Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

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

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

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

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

Tammy: Black.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tammy: That's true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man: Um, all of them.

Good. Pick one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman: Can you do this with yourself?

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

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

Woman: Can you do this with children?

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

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

Woman: Why two steps of dissociation?

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