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

I. Sensory experience

There are several important ways in which what we do differs radically from others who do workshops on communication or psychotherapy. When we first started in the field, we would watch brilliant people do interesting things and then afterwards they would tell various particular metaphors that they called theorizing. They would tell stories about millions of holes, or about plumbing: that you have to understand that people are just a circle with pipes coming from every direction, and all you need is Draino or something like that. Most of those metaphors weren't very useful in helping people learn specifically what to do or how to do it.

Some people will do experiential workshops in which you will be treated to watching and listening to a person who is relatively competent in most, or at least part, of the business called "professional communications." They will demonstrate by their behavior that they are quite competent in doing certain kinds of things. If you are fortunate and you keep your sensory apparatus open, you will learn how to do some of the things they do.

There's also a group of people who are theoreticians. They will tell you what their beliefs are about the true nature of humans and what the completely "transparent, adjusted, genuine, authentic," etc. person should be, but they don't show you how to do anything.

Most knowledge in the field of psychology is organized in ways that mix together what we call "modeling"—what traditionally has been called "theorizing"—and what we consider theology. The descriptions of what people do have been mixed together with descriptions of what reality "is." When you mix experience together with theories and wrap them all up in a package, that's a psychotheology. What has developed in psychology is different religious belief systems with very powerful evangelists working from all of these differing orientations.

Another strange thing about psychology is that there's a whole body of people called "researchers" who will not associate with the people who are practicing! Somehow the field of psychology got divided so that the researchers no longer provide information for, and respond to, the clinical practitioners in the field. That's not true in the field of medicine. In medicine, the people doing research are trying to find things to help the practitioners in the field. And the practitioners respond to the researchers, telling them what they need to know more about.

Another thing about therapists is that they come to therapy with a set of unconscious patternings that makes it highly probable that they will fail. When therapists begin to do therapy they look for what's wrong in a content-oriented way. They want to know what the problem is so that they can help people find solutions. This is true whether they have been trained overtly or covertly, in academic institutions or in rooms with pillows on the floor.

This is even true of those who consider themselves to be "process-oriented." There's a little voice somewhere in their mind that keeps saying "The process. Look for the process." They will say "Well, I'm a process-oriented therapist. I work with the process." Somehow the process has become an event—a thing in and of itself.

There is another paradox in the field. The hugest majority of therapists believe that the way to be a good therapist is to do everything you do intuitively, which means to have an unconscious mind that does it for you. They wouldn't describe it that way because they don't like the word "unconscious" but basically they do what they do without knowing how they do it. They do it by the "seat of their pants"—that's another way to say "unconscious mind." I think being able to do things unconsciously is useful; that's a good way to do things. The same group of people, however, say that the ultimate goal of therapy is for people to have conscious understanding—insight into their own problems. So therapists are a group of people who do what they do without knowing how it works, and at the same time believe that the way to really get somewhere in life is to consciously know how things work!

When I first got involved with modeling people in the field of psychotherapy, I would ask them what outcome they were working toward when they made a maneuver, when they reached over and touched a person this way, or when they shifted their voice tone here. And their answer was "Oh, I have no idea." I'd say "Well, good. Are you interested in exploring and finding out with me what the outcome was?" And they would say "Definitely not!" They claimed that if they did specific things to get specific outcomes that would be something bad, called "manipulating."

We call ourselves modelers. What we essentially do is to pay very little attention to what people say they do and a great deal of attention to what they do. And then we build ourselves a model of what they do. We are not psychologists, and we're also not theologians or theoreticians. We have no idea about the "real" nature of things, and we're not particularly interested in what's "true." The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful. So, if we happen to mention something that you know from a scientific study, or from statistics, is inaccurate, realize that a different level of experience is being offered you here. We're not offering you something that's true, just things that are useful.

We know that our modeling has been successful when we can systematically get the same behavioral outcome as the person we have modeled. And when we can teach somebody else to be able to get the same outcomes in a systematic way, that's an even stronger test.

When I entered the field of communication, I went to a large conference where there were six hundred and fifty people in an auditorium. And a man who was very famous got up and made the following statement: "What all of you need to understand about doing therapy and about communication is that the first essential step is to make contact with the human you are communicating with as a person." Well, that struck me as being kind of obvious. And everybody in the audience went "Yeahhhh! Make contact. We all know about that one." Now, he went on to talk for another six hours and never mentioned how. He never mentioned one single specific thing that anybody in that room could do that would help them in any way to either have the experience of understanding that person better, or at least give the other person the illusion that they were understood.

I then went to something called "Active Listening." In active listening you rephrase what everyone says, which means that you distort everything they say.

Then we began to pay attention to what really divergent people who were "wizards" actually do. When you watch and listen to Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson do therapy, they apparently could not be more different. At least I couldn't figure out a way that they could appear more different.

People also report that the experiences of being with them are profoundly different. However, if you examine their behavior and the essential key patterns and sequences of what they do, they are similar. The patterns that they use to accomplish the rather dramatic things that they are able to accomplish are very similar in our way of understanding. What they accomplish is the same. But the way it's packaged—the way they come across—is profoundly different.

The same was true of Fritz Perls. He was not quite as sophisticated as Satir and Erickson in the number of patterns he used. But when he was operating in what I consider a powerful and effective way, he was using the same sequences of patterns that you will find in their work. Fritz typically did not go after specific outcomes. If somebody came in and said "I have hysterical paralysis of the left leg," he wouldn't go after it directly. Sometimes he would get it and sometimes he wouldn't. Both Milton and Virginia have a tendency to go straight for producing specific outcomes, something I really respect.

When I wanted to learn to do therapy, I went to a month-long workshop, a situation where you are locked up on an island and exposed every day to the same kinds of experiences and hope that somehow or other you will pick them up. The leader had lots and lots of experience, and he could do things that none of us could do. But when he talked about the things he did, people there wouldn't be able to learn to do them. Intuitively, or what we describe as unconsciously, his behavior was systematic, but he didn't have a conscious understanding of how it was systematic. That is a compliment to his flexibility and ability to discern what works.

For example, you all know very, very little about how you are able to generate language. Somehow or other as you speak you are able to create complex pieces of syntax, and I know that you don't make any conscious decisions. You don't go "Well, I'm going to speak, and first I'll put a noun in the sentence, then I'll throw an adjective in, then a verb, and maybe a little adverb at the end, you know, just to color it up a little bit." Yet you speak a language that has grammar and syntax— rules that are as mathematical and as explicit as any calculus. There's a group of people called transformational linguists who have managed to take large amounts of tax dollars and academic space and figure out what those rules are. They haven't figured out anything to do with that yet, but transformational grammarians are unconcerned with that. They are not interested in the real world, and having lived in it I can sometimes understand why.

When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages. If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same. There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not. Our job as modelers is to do a similar task for other things that are more practical. Our job is to figure out what it is that effective therapists do intuitively or unconsciously, and to make up some rules that can be taught to someone else.

Now, what typically happens when you go to a seminar is that the leader will say "All you really need to do, in order to do what I do as a great communicator, is to pay attention to your guts." And that's true, if you happen to have the things in your guts that that leader does. My guess is you probably don't. You can have them there at the unconscious level, but I think that if you want to have the same intuitions as somebody like Erickson or Satir or Perls, you need to go through a training period to learn to have similar intuitions. Once you go through a conscious training period, you can have therapeutic intuitions that are as unconscious and systematic as your intuitions about language.

If you watch and listen to Virginia Satir work you are confronted with an overwhelming mass of information—the way she moves, her voice tone, the way she touches, who she turns to next, what sensory cues she is using to orient herself to which member of the family, etc. It's a really overwhelming task to attempt to keep track of all the things that she is using as cues, the responses that she is making to those cues, and the responses she elicits from others.

Now, we don't know what Virginia Satir really does with families. However, we can describe her behavior in such a way that we can come to any one of you and say "Here. Take this. Do these things in this sequence. Practice until it becomes a systematic part of your unconscious behavior, and you will end up being able to elicit the same responses that Virginia elicits." We do not test the description we arrive at for accuracy, or how it fits with neurological data, or statistics about what should be going on. All we do in order to understand whether our description is an adequate model for what we are doing is to find out whether it works or not: are you able to exhibit effectively in your behavior the same patterns that Virginia exhibits in hers, and get the same results? We will be making statements up here which may have no relationship to the "truth," to what's "really going on." We do know, however, that the model that we have made up of her behavior has been effective. After being exposed to it and practicing the patterns and the descriptions that we have offered, people's behavior changes in ways that make them effective in the same way that Satir is, yet each person's style is unique. If you learn to speak French, you will still express yourself in your own way.

You can use your consciousness to decide to gain a certain skill which you think would be useful in the context of your professional and personal work. Using our models you can practice that skill. Having practiced that consciously for some period of time you can allow that skill to function unconsciously. You all had to consciously practice all the skills involved in driving a car. Now you can drive a long distance and not be conscious of any of it, unless there's some unique situation that requires your attention.

One of the systematic things that Erickson and Satir and a lot of other effective therapists do is to notice unconsciously how the person they are talking to thinks, and make use of that information in lots and lots of different ways. For example, if I'm a client of Virginia's I might

"Well, man, Virginia, you know I just ah ... boy! Things have been, they've been heavy, you know. Just, you know, my wife was... my wife was run over by a snail and... you know, I've got four kids and two of them are gangsters and I think maybe I did something wrong but I just can't get a grasp on what it was."

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to watch Virginia operate, but she operates very, very nicely. What she does is very magical, even though I believe that magic has a structure and is available to all of you. One of the things that she would do in her response would be to join this client in his model of the world by responding in somewhat the following way:

"I understand that you feel certain weight upon you, and these kinds of feelings that you have in your body aren't what you want for yourself as a human being. You have different kinds of hopes for this."

It doesn't really matter what she says, as long as she uses the same kinds of words and tonal patterns. If the same client were to go to another therapist, the dialogue might go like this:

"Well, you know, things feel real heavy in my life, Dr. Bandler. You know, it's just like I cant handle it, you know ..."

"I can see that, Mr. Grinder."

"I feel like I did something wrong with my children and I don't know what it is. And I thought maybe you could help me grasp it, you know?"

"Sure. I see what it is you're talking about. Let's focus in on one particular dimension. Try to give me your particular perspective. Tell me how it is that you see your situation right now."

"Well, you know, I just... I'm ... I just feel like I cant get a grasp on reality."

"I can see that. What's important to me—colorful as your description is—what's important to me is that we see eye to eye about where it is down the road that we shall travel together."

"I'm trying to tell you that my life has got a lot of rough edges, you know. And I'm trying to find a way...."

"It looks all broken up from ... from your description, at any rate. The colors aren't all that nice."

While you sit here and laugh, we can't even get as exaggerated as what we've heard in "real life." We spent a lot of time going around to mental health clinics and sitting in on professional communicators. It's very depressing. And what we noticed is that many therapists mismatch in the same way that we just demonstrated.

We come from California and the whole world out there is run by electronics firms. We have a lot of people who are called "engineers," and engineers typically at a certain point have to go to therapy. It's a rule, I don't know why, but they come in and they usually all say the same thing, they go:

"Well, I could see for a long time how, you know, I was really climbing up and becoming successful and then suddenly, you know, when I began to get towards the top, I just looked around and my life looked empty. Can you see that? I mean, could you see what that would be like for a man of my age?"

"Well, I'm beginning to get a sense of grasping the essence of the kinds of feelings that you have that you want to change."

"Just a minute, because what I want to do is I'm trying to show you my perspective on the whole thing. And, you know—"

"I feel that this is very important."

"And I know that a lot of people have a lot of troubles, but what I want to do is to give you a really clear idea of what I see the problem is, so that, you know, you can show me, sort of frame by frame, what I need to know in order to find my way out of this difficulty because quite frankly I could get very depressed about this. I mean, can you see how that would be?"

"I feel that this is very important. You have raised certain issues here which I feel that we have to come to grips with. And it's only a question of selecting where we'll grab a handle and begin to work in a comfortable but powerful way upon this."

"What I'd really like is your point of view."

"Well, I don't want you to avoid any of those feelings. Just go ahead and let them flow up and knock the hell out of the picture that you've got there."

"I... I don't see that this is getting us anywhere."

"I feel that we have hit a rough spot in the relationship. Are you willing to talk about your resistance?"

Do you happen to notice any pattern in these dialogues? We watched therapists do this for two or three days, and we noticed that Satir did it the other way around: She matched the client. But most therapists don't.

We have noticed this peculiar trait about human beings. If they find something they can do that doesn't work, they do it again. B. F. Skinner had a group of students who had done a lot of research with rats and mazes. And somebody asked them one day "What is the real difference between a rat and a human being?" Now, behaviorists not being terribly observant, decided that they needed to experiment to find out. They built a huge maze that was scaled up for a human. They took a control group of rats and taught them to run a small maze for cheese. And they took the humans and taught them to run the large maze for five-dollar bills. They didn't notice any really significant difference. There were small variations in the data and at the 95% probability level they discovered some significant difference in the number of trials to criterion or something. The humans were able to learn to run the maze somewhat better, a little bit quicker, than the rats.

The really interesting statistics came up when they did the extinguishing part. They removed the five-dollar bills and the cheese and after a certain number of trials the rats stopped running the maze…. However, the humans never stopped!... They are still there! ... They break into the labs at night.

One of the operating procedures of most disciplines that allows a field to grow and to continue to develop at a rapid rate is a rule that if what you do doesn't work, do something else. If you are an engineer and you get the rocket all set up, and you push the button and it doesn't lift up, you alter your behavior to find out what you need to do to make certain changes to overcome gravity.

However, in the field of psychotherapy, if you encounter a situation where the rocket doesn't go off, it has a special name; it's called having a "resistant client." You take the fact that what you do doesn't work and you blame it on the client. That relieves you of the responsibility of having to change your behavior. Or if you are slightly more humanistic about it, you "share in the guilt of the failure" or say he "wasn't ready."

Another problem is that the field of psychotherapy keeps developing the same things over and over and over again. What Fritz did and what Virginia does has been done before. The concepts that are used in Transactional Analysis (TA)—"redecision" for example—are available in Freud's work. The interesting thing is that in psychotherapy the knowledge doesn't get transferred.

When humans learned to read and write and to communicate to one another somewhat, that knowledge began to speed up the rate of development. If we teach someone electronics, we train them in all the things that have already been discovered so that they can go on and discover new things.

What happens in psychotherapy, however, is that we send people to school instead. And when they come out of school, then they have to learn to do therapy. Not only do they have to learn to do therapy, but there's no way to learn to do therapy. So what we do is we give them clients, and we call what they do "private practice" so they can practice privately.

In linguistics there's a distinction called nominalization. Nominalization is where you take a process and you describe it as if it's an event or a thing. In this way you utterly confuse those around you, and yourself—unless you remember that it is a representation rather than experience. This can have positive uses. If you happen to be a government, you can talk about nominalizations like "national security" and you can get people to worry about those words. Our president just went to Egypt and changed the word "imperative" to the word "desirable" and suddenly we're friends with Egypt again. All he did was change a word. That's word magic.

The word "resistance" is also a nominalization. It's describing a process as a thing without talking about how it works. The earnest, concerned, authentic therapist in the last dialogue would describe the client as being callous and insensitive, so totally out of touch with his feelings that he could not communicate effectively with him. That client was really resistant.

And the client would be out looking for another therapist because that therapist needed glasses. He had absolutely no perspective at all. He couldn't see eye to eye with him at all!

And they would both be right, of course.

Now, is there anyone here who hasn't yet identified the pattern that we're talking about? Because it really was the beginning point for us.

Woman: Ah, in the last dialogue the client was using visual words like "look, see, show, focus, perspective." And the therapist was using feeling words like "grasp, handle, feel, smooth, rough."

Right. And there are also some people who use mostly auditory words: "I hear what you're saying,""That rings a bell," "I can resonate with that," etc. What we noticed is that different people actually think differently, and that these differences correspond to the three principal senses: vision, hearing, and feeling—which we call kinesthetics.

When you make initial contact with a person s/he will probably be thinking in one of these three main representational systems. Internally s/he will either be generating visual images, having feelings, or talking to themselves and hearing sounds. One of the ways you can know this is by listening to the kinds of process words (the predicates: verbs, adverbs and adjectives) that the person uses to describe his/her experience. If you pay attention to that information, you can adjust your own behavior to get the response you want. If you want to get good rapport, you can speak using the same kind of predicates that the other person is using. If you want to alienate the other person, you can deliberately mismatch predicates, as we did in the earlier client-therapist dialogues.

Let me talk a little about how language works. If I look at you and say "Are you comfortable?" you can come up with a response. The presupposition of your being able to respond congruently to my question is that you understand the words that I am speaking. Do you know how you understand the word "comfortable" for example?

Woman: Physically.

You understand it physically. You sense some change in your body which is distinctive. That shift in your feeling state is distinctive from "terrified." That's a different response.

She senses a change in her body as a way of understanding the meaning of the word "comfortable. "Did anybody else notice how they understand it? Some of you will see visual images of yourself in a comfortable position: lying in a hammock, or lying on the grass in the sunshine. And a few of you may even hear the sounds which you associate with comfort: the babbling of a brook, or wind blowing through some pine trees.

In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words—which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history—and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word "comfortable. "That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.

Eskimos have some seventy words for snow. Now, does that mean that people who are raised in a tribe called Eskimos have different sensory apparatus than we do? No. My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness. It's not surprising that the Eskimos have seventy-some words for snow in terms of where they live and the kinds of tasks they have to perform. For them, survival is an issue closely connected with snow, and therefore they make very fine distinctions. Skiers also have many different words for different kinds of snow.

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

There is always a slippage between primary and secondary representation. There's a difference between experience and the ways of representing experience to yourself. One of the least immediate ways of representing experiences is with words. If I say to you "This particular table right here has a glass of water partially filled sitting on top of it," I have offered you a string of words, arbitrary symbols. We can both agree or disagree about the statement because I'm appealing directly to your sensory experience.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

Your experience will overlap with mine to the degree that we share a culture, that we share certain kinds of backgrounds. Words have to be relativized to the world model of the person you are talking to. The word "rapport" for a ghetto person, "rapport" for a white middle-class person, and "rapport" for someone in the top one hundred families in this country, are very, very different phenomena. There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences— which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

There's a slippage between the word and the experience, and there's also a slippage between my corresponding experience for a word and your corresponding experience for the same word. I think it's extremely useful for you to behave so that your clients come to have the illusion that you understand what they are saying verbally. I caution you against accepting the illusion for yourself.

Many of you probably have intuitions about your clients when you first meet them. There may be a certain type of client that comes into your office and even before they speak you look up and you know that one's going to be hard, that one's going to be really difficult. It's going to be a rather tedious and long-range project for you to assist that person in getting the choices they want, even though you don't know what those are yet. At other times, before a new client even speaks, you know it will be interesting, it will be a delight. There will be a spark there, there will be a sense of excitement and adventure as you lead this person to some new behavior patterns to get what it is that they came for. How many of you have intuitions like that? Let me have a volunteer. Do you know when you have the intuition that you are having it?

Woman: Umhm.

What is that experience?...

We'll help you. Start by listening to the question. The question I'm asking you is one that I'd like to train you all to ask. The question is "How do you know when you are having an intuition?" (She looks up and to her left.) Yes, that's how you know.

She didn't say anything; that is the interesting thing. She just went through a process non-verbally in responding to the question that I asked her. That process is a replica of the process she actually goes through when she has the intuition, and it was the answer to the question.

If you take nothing else away from this workshop, take away the following: You will always get answers to your questions insofar as you have the sensory apparatus to notice the responses. And rarely will the verbal or conscious part of the response be relevant.

Now let's go back and demonstrate again. How do you know when you are having an intuition?

Woman: Well, let me take it back to the dialogue here earlier… I was trying to put that into some form. And what it was for me was the symbol of—

What kind of a symbol? Is this something you saw, heard, or felt?

I saw it in my head as just—

Yes. You saw it in your head. It was a picture.

Now, all the information that she just offered us verbally is wholly redundant if you were in a position to be able to watch her non-verbal response to the initial question. Everything that she just presented verbally was presented in a much more refined way non-verbally. If you clean up your sensory channels and attend to sensory experience, when you make a statement or ask a human being a question they will always give you the answer non-verbally, whether or not they are able to consciously express what it is.

The information about representational systems comes through in lots and lots of different ways. The easiest way to begin to train your senses is this: people make movements with their eyes which will indicate to you which representational system they are using. When somebody walks into your office, they are planning what they are going to do. They are either visualizing, or they are telling themselves what they are going to say, or they are paying attention to the feelings that they want to describe to you. When they do that, they go inside and they access that information, and they make typical gestures that every one of you knows about unconsciously, and yet through the whole history of psychology no one has ever explicitly described.

For example, I'll name a standard one. You ask somebody a question. They say "Hm, let's see," and they look up and to their left, and tilt their head in the same direction. When people look up, they are making pictures internally.

Do you believe that? It's a lie, you know. Everything we're going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies. Since we have no claim on truth or accuracy, we will be lying to you consistently throughout this seminar. There are only two differences between us and other teachers: One is that we announce at the beginning of our seminars that everything we say will be a lie, and other teachers do not. Most of them believe their lies. They don't realize that they are made up. The other difference is that most of our lies will work out really well if you act as if they are true.

As modelers, we're not interested in whether what we offer you is true or not, whether it's accurate or whether it can be neurologically proven to be accurate, an actual representation of the world. We're only interested in what works.

Let me have three volunteers to come up here….

What I'm going to do next is to ask Fran and Harvey and Susan up here some questions. All I want you out there to do is to clear your sensory apparatus. You could sit there and make images about what something is reminding you of, or you could talk to yourself about such things, or you could have feelings about what's going on.

This is what I am proposing you adopt as a learning strategy for the next few minutes: simply clear all your internal experience. Quiet the internal dialogue, check and make sure that your body is in a comfortable position so that you can leave it there for a while, and don't make internal images. Simply notice with your sensory apparatus what relationship you can discover between the questions I'm going to ask of these three people and the responses they make non-verbally. I would like you to pay particularly close attention to the movements and changes in their eyes. There are lots of other things going on which will be useful for us to talk about at some other time. At this time we simply want you to pay attention to that part of their nonverbal response.

I'll just ask the three of you up here some questions. I'd like you to find the answers to those questions, but don't verbalize the answers. When you are satisfied that you know what the answer is, or you've decided after searching that you don't know what the answer is, stop. You don't have to give me any verbal output; you keep the answers to yourself.

In the United States there's an interesting phenomenon called "traffic lights." Is the red or the green at the top of the traffic light?... When you came here today, how many traffic lights did you pass between where you started your trip and arriving here at the hotel?...What color are your mother's eyes?... How many different colored carpets did you have in the last place you lived? (Fran stares straight ahead in response to each question; Harvey looks up and to his left; Susan looks up and to her right, or sometimes straight ahead.)

Now, have you noticed any movements in their eyes? Do you see systematic shifts there? OK. Store that information for a moment. These are complex human beings, and they are giving more than one response. However, notice what is common about the responses they gave to that set of questions.

I'm going to shift the questions a little bit and I want you to notice if there is a systematic difference in the way they respond.

Think of your favorite piece of music.... What is the letter in the alphabet just before R?... Can you hear your mother's voice? (Fran and Harvey look down and to their left as they access information after each question; Susan looks down and to her right.)

Now, there was a difference between the last set of responses and the previous set.

Now I'm going to shift my questions again.

Do you know the feeling of water swirling around your body when you swim?... What happens in winter when you are in a nice, warm, cozy house, and you walk out into the cold air outside?... (Fran and Harvey look down and to their right while accessing the answer to each question; Susan looks down and to her left.)

Can you make a connection between the classes of questions I was asking and the kind of movements that you were seeing? What did you actually see in your sensory experience when I asked the questions?

Man: I noticed especially that when it seemed like Susan was picturing something, she would look up. And then there were times when she would look straight ahead.

OK. I agree with you. How do you know when she was picturing something? That's an assumption on your part. What were the questions that I was asking that those movements were responses to?

Man: The color of eyes. How many lights—like she was picturing the intersections.

So the questions I was asking demanded visual information by presupposition. And the responses you noticed were a lot of up movements. Did you notice any preference as to side?

Woman: Susan looked to her right. She looked to her right because she is left-handed.

Because she's left-handed Susan looks to her right? She doesn't always look to her right. Watch this.

Susan, do you know what you would look like with long flaming red hair?... Do you know what you would looklike if you had a beard?... Do you know what you look like sitting right here?... (Her eyes move up and to her left.) Which way did her eyes go that time? Distinguish left and right with respect to her. You said that she typically went up to her right in answering the previous visually-oriented questions. What movement did you see with her eyes just now, in response to the last questions? This time her eyes dilated and moved up to her left and back. So she doesn't always look up and to her right. She sometimes looks up and to her left. There's a systematic difference between the kind of questions I asked just now, and the kind of visual questions I was asking before. Can you describe the difference?

Woman: The first questions had to do with experiences she was remembering, and the second group she had not experienced and was trying to visualize.

Excellent. The first set of pictures we call eidetic or remembered images, and the second set we call constructed images. She's never seen herself sitting here in this chair in this room. It's something she has had no direct visual experience of, therefore she has to construct the image in order to see what it is that she would look like.

Most "normally organized" right-handed people will show the opposite of what we've seen with Susan here. Susan is left-handed and her visual accessing cues are reversed left to right. Most people look up and to their left for visual eidetic images and up and to their right for constructed visual images.

However, lots of normally organized right-handers will look up and to their right as they respond to questions about visual memory. Barbara, here in the audience, looked up and to her right to recall something a few moments ago. Do you remember what it was you saw up there?

Barbara: No.

Do you remember one of the houses you lived in as a child?

Barbara: Yes, I do.

She just went up and to her right again. What did you see, Barbara? Name one thing you saw.

Barbara: I saw the living room.

I'm going to predict that the living room that you saw was peculiar in a specific way. I want you to check this and let me know whether my statements are accurate. The living room you saw was suspended in space. It wasn't bounded in the way it would be bounded visually if you were actually inside of that living room. It was an image which you had never seen before because it was a fragment of a set of images you'd seen lots of times in the past. It was not a visual input that you've ever had directly. It was literally extracted, a piece of a picture extracted from some part of your experience and displayed separately. Is that accurate?

Barbara: Yes.

When you ask visual memory questions and a person looks up to their right, you cannot conclude that they are left-handed or that their accessing cues are reversed. All you can conclude is that they looked up and to their right. If you want to explore it further, there are a couple of possibilities. One is what's true of Susan—namely, that she has reversed cerebral organization. The other possibility is that they could be constructing images of the past, as is true of Barbara. If that is so, the images will not have the color, the detail, the contextual markers, or the visual background that an actual eidetic remembered image has. That is an important difference.

When Barbara recalls images, she recalls them outside of context, which is characteristic of constructed images. By the way, she will argue about the past with people a lot—especially with someone who remembers eidetically.

Sally: I didn't see Fran's eyes going up or down, just straight.

OK. Was there any marked difference between the way she was looking straight at me before I asked a question and the way she continued to look straight at me after I'd asked the question? Did you notice any change?

Sally: Yes. She looked more pensive then.

"Pensive." What looks like "pensive" to you and what looks like "pensive" to me may be totally different kinds of experiences. "Pensive" is a complex judgement about experience; it's not in your sensory experience. I'm sure that "pensive" has appropriate meaning for you, and that you can connect; it with your sensory experience easily. So could you describe, so that we could agree or disagree, what you actually saw, as opposed to the judgement that she was being "pensive"?

As we said before, all these questions are being answered before the verbalization. So if you have the opportunity to watch anyone we're communicating with directly, you will always get the answer before they offer it to you verbally. I just asked Sally to describe something, and she demonstrated non-verbally what she saw. She mirrored in her own movements what Fran was doing.

Sally, do you remember the feeling of what you just did?

Sally: My eyes kind of closed a little.

So your eyelids dropped a little bit. Is there anything else that you could detect either from what you felt your eyes doing or from remembering what Fran was doing?...

Have you ever had the experience in a conversation that the other person's eyes are still resting on your face but somehow suddenly you are all by yourself? You are all alone? That's what was going on here. In both of these cases the pupils dilated and the facial muscles relaxed.

If you have trouble seeing pupil dilation, I believe that's not a statement about pupil dilation; it's a statement about your own perceptual programs. And I'm not talking about whether you have 20/20 vision or 20/2000 vision with corrective lenses. Your ability to perceive is something that is learned and you can learn to do it better. Most people act as if their senses are simply passive receptacles into which the world dumps vast amounts of information. There is a vast amount of information, so vast that you can only represent a tiny fraction of it. You learn to actively select in useful ways.

So what we’ll ask you to do in a few minutes is to change your perceptual programs to determine (1) whether the patterns we're talking about exist, and (2) whether they can be useful. We're going to proceed in that step-wise fashion. We're going to rely on whatever rapport we have with you to get you to do an exercise in which you discover for yourself, using your own sensory apparatus, whether in fact these things we're talking about are there. Then we'll talk about how to use them because that's the really important thing. The ultimate question is whether this is worth knowing about.

Let me reassure you that if you have patterns of communication that work for you now in therapy or education or business, those skills will still be available to you when we finish this seminar. I guarantee you that much. We're not going to do anything to take choices away. We would like you to consider a new approach. My guess is that some of you are quite effective and competent communicators therapeutically. You get results and you're pleased with them, and it's a challenge, and you like your job, at least some of the time. But even in the cases where you do very, very well indeed, you get bored from time to time. There's a tendency for you to repeat some set of interventions that you've made in the past which were successful, hoping for success again in the present. I think one of the most dangerous experiences human beings can have is success—especially if you have success early in your career—because you tend to become quite superstitious and repetitious. It's the old five-dollar bill at the end of the maze.

For example, say you once had somebody talk to an empty chair and visualize their mother in that chair and they dramatically changed. You might decide that every therapist in the country ought to do that, when in fact that's only one of a myriad ways of going about accomplishing the same result.

For those of you who are doubtful, and those who have skeptical parts, we would like to ask you—and this is true for all of the lies we are going to tell you—to do the following: accept our lie for a limited period of time, namely during the exercise that follows our description of the pattern we claim exists. In this way you can use your own sensory experience—not the crazy verbalizations we offer you—to decide whether in fact the things we describe can be observed in the behavior of the person you're communicating with.

We're making the claim right now that you've missed something that was totally obvious. We're claiming that you have been speaking to people your whole life and they've been going "Well, the way it looks to me..." (looks up and to his left), "I tell myself..." (looks down and to his left), "I just feel..."(looks down and to his right)—and you haven't consciously noticed that. People have been doing this systematically through a hundred years of modern psychology and communication theory and you've all been the victims of a set of cultural patterns which didn't allow you to notice and respond directly and effectively to those cues.