Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

One of the main places that communicators get stuck is on a linguistic pattern that we call "modal operator." A client says "I can't talk about that again today. That's not possible in this particular group. And I don't think that you're able to understand that, either." When you listen to content, you get wiped out. You will probably say "What happened?"

The pattern is that a client says "I can't X" or "I shouldn't X." If somebody comes in and goes "I shouldn't get angry" what you do if you're a gestalt therapist, is "Say 'I won't.'" Fritz Perls was German, and perhaps those words make a difference in German. But they don't make any difference in English. "Won't" and "shouldn't" and "can't" in English are all the same. It makes no difference whether you shouldn't or you couldn't or you wont, you still haven't. It makes no difference whatsoever. So the person says "I wont get angry."

Then if you ask "Why not?" they are going to give you reasons and that's a great way to get stuck. If you ask them "What would happen if you did?" or "What stops you?" you'll go somewhere else more useful.

We published all this in The Structure of Magic some years ago, and we ask a lot of people "Have you read Magic I"? And they go "Well, laboriously, yes." And we ask "Did you learn what was in it? Did you learn Chapter Four?" That's the only meaningful part of the book as far as I can tell. And they say "Oh, yes. I knew all that." And I say "OK, good. I'll play your client, and you respond to me with questions." I say "I cant get angry." And they say "Ah, well, what seems to be the problem?" instead of "What prevents you?" or "What would happen if you did?" By not having the meta-model responses systematically wired in, people get stuck. One of the things that we noticed about Sal Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls is that they intuitively had many of those twelve questions in the meta-model wired in.

You need to go through some kind of program to wire in your choices so that you don't have to think about what to do. Otherwise, while you are thinking about what to do, you will be missing what's going on. We're talking right now about how you organize your own consciousness to be effective in a complex task of communication.

As far as the conscious understanding of the client goes, it's really irrelevant. If the client wants to know what's going on, the easiest way to respond is "Do you have a car? Do you ever have it repaired? Does the mechanic describe in detail what he is going to do before he does anything?" Or "Have you ever had surgery? Did the surgeon describe in detail which muscles were going to be cut, and how he was going to clamp the arteries?" I think those are analogies which are pertinent to respond to that kind of inquiry.

The people who can give you the most detailed and refined diagnosis of their own problems are the people I've met on the back wards of many of the mental institutions in this country and in Europe. They can tell you why they are the way they are, where it came from, and how they perpetuate the maladaptive or destructive pattern. However, that explicit conscious verbal understanding does them no good whatsoever in changing their behavior and their experience.

Now what we would like to do is to make a suggestion. And of course we are only hypnotists, so this is only a suggestion. And what we'd like to do is to suggest to the unconscious portion of each of both of you, whose communication we have been delighted to receive the entire day today, that since it has represented for you at the unconscious level all the experiences which have occurred, both consciously and otherwise, that it make use of the natural process of dreaming and sleep, which will occur tonight as a natural course in your life, as an opportunity to sort through the experiences of today. And represent even more usefully than up to this point the material which you have learned here today without fully realizing it, so that in the days and the weeks and the months ahead you will be able to discover to your delight that you are doing new things. You had learned new things without even knowing it, and you will be delightfully surprised to find them in your behavior. So if you should happen to remember, or not, your dreams, which we hope will be bizarre this evening, allowing you to rest peacefully, so that you can arise and meet us again here alert and refreshed, ready to learn new and exciting things.

See you tomorrow.

II. Changing Personal History and Organization

Yesterday we described a number of ways that you can get rapport with another person and join their model of the world, as a prelude to helping them find new choices in behavior. Those are all examples of what we call pacing or mirroring. To the extent that you can match another person's behavior, both verbally and non-verbally, you will be pacing their experience. Mirroring is the essence of what most people call rapport, and there are as many dimensions to it as your sensory experience can discriminate. You can mirror the other person's predicates and syntax, body posture, breathing, voice tone and tempo, facial expression, eye blinks, etc.

There are two kinds of non-verbal pacing. One is direct mirroring. An example is when I breathe at the same rate and depth that you breathe. Even though you're not conscious of that, it will have a profound impact upon you.

Another way to do non-verbal pacing is to substitute one non-verbal channel for another. We call that "cross-over mirroring." There are two kinds of cross-over mirroring. One is to cross over in the same channel. I can use my hand movement to pace your breathing movement—the rise and fall of your chest. Even though the movement of my hand is very subtle, it still has the same effect. It's not as dramatic as direct mirroring, but it's very powerful. That is using a different aspect of the same channel: kinesthetic movement.

In the other kind of cross-over mirroring, you switch channels. For example, as I speak to you ... I watch ... your breathing ... and I gauge the ... tempo... of my voice... to the rise... and the fall... of your chest. That's a different kind of cross-over. I match the tempo of my speech to the rate of your breathing.

Once you have paced well, you can lead the other person into new behavior by changing what you are doing. The overlap pattern we mentioned yesterday is an example of that. You join the client in their representation of the world and then overlap into a different representation.

Pacing and leading is a pattern that is evident in almost everything we do. If it is done gracefully and smoothly it will work with anyone, including catatonics. Once I was in Napa State Mental Hospital in California, and a guy had been sitting there for several years on the couch in the day room. The only communication he was offering me were his body position and his breathing rate. His eyes were open, pupils dilated. So I sat facing away from him at about a forty-five degree angle in a chair nearby, and I put myself in exactly the same body position. I didn't even bother to be smooth. I put myself in the same body position, and I sat there for forty minutes breathing with him. At the end of forty minutes I had tried little variations in my breathing, and he would follow, so I knew I had rapport at that point. I could have changed my breathing slowly over a period of time and brought him out that way. Instead I interrupted it and shocked him. I shouted "Hey! Do you have a cigarette?" He jumped up off the couch and said "God! Don't do that!"

I have a friend who is a college president. He is living in a delusional reality that he's intelligent and that he has a lot of prestige and all those things. He walks around stiffly, looks gruff and smokes a pipe; he does this whole number. It's a completely delusional reality. The last time I was in a mental hospital, there was a guy there who thought he was a CIA agent, and that he was being held there by the communists. The only difference between them is that the rest of the people in the world are more apt to believe the college president than the psychotic. The college president gets paid for his delusions. In order to pace either of them I'm going to accept their reality. With the college president I'm going to say that "Since he's so intelligent and prestigious he will be able to"—and then I'll say whatever I want him to do. If I go to an academic conference and I'm there with all the people who live in the psychotic reality of academia, I am going to pace that reality. Ill present a paper, because raw experience wouldn't pace their reality. If there was any experience there, it would just go right by them.

With the psychotic who believes he's a CIA agent I'll open the door, look back, slip in and close the door quickly, and whisper "At last we got through to you! Whew! I almost got caught coming in here! Now, quick, I only have a few minutes to give you these instructions. Are you ready? We have gotten you a cover as a college professor, and we want you to apply for this job and wait until you hear from us. You can do that because you've been trained to do it as an agent, right? Do it well, so that you're not discovered and sent back here. Got it?"

When you join someone else's reality by pacing them, that gives you rapport and trust, and puts you in a position to utilize their reality in ways that change it.

Non-verbal mirroring is a powerful unconscious mechanism that every human being uses to communicate effectively. You can predict by looking at people communicating with each other in a restaurant whether they are communicating well or not by observing their postures and movements.

Most of the therapists I know who mirror do it compulsively. We did a seminar in which there was a woman who was an exquisitely good communicator who mirrored very compulsively. As she was talking with me, I began sliding off my chair, and she literally fell on the floor. If you believe that you have to have empathy, that means that you have to have the same feelings that your client does in order to function well as a therapist. Someone comes in and says "Well, I have this kind of phobic response every time I walk down the street and begin to talk to somebody; I feel like I'm going to throw up, you know. I just feel real nauseous and light-headed and I feel like I'm going to sway... ."If you have to mirror, you're going to get sick.

How many of you have ever finished a day of doing therapy or educational work and gone home and felt like you took some of the residue home with you? You know that experience. The statistics show about eight years shorter life span for people in therapy than almost any other profession.

If you work with people who are diseased or dying, you don't want to mirror that directly, unless you want a very short career. People in therapy are always talking about pain, sadness, emptiness, suffering, and enduring the tribulations of human existence. If you have to understand their experience by experiencing it, then my guess is you're going to have a really unpleasant time. The important thing is to have a choice between direct mirroring or cross-over mirroring. With someone who breathes normally, pace with your own breathing. With someone who is asthmatic, pace with your hand movement or something else.

Now let's do something with this, and all the things we talked about yesterday. Is there someone here who has a past experience that they think about from time to time, and it makes them have a feeling that they don't want? ...

OK. Linda, this is secret therapy. Your task is always to keep the content of what goes on from the people here. Because if you tell them the content, they will become involved. And if they become involved, it will be harder for them to learn.

Whenever we ask a person to come and make a change here as a demonstration, we will insist that they keep the content to themselves. Usually we'll say "I want you to pick a code word, a color, a number, a letter for what you want to change." So the person will say "I want to be able to M" or "I don't want to have to three." That has a couple of positive dimensions. If the outcome we're after is to teach people how to do what we do, then we will demand that it be content-free pure process therapy. Then the only things you have available to pay attention to are the pieces of the process. You cannot hallucinate effectively on "number three"—at least not as effectively as you can on "assertiveness" or "love" or "trust" or any of those other nominal-izations.

In addition it has an extra advantage. If you are in any context in which people know each other, many people are reluctant to work on material which they think might change their relationship with the people who are there. By doing secret therapy you avoid that difficulty because nobody knows what they are working on.

Linda, what do you recall that gives you the unpleasant feeling? Is it a set of images or a voice? OK. She already answered the question nonverbally. If you were watching her eyes, you saw them move up to her left and then down to her right. So she makes an eidetic visual image and then has a feeling about it.

Linda, when you see this image you have certain feelings which are unpleasant to you. Now I'd like you to look at the image and find out if you still get the unpleasant feeling when you look at it now. And I'd like you to do a good job of that. You can close your eyes and really take a good look at it. (Pause. As she experiences the feelings, he touches her right shoulder.) And as you can all see by her responses, Linda is telling the truth: when she sees that picture she feels bad. So there is some past experience that occurred, and things didn't turn out quite the way you would have liked them to. That's an understatement if I've heard right.

Linda: Right. That's exactly right.

So from time to time an image comes into your mind, and when you think about it, you get the same kind of feelings that you had as a result of that experience. Now, I would like you to think what resource you would have needed back then to have made a different response to that situation, a response which would have given you a much more acceptable outcome if you had made it. Wait a minute, because I want to tell you what I mean by "resource." By resource I don't mean some outside help or anything like that. What I mean by a resource is more confidence, more assertiveness, more trust, more caring—any internal resource. At this point in time, some time has elapsed; I don't know how much, but during that interval you have gained resources as a human being that you didn't have access to then. I want you to select a resource that would have enabled you to have had a wholly different experience back then. I don't want you to tell me what it is. I just want you to think of what it would be. (Pause. As she thinks of the resource, he touches her left shoulder.)

Did those of you watching notice some changes? Let's call the response she gets from the picture Y, and the new resource that she needed back there we'll call X. Now, let's demonstrate. Which of those two responses is this? (He touches her right shoulder.)... Now, you should be able to see the color changes, lip size changes, breathing changes, actual trembling in her body, that we have called Y.