Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

Now there is congruency between the intention of the unconscious part and the appreciation of the conscious.

That means it's time for step number four: to create some new alternatives to the pattern X that are more successful in accomplishing the intention, and that still allow consciousness to have exactly what it wants. What we're going to do is hold the intention—the outcome— constant, and vary the ways of achieving that outcome until we find some better ways of achieving it, ways that do not come into conflict with other parts of Dick.

Dick, do you have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part?

Dick: Humpf!

The creative part hops out! "Hi! Here I am. What do you want?" I hope you all appreciate the sense in which I said before that multiple personality is an evolutionary step. So you do have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part.

Dick: Oh, yes.

I want you to go inside and ask your creative part if it would be willing to undertake the following task. Let me explain it first before you do it. Ask it to go at the unconscious level to the part that runs pattern X, and find out what that part is trying to do for you. Then have it begin to create alternative ways by which this part of you can accomplish this intention. It will create 10,20, or 1000 ways to get that outcome, and it's to be quite irresponsible in this. It simply is to generate a lot of possible ways for you to get the outcome, without trying to evaluate which ones would really work. Now, out of that multitude of things that it will offer, the part of you that's running pattern X will evaluate which of those ways it believes are more effective than pattern X in getting what it's been trying to get for you. It is to select at least three ways that it believes will work at least as effectively as, and hopefully more effectively than, the pattern of behavior it's been using up to now to accomplish that intention. Does that make sense to you?

Dick: I think so.

OK. Go inside and ask your creative part if it would be willing to do that. When it says "yes," tell it to go ahead. And the way I would like the part of you to notify you that it has accepted each one of the new choices is by giving you that feeling, that "yes" signal. You may or may not be conscious of what the new alternatives are. That's irrelevant for our purposes here.

Dick: It sounds like a big assignment.

Yes, it is, but thousands of people have done it all over the world. It's humanly possible and you are a human. You have to go inside and explain it to your creative part and to the other part, and if they both agree, tell them to go ahead. What you're going to do now is to use your own creative resources to begin to reorganize your behavior…. (long pause)

Did you get your three signals, Dick? (No.) How many have you gotten? (None.) None, you've gotten none. Would you go inside and ask that same part—again "yes" or "no"—if it has been presented with choices by your creative part. Ask if your creative part has been presenting it choices…. (He nods.) OK. Then it has been receiving?

Dick: Apparently.

So checking at the creative level, we find creativity is generating lots of possibilities. OK, would you go inside and ask if any of those choices that were presented were acceptable choices? Were any of them more effective than pattern X to accomplish what it wants?

Some of you like to offer advice to your clients. Any time you offer advice, that's going to be less effective than if you can throw them back, with appropriate explicit instructions, on their own resources to develop their own alternative ways. You are a unique human being and so are your clients. And there may or may not be overlap, as you found the first day during that afternoon exercise when we asked you to hallucinate. Some of you could guess the content of your partner's experiences in a way that was almost unbelievable. With other people, it doesn't work at all. If you have that incredible overlap, then you can offer useful advice. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you are sensitive to the response you are getting as you offer it. But even then it will be more effective to throw a person back on their own resources. (Dick shakes his head.)

OK. You got a "no" signal. None of the new choices are acceptable. The creative part generated a lot of possible ways, none of which were as effective as the present pattern. Now, would you ask that part that runs pattern X if it would go to your creative part and become an advisor to your creative part so that it can come up with better choices about how to accomplish that intention? Ask it to explain what, specifically, about the choices the creative part has been presenting prevents them from being more effective ways of accomplishing the intention. Do you understand that instruction consciously, Dick? OK, would you go inside and explain it to that part and then ask it—"yes" or "no"—if it would be willing to do that? And if it says "yes," tell it to go ahead.

This particular process differs significantly from normal therapeutic and hypnotic techniques. We simply serve as consultants for the person's conscious mind. He does all the work himself. He is his own therapist; he is his own hypnotist at the moment. We're not doing any of those things. We communicate directly only with his consciousness and instruct it how to proceed. It's his responsibility to establish and maintain effective communication with the unconscious portions of him that he needs to access in order to change. Of course, once he learns to do that—using this as an example—he can do it without us. That's another advantage. This process has autonomy for your client built into it.

Dick, did you get three signals?

Dick: I'm not sure.

OK, would you go inside and ask that part if it now has at least three choices—whether or not you are conscious of what they are is irrelevant—which it finds more powerful than the old pattern X in accomplishing what it's trying to do. Again, use the same signal. It's important to continually refer back to the same signal, and it's important to get three new choices. If you have at least three choices, you begin to exercise variability in your behavior.

Dick: That was "yes."

OK, so now he got a positive; it said "Yes, I have at least three ways more effective than the old pattern X," even though he consciously doesn't know what those are.

Step five is to make sure those new choices actually occur in his behavior. Using the same signal system, Dick, we would like you to ask this part "Since you have three ways more effective than the old pattern X, would you take responsibility for actually making those things occur in my behavior in the appropriate context?" And you know that the "yes" is the intensification, and the "no" is the diminishment. Is that true?

Dick: I'm not sure that it is.

OK. Ask for that part to give you a "yes" signal before you begin, so that you know which is "yes" and which is "no." If you get them backwards, it's going to mess things up a little bit.

Dick: Yeah, I … I... I lost track.

Yes. I know. That's why I'm asking you to do this. Just go inside and ask the part to give you a "yes" signal, so that you know which one is "yes."

Dick: The "yes" signal is relaxing.

OK, fine. Let's back up a bit. Go back inside and ask the part if it agrees that these choices will work more effectively than X.

Dick: That was "yes."

Fine. Now ask that part if it would be willing to accept the responsibility for generating the three new choices—instead of pattern X—for a period of, say, six weeks to try them out.

Dick: "Yes."

Step six, in my opinion, is what makes this model for change really elegant. The ecological check is our explicit recognition that Dick here, and each one of us, is a really complex and balanced organism. For us to simply make a change in pattern X and not take into account all the repercussions in other parts of his experience and behavior would be foolhardy. This is a way of building in a protection against that.

We would like you to thank this part for all the work it has done. It's got what it needs; it's already satisfied with that. Now we want to find out if any other parts have input to this process. Ask "Is there any other part of me that has any objection to the new choices that are going to occur?" Then be sensitive to any response in any system: feelings, pictures, or sounds….

OK, you've got a response. And?

Dick: They have no objections,

How do you know that? This is important. I asked you to attend to all systems. You came back and said "No. There's no objection." How do you know there's no objection?

Dick: I felt no tension anywhere.

You felt no tension. Were there any changes you could detect either in your kinesthetics or visually or auditorily?

Dick: Well, the relaxation.

A relaxation. OK, that was an overall body relaxation. Just to be sure, just to check for congruency, thank whatever part made your body relax. And then ask "If this means no objection, relax me even further. If there is any objection, make some tension occur." Again, all we are doing is varying the signal for "yes" or "no." It's arbitrary whether you go "Yes for positive increase, No for diminish," or the reverse. It doesn't matter.

Dick: I'm getting some objection.

OK. What exactly was your experience? Were there changes in muscle tension?

Dick: Yes, around my eyes.

OK. Whenever you get a response to a general inquiry, it's important to check and be absolutely sure what that response means. Thank that part for the response of tension in the muscles around your eyes. Ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no" to the question: "Do you object to the new alternatives?"...

Dick: There was a decrease.

It's slightly unusual to have the tension here. Typically at the ecological check almost everybody's heart speeds up. Most people associate a speeded-up heart rate with fear or anxiety. When I ask them to stop hallucinating and simply ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no," the heart rate usually slows down. My understanding of this is that it's simply a signal that some part of them is quite excited about what's going on.

Dick: I was also aware of a pulsating in my hands, but the eye tension seemed more dramatically different than the hand sensations, so that's why I mentioned the eye tension.

OK, let's check this, too. This time go in and thank the part that gave you the hand signals. Then ask the same question "Do you have any objections?" and ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no."

Dick: Decrease in sensation.

Decrease, so that part also doesn't have an objection. If there had been an objection at this point, you would simply recycle back to step three. You have a new "yes-no" signal—the pulsating in the hands. Now you make a distinction between this part's objection and its intention. You continue cycling through this process until you have integrated all objections.

We usually hold the first set of three choices constant and ask any part that objects to find alternative ways of doing what it needs to do without interfering with the first set of choices. But you could also ask both parts to form a committee and go to the creative part and select new alternatives that are acceptable to both.

The ecological check is very important. Many of you have done elegant work, and the client is congruent in your office. When he leaves, another part of him emerges which has concerns that are contextually bound. When he gets home, suddenly he doesn't have access to what he had in your office or in the group. There are other parts of him that know that if he goes home and simply changes in the way that he was going to change, he would lose the friendship of this person, or blow that relationship, or something like that. This is a way of checking to make sure that there are no parts whose positive contribution to him will be interfered with by the new pattern of behavior. Of course the only real check is in experience, but this is a way of doing the best you can to make sure that the new choices will work.

OK, now, Dick, what happens if six or seven weeks from now, you discover yourself doing the old pattern of behavior X? What are you supposed to do, then? ... You can accept that as a signal that the new choices that you came up with were not adequate to satisfy the intention. And you can go back to your creative part and give it instructions to come up with three more choices. The pattern of behavior is a barometer of how effective the new choices are. If the old behavior emerges after a test period, it's a statement that the new choices were not more effective than the old pattern. It's a signal for you to return to this process and create better choices.

Regression to previous behavior isn't a signal of failure, it's a signal of incompetency, and you need to go back and fix it. Reframing will work. I guarantee his behavior will change. If his behavior changes back, that's a signal that the new kinds of behavior were not as effective at getting something for him as the old pattern. Then he goes back through the process, finds out what other secondary gain is involved, and creates new ways to take care of that as well.

If you don't explicitly make the symptom a signal to negotiate, the person's conscious mind will call it a "failure" if the symptom comes back. When the symptom is identified as a signal, the client begins to pay attention to it as a message. It probably always was a message anyway, but they never thought about it that way. By doing this, they begin to have a feedback mechanism. They discover that they only get the signal at certain times.

For example, somebody comes in with migraine headaches and I reframe, and all parts are happy, and the client goes along for two weeks and everything's fine. Then they are in a particular context and suddenly they get a headache. That headache triggers off the instruction that the negotiations weren't adequate. The person can drop inside and ask "Who's unhappy? What does this mean?" If a part says "You're not standing up for yourself like you promised to," then they are faced with a simple choice of having a migraine headache or standing up for themselves.

I had a woman who got such severe migraine headaches that she was flat on her back. There was a part of her that wanted to be able to play every so often, and if it wasn't going to get to play, then the other parts weren't going to get to do anything! Whacko! It would give her a headache. So she made an arrangement that she would spend a defined amount of time in playing activities. After the session, when the weekend came and it was time to play, she decided to do her taxes instead! That part just laid her out. She called on the phone and said "Well, I didn't keep up my end of the bargain, and I got another migraine headache. What should I do?" I said "Don't ask me; ask the part. It's not my problem. My head doesn't hurt."

So she went in and found out what she was supposed to do. That part said "Go out, get in the car, and go somewhere and have fun or else!" As soon as she got in the car, the headache was gone. So her headache no longer became something that was a burden; it became an indicator that she had better respond. She learned that getting a headache was a signal to go out and have some fun.