Linguistic Programming. We thought "Well, if that's true, then we should be able to reframe people into doing every deep trance phenomenon that we know about." So we took a group of twenty people and in one evening we programmed all the people in that group to do every deep trance phenomenon we could remember having read about anywhere. We found that we could get any "deep trance phenomenon" without doing any ritualized induction. We got amnesia, positive hallucination, tone-deafness, color blindness—everything. One woman negatively hallucinated Leslie for the entire evening. Leslie would walk over and pick up the woman's hand; her hand would float up and she had no idea why. It was like those cartoons about ghosts and stuff. That's as good as any negative hallucination we ever got doing hypnosis.

In the phobia technique where you see yourself standing there, and then float out of your body and see yourself there watching the younger you—that's a deep trance phenomenon. It requires positive hallucination, and getting out of your own body. That's fairly amazing. Yet all you have to do is give somebody the explicit instructions, and out of a hundred people, ninety-five can do it quickly and easily as long as you don't act as if it's hard. You always act as if you're leading up to something else that's going to be difficult, so they go ahead and do all the deep-trance phenomena and alter their state.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is a logical step higher than anything that has been done previously in hypnosis or therapy only in the sense that it allows you to do things formally and methodically. NLP allows you to determine exactly what alterations in subjective experience are necessary to accomplish a given outcome. Most hypnosis is a fairly random process: If I give someone a suggestion, that person has to come up with a method of carrying it out. As a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, even if I use hypnosis, I would describe exactly what I want that person to do in order to carry out the suggestion. That's the only important difference between what we're doing here and what people have been doing with hypnosis for centuries. It's a very important difference, because it allows you to predict outcomes precisely and avoid side-effects.

Using reframing and strategies and anchoring—all the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming—you can get any response you can get through hypnosis. But then that's only one way to go about it. Doing it through official hypnosis is also interesting. And combining NLP and hypnosis is even more interesting.

For instance there is the "dreaming arm" technique that works great with children—and adults, too. First you ask "Did you know you have a dreaming arm?" When you have their interest, you ask "What is your favorite TV show?" As they access visually, you notice which side their eyes go to. As they do that, you lift up their arm on the same side, and say "I'm going to lift your arm, and your arm will go down only as fast as you watch that whole TV show, and you can begin right now. So the kid watches his favorite TV show. You can even reach out and stop their arm for a moment and say "It's time for a commercial" and install messages.

I'll tell you the extremes you can take this to. I had a client who had a severe hallucination that was always with him. I could never discern quite what it was. He had a name for it which was a word I'd never heard. It was a geometric figure which was alive and that followed him everywhere. It was his own sort of personal demon, but he didn't call it a demon. He could point to it in the room, and he interacted with it. When I asked him questions, he would turn around and ask "What do you think?" Before he came to me he had been convinced by a therapist that this was a part of him. Whether it was or not, I don't know, but he was convinced that this was a part of him that he had alienated. I reached over and said "I'm going to lift up your arm, and I want you to put it down only as fast as you begin to integrate this."Then I pulled his arm down quickly, and that was it. The integration occurred— whammo, slappo—because I had tied the two together with words.

I once asked a TA therapist which part had total control over his conscious ongoing behavior. Because it didn't seem that people had a choice about being their "parent," or their "child." So he named some part; TA has names for everything. I said "Would you go inside and ask that part if it would knock your conscious mind out for a while?" And he went "Ah, well... "I said "Just go in and ask, and find out what happens." So he went inside and asked the question... and his head fell over to one side and he was gone! It is amazing how powerful it is to use language. I don't think people understand the impact of verbal and non-verbal language at all.

At the beginning of therapy sessions very often I'll say to people "If anything begins to occur to your conscious mind which is too painful in any way, I want to say to your unconscious mind that I think it has the right and the duty to keep from your conscious mind anything that is unpleasant. Your unconscious resources can do that and they should do it—protect you from thinking about things which are unnecessary in that way, and make your conscious experience more pleasant. So if anything unpleasant begins to arise in your conscious experience, your unconscious mind can slowly allow your eyes to flutter closed, one of your hands to rise up, and your conscious mind can drift away into a pleasant memory, allowing me to speak privately with your unconscious mind. Because I don't know what the worst thing that ever happened to you was...."

I'm saying when X occurs, respond this way, and then I'm providing X. I'm not saying "Think about the worst thing that ever happened." I'm saying "I don't know ..." This is the same pattern that's in Changing with Families, the pattern of embedded questions. Virginia never says "What do you want?" She says "Gee, I ask myself why a family would travel six thousand miles to see me. And I don't know, and I'm curious." When I say "I don't know exactly what the most painful and tragic experience of your whole life was," it'll be right there in consciousness.

People do not process language consciously. They process language at the unconscious level. They can only become conscious of a very small amount of it. A lot of what is called hypnosis is using language in very specific ways.

It's one thing to alter someone's state of consciousness and to give them new programs, new learnings, new choices. Getting them to know that they've been in an altered state is something else entirely. Different people have different strategies by which they convince themselves of things. What constitutes somebody's belief system about what hypnosis is, is very different from being able to use hypnosis as a tool. It's much easier to use trance as a therapeutic tool with people who don't know that they've been in a trance, because you can communicate so much more eloquently with their unconscious processes. As long as you can establish unconscious feedback loops with that person, you'll be able to alter their state of consciousness and they are more apt to have amnesia.

My favorite case of this was a guy named Hal. He came to a seminar that a student of mine had set up and at the last minute she decided that she was an inadequate human being and left the State. The people all showed up at the seminar and someone called me and said "All these people are here, what should I do?" It was nearby, so I went over and I said "Well, I'll spend the evening with you. I don't want to teach a seminar, but I would like to know what you all hoped to get." Hal said "I have been to every hypnotist I've ever found; I have gone to every seminar I could ever find on hypnosis, and I have volunteered myself every time, and I have not gone into a trance."

I thought that was dedication for somebody who had failed over and over again. And so I thought "Well, wow! This is really interesting. Maybe this guy really is an 'impossible,' and maybe there's something interesting here." So I thought I'd try it. I did a hypnotic induction and the guy went right through the floor! He went into deep trance and he demonstrated all the most difficult hypnotic phenomena. Then I aroused him and said "Did you go into a trance?" And he said "No." I said "What happened?" And he said "Well, you were talking to me and I sat here and listened to you talk, and I closed my eyes, and I opened my eyes." I said "And did you X?" and I named one of the trance phenomena he had just demonstrated. And he said "No." So I thought, "Ah! well, it's just a function of his amnesia."

I hypnotized him again and gave him implicit hypnotic commands to remember doing all the things he did. He still had no memory whatsoever. All the people in the room, of course, were going crazy because they've seen him do all these things. I tried things like saying "Tell Hal what you saw" and they all told him. And he said "That's not going to work on me. I didn't do that. I would know if I did that." The interesting thing about Hal was there was more than one of him, and they had no connection with one another, no means of communicating with one another. So I thought well, I'm going to have to mix it up a little bit. I said "While you remain in the conscious state, I'd like to ask your unconscious mind to demonstrate to you that it can do things by lifting your hand so that only your right arm is in trance." His arm began to involuntarily float up. I thought "Now this is going to convince this guy," because only his arm was in trance. And he looked me straight in the eye and said "Well, my arm is in trance, but the rest of me can't go in."

By the way, I have a rule which says I have to succeed. So I tried videotaping him and showing him the videotape. He couldn't see it! We'd turn on the videotape, and he'd just go into a trance and that was it. He could not watch the videotape. I told him that if he had not been in a trance, he would be able to watch the videotape. So he sat there with the videotape machine, and he would turn it on and drop out. We'd turn it off and he'd come back. He'd turn it on again and drop out again. He sat there for the rest of the evening trying to watch himself go into a trance. He couldn't do it. So he became convinced that he had been in a trance, but he didn't understand it.

This taught me a lesson. I stopped worrying about whether people knew they were in trance or not and only noticed the results that I could get, utilizing it as phenomenon of change. Hypnotists do a terrible thing to themselves. Hypnotists are always worried about convincing people that they have been in trance, and it isn't important. It is not essential to their changing; it is not essential for anything. Whether they know that they've gone into trance or not, they will notice that they have the changes.

The same is true of anchoring and reframing. As long as you use sensory experience to check your work, it's irrelevant whether your clients believe that they have changed. They will find out in experience—if they bother to notice at all.

The information and patterns that we have been presenting to you are formal patterns of communication that are content-free. They can be used in any context of human communication and behavior.

We haven't even begun to figure out what the possibilities are of how to use this material. And we are very, very, serious about that. What we are doing now is nothing more than the investigation of how to use this information. We have been unable to exhaust the variety of ways to put this stuff together and put it to use, and we don't know of any limitations on the ways that you can use this information. During this seminar we have mentioned and demonstrated several dozen ways that it can be used. It's the structure of experience. Period. When used systematically, it constitutes a full strategy for getting any behavioral gain.

We are very slowly tapering off teaching and doing therapy because there's a presupposition common in the field of clinical psychology which we personally disagree with: that change is a remedial phenomenon. You find something that is wrong and you fix it. If you ask a hundred people "What would you like for yourself," ninety-nine will say "I want to stop doing X."

There is an entirely different way to look at change, which we call the generative or enrichment approach. Instead of looking for what's wrong and fixing it, it's possible simply to think of ways that your life could be enriched: "What would be fun to do, or interesting to be able to do?" "What new capacities or abilities could I invent for myself?" "How can I make things really groovy?"

When I was first doing therapy a man came in and said "I want to have better relationships with people." I said "Oh, so you have trouble relating to people?" He said "No, I get along fine with people. I enjoy my relationships a lot. I'd like to be able to do it even better." I looked into my therapy bag to see what to do for him, and there wasn't anything there!

Very rarely do people come in and say "Well, I'm confident but, boy, you know, if I were twice as confident things would be really wonderful." They come in and say "I'm never confident." I say "Are you sure of that?" and they say Absolutely

The idea of generative change is really hard to sell to psychologists. Business people are much more interested, and they're more willing and able to pay to learn how to do it. Often we do groups in which about half of them are business people, and half of them are therapists. I say "Now, what I want you to do is to go inside and think of three really different situations." The business people go inside and sell a car, win a lawsuit, and meet somebody they really enjoy. The therapists go inside and get beaten up as a child, have a divorce, and have the worst professional failure and humiliation of their life!

We are currently investigating what we call generative personality. We are finding people who are geniuses at things, finding out the sequence of unconscious programming that they use, and installing those sequences in other people to find out if having that unconscious program allows them to be able to do the task. The "cloning" thing we did for the ad agency is an example of doing that at the corporate level.

When we do that, things which were problems, and would have been meat for therapy, disappear. We completely bypass the whole phenomenon of working with problems, because when the structure is changed, everything changes. And problems are only a function of structure.

Man: Can that present new problems?

Yes, but they are interesting, evolutionary ones. Everything presents problems, but the new ones are much more interesting. "What are you going to evolve yourself to become today?" is a very different way of approaching change than "Where is it wrong?" or "How are you inadequate?" I remember once I was in a group with a gestalt therapist and he said "Who wants to work today?" Nobody raised their hand. And he said "There's really no one in here that has a pressing problem?" People looked at each other, shook their heads, and said "No." He looked at the people and said "What's wrong with you? You are not in touch with what's really going on if there's no pain here." He really made that statement; I was flabbergasted. Suddenly all these people went into pain. They all said "You're right! If I have no pain, I'm not real." Boom, they all went into pain, so then he had something to do therapy with.

That model of change does not produce really generative, creative human beings. I want to make structures that are conducive to creating experiences which will result in people who are interesting. People come out of therapy being lots of things, but rarely interesting. I don't think that it's anybody's fault. I think it's a result of the whole system and the presuppositions that underlie the system of psychotherapy and counseling. Most people are totally unconscious of what those presuppositions are.

As I walked around watching and listening to you practicing reframing, I saw a lot of you reverting to other patterns that I'm sure are characteristic of your habitual behavior in therapy, rather than trying something new. And that reminded me of a story:

Some fifteen or so years ago when the Denver zoo was going through a major renovation, there was a polar bear there, which had arrived at the zoo before a naturalistic environment was ready for it. Polar bears, by the way, are one of my favorite animals. They are very playful; they are big and graceful and do lots of nice things. The cage that it was put in temporarily was just big enough that the polar bear could take three nice, swinging steps in one direction, whirl up and around and come down and take three steps in the other direction, back and forth. The polar bear spent many, many months in that particular cage with those bars that restricted its behavior in that way. Eventually a naturalistic environment in which they could release the polar bear was built around this cage, on-site. When it was finally completed, the cage was removed from around the polar bear. Guess what happened? ...

And guess how many of those students at that university are still going down the maze, still trying to find the five-dollar bill? They sneak in at night and run down the maze to look and see if it just might be there this time.

We have been deluging you with information for three days now, totally overloading your conscious resources. And we'd like to offer you a couple of allies in this process which we have discovered are helpful to some people. Do people read Carlos Castaneda here? He's a whacko multiple personality with an Indian friend. There's a section in book two or three in which Don Juan gives a piece of advice to Carlos. We would not give this piece of advice to any of you, but we will repeat it for whatever it's worth.

You see, what Juan wanted to do to Carlos—which we wouldn't, of course, want to do to you—was to find some way of motivating him to be congruent and expressive in his behavior at all times, as creative as he could be as a human being. He wanted to mobilize his resources so that each act that Carlos performed would be a full representation of all the potential that was available to him—all the personal power that he had that was available to him at any moment in time.

Specifically what Juan told Carlos was "At any moment that you find yourself hesitating, or if at any moment you find yourself putting off until tomorrow trying some new piece of behavior that you could do today, or doing something you've done before, then all you need to do is glance over your left shoulder and there will be a fleeting shadow. That shadow represents your death, and at any moment it might step forward, place its hand on your shoulder and take you. So that the act that you are presently engaged in might be your very last act and therefore fully representative of you as your last act on this planet."

One of the ways you can use this constructively is to understand that it is indulgent to hesitate.

When you hesitate, you are acting as though you are immortal. And you, ladies and gentlemen, are not.

You don't even know the place and the hour of your death.

And so one thing you can do... to remind yourself that not to bother to hesitate is not to act unprofessional... is to just suddenly glance over your left shoulder and remember that death is standing there, and make death your advisor. He or she will always tell you to do something representative of your full potential as a person. You can afford no less.

Now, that's a little bit heavy. That's why we wouldn't tell that to you. We noticed that Juan told Carlos. We offer you an alternative.

If at any point you discover yourself hesitating, or being incongruent, or putting off until tomorrow something you could try now, or just needing some new choices, or being bored, glance over your right shoulder and there will be two madmen there, sitting on stools, insulting you.

And as soon as we finish the insults, you may ask us any question.

And that's just one way that your unconscious can present to you all the material that it has learned and represented during these three days.

Now, there's only one other thing that we like to do at the end of a workshop. And that is to say….

Goodbye!