Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

Now which response is this? (He touches her left shoulder.)... Now, when I say that she needs this resource X, I have given you as much information verbally as you ever get from your clients when they tell you what they want. If a client says "I want to be more assertive; I want to be more trusting; I want to be more caring, more respectful of other people," they have given you exactly the same amount of information as saying "I need X." In a way they have given you less. Because if they say "I want to be more assertive,"you're going to take your meaning of assertive and assign it to their behavior. If they say "Well, what I need is some X," you won't run the risk of misunderstanding them. Sometimes I think it would be easier to do therapy in a foreign language that you didn't speak. That way you would not have the illusion that the words you heard had the same meaning for the person who utters them as they have for you. And believe me, that's an illusion.

Now why does response Y occur when I touch her right shoulder?... Have you noticed that that occurs? Has anyone in here noticed that? What's going on here? It's really spooko time! Linda, do you believe in free will?

Linda: Yeah.

(He touches her right shoulder.) Now who tightened the muscles around your mouth? Whose free will do you believe in? Free will is a funny phrase. It's also a nominalization. When you came up here in response to my request, you made a statement about your own free will. I said "I want somebody up here who makes pictures that they don't want to make." That is a statement that someone is making those pictures and it isn't you. It's your unconscious or your "mother," one or the other.

Now, what's going on? Did anybody make sense out of that?

Woman: When you were asking her to go deep inside of her and see that image, you put your hand on her right shoulder as she was feeling the bad feelings, so she had an association with the touch.

Do you mean to tell me that now every time I touch her on the shoulder like that, shell have that response? (He touches her right shoulder again, and response Y occurs.)

Man: It sure looks that way. I agree with you.

How could something that powerful be overlooked by modern psychology? Here you are, adult human beings. Most of you have been to college, and most of you are professional communicators. You've learned about human beings and how human beings work. How do you make sense out of this? ...

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? This is straight stimulus-response conditioning. Linda had a certain experience which was her response to an accessing question that I asked her—namely about this experience that she wants to change. As she fully recovered that experience—and I knew when she had fully recovered it by observing her responses—all I had to do was touch her. That touch is now associated with the entire experience that she recalled. It's the same process as the thing that she wants to change. How is it that when she makes that picture she has a set of feelings automatically? She sees a picture, bam!—she has the unpleasant feeling. It's the same process.

When a person is in a certain state of consciousness such as the experience Y for Linda, you can introduce a new dimension in any sensory system, such as a touch. We call this an "anchor," in this case, a kinesthetic anchor. As long as I repeat that touch with the same pressure at the same point on Linda's body, and she has no stronger competing states of consciousness when I begin, it will always re-access that experience. It's straight conditioning. It constitutes, in my opinion, one of the most powerful covert tools that you can use as a therapist or as a communicator. It will get you almost everything. About ninety percent of what goes on in therapy is changing the kinesthetic responses that people have to auditory and visual stimuli. "My husband makes me feel bad." "My wife always makes me angry."

Now let's demonstrate one—and this is only one way—to use it. What I'd like you to do, Linda, is to go back to this experience. Close your eyes, and go back to that experience. This time I want you to take this resource with you (He touches her left shoulder.) and I want you to see yourself respond in a whole new way. Go all the way through it until you're satisfied.

What she's doing now is reliving it with the new resource available— which wasn't available the first time this happened—until she is satisfied with her response in that situation. We call this process "changing personal history." You go back into your personal history with resources you did not have then, taking them with you this time. We don't know what the content of this is, and there's no need for us to. She is reliving the experience now. After this she will have two histories, the "real" one in which she didn't have the resource, and the new one in which she did have the resource. As long as these are full experiences—and we're guaranteeing that by anchoring—both will serve equally well as guides for future behavior.

Linda: (She opens her eyes and smiles broadly.) I love it!

OK, now, Linda, I would like you to go back and make the old picture again, the one that made you feel bad, and tell me what happens. Observers, what do you see, X or Y? And this is where the sensory experience really counts. You can do the therapy but knowing whether or not it worked is the most essential piece.

Man: I see a mixture of X and Y.

What happens in your experience, Linda? When you see that picture, do you feel the same way you did before? Linda: No, I do not.

Don't reveal any content; just tell us how it's different.

Linda: Uh, my fear is gone.

Now, there's another way to check your work. Anchoring can be used in a number of ways. Now, watch this. (He touches her right shoulder.) Is that the same response that touch elicited before?

Woman: Partially.

Partially. Now, if it were to be entirely reversed, I would consider that doing the client a disservice. If you are in the business of choice, you are in the business of adding choices—not subtracting them, and not substituting one rigid stimulus-response circuit for another. If you have a client who feels helpless and small each time he goes to work, and you change that so each time he goes to work he feels assertive, happy, and confident, he is no better off, in my opinion. He still has only one choice about how to respond. And if you have one choice, you're a robot. We think therapy is the business of turning robots into people. That's not an easy task. We all get robotized. Part of your job is to change that situation unconsciously, so that people actually exercise choice in their behavior, whether it's conscious or not.

What is choice? Choice, to me, is having multiple responses to the same stimulus. Do you realize that each time you read a book there are probably no new words in that book? It's the same old words in a new order? Just new sequences of the same words? No matter where you go, you're going to hear the same old words, or just new sequences of the same old words. And each time I read a fiction book, it's the same thing. Practically every word we've used today has been an old word. How can you learn anything new?

Now, we need to do one more thing that's very important. Linda has the choice sitting here in this room. You've all seen that. We want her to also have this choice in other contexts. All of you have had the following experience. You work with a client and you and the client both know that they have new choices. They leave the office and you're happy and they're happy and congruent, and two weeks later when they come back they go "Well, it didn't quite ... I don't know what happened. I knew it... and I uh..." Or worse yet they come back and present you with the exact same problem, with very little memory that you even worked on it two weeks ago!

Linda was in an altered state up here. She radically altered her consciousness to go after old experiences, to integrate them with new kinds of resources. The point is—and this was a primary insight of family therapy twenty years ago—if you simply induce changes in an altered state of consciousness known as an institution, or a therapist's office, or a group setting, it's very unlikely that most of your work will transfer the first time. You'll have to do it several times. You have to be sure that the new understandings and learnings, the new behavior, the new choices, transfer out of that altered state of consciousness into the appropriate context in the real world.

There's a very easy process that we call "bridging" or "future-pacing" that connects the new response with the appropriate context. It's another use of anchoring. You know what the new response is, and you know that the person wants it to occur in some context, so you simply ask them the following question: "What is the first thing that you would see, hear, or feel, that would allow you to know you are in the context where you want to make this new choice?"

Linda, there are other situations in your present life that are similar to the one that you saw in those pictures, right?—situations in which you respond the same way you responded to that picture, instead of the way you would like to respond. Now, what I need to know is what allows you to know that a context is similar to that one. Is it something about what you see? Is it the tone of someone's voice, the way someone sounds, the way someone is touching you? ...

Linda: It's the way someone looks.

OK, I want you to see what that looks like. And as you see that, each time you see anything similar, you will feel this. (He touches the resource anchor.) I want you to remember that you have this particular resource....

That's bridging. It takes a minute and a half or two minutes, and it guarantees that your work will transfer out into the real world. The same stimulus that in the past elicited the maladaptive stereotyped behavior, the feeling that she wants to change, now serves as a stimulus for which the resource is a response. Now she will automatically have access to the new choice in the contexts where she needs it—not just in the office, the group, the institution. This is stimulus-stimulus conditioning.

You're not going to be there to squeeze her shoulder, so you need to make some part of the actual context the trigger for her new behavior. The best thing to use as the trigger is whatever was the trigger for the unwanted behavior. If her boss' tone of voice makes her feel helpless, then make that tone of voice the trigger to access the resources of creativity, confidence, or whatever. Otherwise, if the old anchors that exist are stronger than the new ones that you've created, the old ones will override the new ones.

That is what prompted the development of family therapy. They take a schizophrenic kid and they put him in a hospital and they give him M&M's in the right order and the kid gets better and he's well and normal, happy, learning. Then they put him back in the family and he's schizophrenic again in a matter of weeks. And so they said "Ah!

Something in the family keeps the kid the same, so therefore we will treat the whole family." You don't have to treat the whole family. That's one way to do it: it's a choice. If you bring the family in, the anchors are there, and you can use them. In fact, I'll demonstrate. You can sit down now, Linda. Thank you.

I'd like two people to come up here and role-play a husband and wife…

Thank you. Larry and Susie. Now as a wife, would you give me some complaints. What does he do or not do?

Susie: He drinks too much beer. He’ll never watch football with me.

He'll never watch football with you? And how does that make you feel?

Susie: Mad. Deserted.

Deserted, so what you want is some attention from him.

Susie: Right.

And when you try to get attention from him, what—look at that, he went right up into a visual access. Boom! That's what typically happens. The wife says "I feel I want him to touch me," and the husband goes (looking up) "Well, I don't see how that's useful."Right? And then he comes into the house and says "Look, this place is a mess. I can't stand to see a cluttered house." And she says "But it feels cozy this way."

Now what I'm going to do here is use anchoring. I say "Well, I find that hard to believe, but let me check it out." So I come over here and ask the husband a few rhetorical questions, simply for the purpose of eliciting responses. I say "Larry, let me ask you a question. Are there some times when you feel like you really want to be close to her, give her some attention and some good feelings and really get close to her? Are there times like that?"

Larry: Sure, there are times. (He touches Larry's wrist.)

"Now, I know, based on my past experience as a therapist, that couples usually get in trouble with words, because people are not very good with words. They don't train adults to use words; they don't even train children. So what I'm going to recommend to you, Susie, is that you try the following: I'm going to give you a non-verbal signal to try with Larry for the next two weeks just as a way to find out whether or not he really is open to paying attention to you. What I would like you to do is this: Any time you want five or ten minutes of his undivided attention and some affection, walk up to him and hold him on the wrist like this. OK, and would you do that right now? I want to check and make sure you know what I mean."

"Now, Susie, when you do this, look at him and he will nod or shake his head depending upon whether or not he feels this is an appropriate time to spend some time with you. This way he gets a message from you which is unambiguous, because if you come up to him and say (harsh voice, punching his arm) 'Want to watch football?' he might misinterpret that." I can send this couple off and let them try it. I'll tell her "Now, you're only to use this twice a day." Of course she'll be curious and she will try it. And what's underneath the "non-verbal signal?" An anchor. So what will happen? Will he nod "yes" or shake his head "no"?

Now, the first few times when she does this, shell complete the whole pattern. But pretty soon it will streamline. She'll walk in and just start to reach for him and that will be enough. Pretty soon she'll be able to walk in and just look at him and that will elicit the same response.

Couples get into trouble because they don't know how to elicit responses from one another. The response they intend to get is completely different from the one they actually get. For instance, say I have a guy here who really wants her to come and comfort him sometimes. So he sits on the end of the bed and stares at the floor. She, of course, assumes that this means that he wants space for himself, so what does she do? She leaves the room. They end up in therapy seventeen years later and he says to me "She doesn't support me when I need support." And she says "I do, too!" He says "You've never done it in seventeen years when I really needed it." I say "How do you let her know you need it?" He says "Well, when I sit on the end of the bed, I show her." And she says "Huh! Oh, I though you wanted to be alone." That's why we say "The response that you get is the meaning of your communication." This is a way that you can get the responses that people want connected with their own behavior. Now when Susie here wants affection, she has a direct way of eliciting that part of him. After you give a couple a few anchors, they begin to do it on their own without ever knowing what happened. They suddenly start getting what they want "mysteriously." That's one way of using anchoring with couples.