Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

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OK. How did it go? What questions do you have?

Woman: I noticed I was getting distracted because my partner was using many words that didn't match the experience I had internally.

What you need is a very subtle maneuver: You say "Shut up!" or you kick your partner!

One of the things that all of you can learn from this is that it's very easy to learn to talk in a way that matches your client's experience. The way to do that is described in our book, Patterns I. It describes the patterns of language that sound specific, but are actually simply process instructions with zero content.

For example, here's an exercise you can all do. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax.

Sometime within the last five years, each of you has had a very strong experience in which you learned something of great value for yourself as a human being. You may or may not have a conscious appreciation of exactly which episode in your life history this is. I would like you to allow that experience to come up into your consciousness. Sit there for a moment, with feelings of comfort and strength, knowing you're actually here, now. With those feelings of comfort and strength, let yourself see and hear again what it was that happened to you back there. There are additional things to be learned from that experience. I would like you to allow yourself the treat of seeing and hearing yourself go through that again so as to make new understandings and learnings which are embedded in that experience in your past history….

And when you've seen and heard something that you believe to be of value for yourself, I would like you to pick a specific situation that you know will occur within the next couple of weeks. Notice—again by watching and listening with feelings of strength and comfort — how you can apply that new learning and that new understanding to this new situation that is going to arise in the next couple of weeks. In so doing you are making elegant use of your own personal history, and you are transferring understandings and learnings from one part of your personal history, so as to increase your choices as a creative human being in the present. Take all the time you need, and when you finish, drift back and rejoin us….

Some of you may have a clear, solid, resonant understanding of what you've succeeded in doing; some of you may simply have a sense of well-being, a feeling of having done something without actually understanding in detail explicitly what it was that you were able to do by making use of a particularly powerful experience from your past in a new way....

Now I'd like you to begin to drift back slowly, understanding that if you've completed the process to the best of your conscious understanding, fine.... If you haven't yet finished, you've set into motion a process which can be completed comfortably outside of your awareness as you return your attention slowly here to this room….

Now, what did I actually say? I didn't say anything! Zero. There was no content to that verbalization. "To do something of importance for yourself... certain learnings... unconscious understanding from that specific experience in your past." None of those have any content. Those are pure process instructions. And if you have the sensory experience, you can see the process happening as you do it. That is where your timing is very important.

Let me give you a very different experience. I'd like you to close your eyes and visualize a rope... which is green. How many of you already had a different colored rope? If I give you instructions that have any content whatsoever, as I just did, I am very, very apt to violate your internal experience. I will no longer be pacing you adequately.

A skill that all communicators need is the ability to give process instructions: instructions that have no content whatsoever. That's the sense in which I mentioned earlier that Ericksonian hypnosis is the least manipulative of all the forms of psychotherapy I've ever been exposed to. In any communication with content there's no way for you to not introduce your own beliefs and value systems by presupposition. However, if you restrict yourself to process work, to content-free verbalizations with your clients, you are guaranteeing that you are respecting their integrity. If you do secret therapy there's no way that you can interfere with their beliefs or value system because you don't know what they are. You don't have any idea what they are doing, and there's no need for you to, either.

Woman: Why do you have to integrate the negative anchor, instead of just ignoring it altogether?

Lots of people go to hypnotists to stop smoking. The hypnotist hypnotizes them and says "From this point on, cigarettes will taste terrible." And he wakes them up and sends them away, right? They don't smoke any more because it tastes terrible. However, that leaves them with a whole set of dissociated motor patterns. It's the same with alcoholics. Alcoholics Anonymous says "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." That's a statement to me that their program fails to integrate motor programs which can still be triggered at a later date by the presence of alcohol. So all it takes is one drink and they have to continue—binge drinking—or one cigarette later on and boom! that person is a smoker again.

Dissociated motor patterns can always be triggered unless you integrate them. If you dissociate and sort someone, make sure you put them back together. Don't leave those dissociated motor patterns lying around. That's one of your professional responsibilities. People have enough dissociations on their own already. They don't need more.

Man: Have you ever worked with multiple personalities?

Multiple personality is a little bit complicated, because it depends upon who messed the person up in the first place. You really need to know the model of the therapist that wrecked the person to begin with. I have never personally met a multiple personality that wasn't made by a therapist. That doesn't mean they don't exist, it's just that I've never met one. My guess is that there might be a few out there somewhere, but I'll tell you there aren't as many as therapists keep creating and bringing to me.

We became interested in multiple personalities years ago, and wrote to a man who had written a big paper about it. He invited us to come and meet one named Helen. She had about twenty personalities, but the cover name for everyone was Helen. And the fascinating thing was that all of her multiple personalities were more interesting than she was.

Her therapist had a very elaborate model of her personalities. She had an organization part: a part that was very organized and did secretarial work and all kinds of stuff like that. So I said "Well, get that one for me." The therapist had this great non-verbal analogue: he stood up and shouted "JOYCE! COME OUT, JOYCE! "and he hit her on the forehead, Bwamm! and she went through all these changes. Brrnnnggnhhh! It was right out of the movies; it was really spooky. This guy does exorcisms on the helicopter pad at a Catholic college, and he's considered to be a respectable psychiatrist by people who think we are weird! In some ways he's very effective because he is so expressive, but I don't think he understands the full ramifications of what he is doing. He has anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two multiple personalities in his practice at any time, and he can't understand why the rest of the therapeutic community doesn't recognize the epidemic of multiple personalities that he has discovered!

So the organization part of this woman came out, and I introduced myself. Then I said "Most of these parts have amnesia for what goes on in this person's life. Being the organization part, I figure you would have kept pretty good track of it all." "Oh, yes, of course I kept good track of it." I said "Well, how did you end up with so many personalities?" And she said to me "It's as if there were a whole bunch of different parts and there was a round peg that went through the middle. And when I met Dr. So-and-so, he took the peg and pulled it out." That is almost verbatim what she said to me, and this is a woman who does not have a high school education.

She didn't think that this was bad, by the way. Her description was that he pulled the peg out so that they all became more apparent as separate personalities, and now they were going to go back through and make them all into one again. The tragic thing is that when he succeeded in integrating her, she had total amnesia for her entire life, and was a drip as far as I could tell. She had these great parts. She had a sexy part that was just rrrnnnhhh! Another part told jokes and was really corny. Another part was very shy and coy. But when he "cured" her, she had amnesia for her entire life and she had none of the resources of any of those parts. She was just dull.

Now I don't think that you can wipe out parts. So I kept mentioning the names of the parts that I liked, and I got really great unconscious responses from her. They were still there, but they weren't fully available to her.

To do a good job with a multiple personality, I think you need to know the model of the therapist that created it. Some therapists' model of multiple personality is that you have all these parts and an unconscious that runs the program. That's one model, a very common one. The way you'd integrate that one is totally different than you would some other model. This guy's model was that there were three parts here and they had their own unconscious, and then there were two parts over here and they had an unconscious, and then there was an unconscious for these two unconsciouses, and so on. It was really stacked in levels. When you integrated, you would always have to integrate at the same logical level. My guess is that he didn't do that, and that is how he got so much amnesia.

You can use what we call the "visual squash" with multiple personalities. The visual squash is a visual method of integration using visual anchors. You hold out your hands and see yourself as one part here on your left, and as another part here on your right, and you watch them and listen to them. Then you slowly pull the two images together, and visually watch them merge together and then notice how that image is different. If you like it, then you do the same thing again kinesthetically, and squash the two images together with your hands. Then you pull the integrated image into your body.

We just stumbled across this. At first it sounded kind of weird, until we studied a little bit about neurology. It's a good metaphor for what goes on in the metaphor called "neurology." And if you don't think neurology is a metaphor, you are naive, I want to tell you! But anyway, their metaphor and our metaphor were very similar. And if you try it, it's very dramatic. It's a very powerful method.

I once cured a multiple personality with only that. I went through all the levels one by one and squashed all the personalities together.

I once had a therapist call me on the telephone from the Midwest. He said he'd read my book and there was nothing in it about multiple personalities, and he didn't even believe in them, but one had just come into his office and what should he do? I went through the instructions on the phone with him for forty minutes and cured his patient over the telephone. "OK, now tell her to hold out both hands. Tell her to visualize Jane in her right hand and visualize Mary in her left hand. Just take two of them and collapse them together into one image. And then tell her to pull it into her body and integrate it. Then tell her to get the integrated image that she just had, and put it together with another one." So you do them one at a time.

Most people don't really ask multiple personalities any questions. But I really questioned the ones that I've been around, to find out how they functioned. The experience of being multiple for one may be very different than it is for another.

One of the women that I worked with described every single one of her parts as part of the same process. She was really, really visual; she had a picture of them all. There was a couch backstage, in the back of her mind, and all these women sat back there on the couch doing their nails and chatting. Every once in a while, one of them would hop up and walk through the curtains. When it walked through, it would step into her body. Some of them knew about what the other ones did, because they would go and peek out through the curtains. I hypnotized her and went backstage with her and did the visual squash technique and put them all together.

That visual squash method is a very powerful way of integrating sequential incongruities by making them simultaneous in a dissociated state. If you have a sequential incongruity, you can never represent both parts simultaneously in any system other than the visual, as far as I can tell. It takes a very complex auditory representation to have two voices going on at the same time—as opposed to alternating—and people can't pull it off kinesthetically. But you can take sequential incongruities and make them simultaneous by visual/kinesthetic dissociation, and then integrate them by pulling the hands together, and then get the integration in the other two systems.

I don't understand the significance of moving the arms when you do the visual squash, but if you do it without the arms it doesn't work. And I have no idea why. I've tried it both ways; if people don't actually hold out their hands in front of them like this and pull the images together, it doesn't work. People don't have to hold out their hands to get cured of phobias, but apparently with multiple personalities they have to. That doesn't make any sense to me logically, but it happens to be the case. If I were to make a generalization, I would make the reverse one. But I have found out that's the case in experience.

We are a lot more willing to experiment against our intuitions than most people. When most people have a strong intuition, they'll follow it. A lot of times when we have a strong intuition, we'll violate it to find out what will happen—especially when we have clients that we have ongoing contact with, and can be sure of being able to deal with the consequences. That kind of experimentation has resulted in many useful patterns and discoveries.

One woman had been a homosexual for years, and had fallen in love with a man. She was really stuck in this dilemma. A very strong part of her now wanted to become heterosexual. There was another part of her that was afraid it was going to have to die. She was going through the visual squash with these two parts. She was trying to pull her hands together, and she was wailing "I can't do it! I can't do it! I can't do it like that!" Richard and I were standing on either side of her. We looked at each other, and then we each grabbed one hand and pushed them together suddenly. The changes that occurred in that woman were fantastic!

You can create change without being elegant; I think people do it all the time. However, the ramifications of doing something like that are not predictable, and predictability is something that we have always tried to develop. We just went blammo, pow! and rammed it in. She did change; she got what she wanted, and it's lasted a long time; I'm sure of that because I still know that woman. However, I don't know what the side effects were. She isn't totally wonderful in many areas of her life, and I don't know how much of that is a consequence of what we did. She's certainly better off than she was. And at the time we really wanted to know what would happen.