Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

OK. Any questions about the process we went through with Dick?

Woman: Am I understanding that Dick doesn't need to be aware of what those choices are?

We prefer that he not be. That could just get in his way.

Woman: Dick, you're not aware of your three alternatives specifically?

Dick: I'm not. In some ways I feel a failure because of it, you know, because I can't think it.

Woman: Well, how does he know he has them?

He got a signal from his unconscious, namely the kinesthetic feeling of relaxation. He doesn't consciously know what the new alternatives are.

Dick: But it feels OK down here.

His unconscious mind knows what they are, and that's all that counts. That's the one that runs the show in this area of behavior, anyway. Let's make a demonstration for your purposes here. Would you go inside, Dick, and ask this same part down here, using the same "yes-no" signal, if it would be willing to allow your conscious mind to know what one of those new choices is, just as a demonstration to you that it knows things that you don't.

This is called a convincer. It's wholly irrelevant for the process of change, but it can settle people's conscious minds a little bit.

Dick: He won't do it

And rightfully so. If I were Dick's unconscious mind, I wouldn't tell him either. He'd try to interfere. What did he do earlier? His unconscious part wouldn't release specific information, and he immediately had a feeling of failure! I wouldn't communicate with his conscious mind if it were going to behave like that either. It's just as convincing to have your unconscious say "No, I won't tell you what any of the new choices are," if it's an involuntary signal. Right?

Dick: Right.

Now let me mention in passing the paradoxical nature of the request that we made in step two. The question is "Would you be willing to communicate with me in consciousness?" Any signal that he detects has to be a response in consciousness. Even if the part says "No, I would not," that's still a communication in consciousness.

If he had gotten a "no" response, I would understand that in the following way: the intent of that part is not to not communicate with him in consciousness. It's a statement that it doesn't trust him. That is, it's not willing to release content information to his conscious mind. And I respect that. I really believe that unconscious minds should have the freedom, and in fact have the duty, to keep out of awareness material which would not be useful for the conscious mind to deal with.

We had a period when we did nothing but deep, deep trance hypnosis. A man came in once and said that there were all kinds of things standing in the way of his being happy. I said "Would you like to tell me what those things are?" And he said "No, I want to go into a trance and change it all, and that's why I came for hypnosis." So accepting all behavior, I did an induction, put him into a deep trance, sent his conscious mind away, and said "I want to speak privately with your unconscious mind." I have no idea what that means. However, when you tell them to, people do it. They talk to you and it's not the one you were talking to before, because it knows things the other one doesn't know. Whether I created that division or whether it was there already, I have no idea. I asked for it, and I got it.

In this particular case, his conscious mind was, to put it as nicely as I can, inane. His unconscious resources, however, were incredibly intelligent. So I said "What I want to know from you, since you know much more about him than I do, is what change is it that he needs to make in his behavior?"

The response I got was "He's a homosexual."

"What change does he need to make?"

"He needs to change it, because it's all based on a mistake."

"What mistake?"

The explanation that I got from his unconscious mind was the following: The first time he had ever asserted himself physically, in terms of trying to defend himself against violence, was when he was five years old in a hospital to have his tonsils out. Someone put the ether mask on his face, and he tried to push it away and fight back as he went under the anesthetic. Anesthesia became anchored to the feeling of being angry. After that, every time he began to feel angry or frightened and started to strike out, his body went limp. As a result of this, his conscious mind decided that he was a homosexual. He had lived as a homosexual for about twenty-five years.

His unconscious resources said "You must not let his conscious mind know about this mistake, because knowing that would destroy him." And I agreed with that. There was no need for him to know that he had goofed in all of his relationships for twenty-five years. The only important thing was that he make a change, because he wanted to get married. But he couldn't marry a woman because he knew that he was a homosexual. His unconscious mind would not allow him in any way to become conscious of the fact that he had made this mistake, because it would have made his whole life a mistake and that knowledge would have utterly destroyed him. It wanted him to have the illusion that he grew out of it and grew into new behavior.

So I arranged with his unconscious mind to have him blossom as a heterosexual person and to make the changes as a result of a spiritual experience. His unconscious mind agreed that that was the best way to go about it. He changed without any conscious representation of either the hypnotic session or where the changes came from. He believes it came as a result of a drug experience. He smoked marijuana and had a cosmic experience. He assumed that it was the quality of the grass, and not a post-hypnotic suggestion. That was adequate for him to make the changes that he wanted.

There are many parts of people that do that same kind of thing. A part doesn't want the conscious mind to know what's going on, because it believes the conscious mind can't handle it, and it may or may not be right. Sometimes I've worked with people and I've made a deal with a part to allow the conscious mind to slowly become aware of something a little at a time, to discover if in fact the conscious mind can handle it or not. And usually the part discovered that the conscious mind could accept the information. At other times I've gotten an emphatic "No, there's no way I will do that. I don't want the conscious mind to know. I will change all behaviors, but I will not inform the conscious mind of anything." And people do change. Most change takes place at the unconscious level anyway. It's only in recent Western European history that we've made the idea of change explicit.

If Dick's part had said that it was unwilling to inform his conscious mind what the intention was, we would have just gone ahead anyway because it isn't relevant. We would have just told that part to go directly to his creative part and get the new choices. In fact, informing his conscious mind is probably what made it take so long. I'm serious. Being conscious, as far as I can tell, is never important, unless you want to write books to model your behavior. In terms of face-to-face communication, either internally or with other people, you don't need consciousness. We essentially limit his conscious participation to receiving and reporting fluctuations in his signal system, and asking the questions which stimulate those responses.

It's quite possible—not only possible but quite positive—for him not to know what the intention of his unconscious part is, as well as for him not to know what the new choices are. The changes will still be as profound and as effective as if he knew all that. In fact, in some ways the changes will be more effective.

Man: What if you get no response at all at the beginning?

Well, if you get no response at all, your client is probably dead. But if he doesn't get a response that convinces him, I'd ally myself with his unconscious mind and say "Look, this part is unwilling to communicate with you and I agree with it, because I wouldn't want to communicate with you either. What you haven't realized yet is that this part has been doing something vitally important for you. It's been doing you a service and you've spent all this time fighting your own internal processes when they've been trying to do something positive for you. I want to salute them and compliment them. And I think you owe them an apology." I'll literally tell people to go inside and apologize for having fought with the part and having made it that much harder for that part to do what it's trying to do for them.

If that doesn't work, you can threaten them. "And if you don't start being better to your parts, I'm going to help them destroy you. I'm going to help them give you a terrible headache and make you gain twenty-five pounds." Then typically I begin to get really good unconscious communication. The person will be saying "Well, I don't think this is really accurate" at the same time that their head is nodding up and down in response to what I've said.

Woman: In step three you ask the part what it is trying to do— what its intention is by that pattern of behavior. Do you need to do that if it doesn't matter whether you know about it or not?

No. It's just that most people are interested. If the unconscious doesn't want to reveal the intention, we'd just say something like "Even though X is a pattern you consciously want to change, are you willing to believe that this is a well-intentioned unconscious part, and that what it's trying to get for you by making you do X is something in your behalf as a total person? If you're willing to accept that, let's keep all the content unconscious, saying 'OK, I trust that you're well-intentioned. I don't need to review and evaluate your intentions because I will make the assumption that you're operating in my best interests.'" Then we'd just go ahead with step four.

A few years ago we were doing a workshop and there was a woman there who had a phobia of driving on freeways. Rather than treating it as a phobia, which would have been much more elegant, I did a standard reframing to demonstrate that you can work with phobias with reframing, even though it's much faster to use the two-step visual/kinesthetic dissociation pattern. I said "Look, there's a part that's scaring the pants off you when you go near freeways. Go inside and tell this part that we know it's doing something of importance, and ask if it is willing to communicate with you." She got a very strong positive response. So I said "Now go inside and ask the part if it would be willing to tell you what it's trying to do for you by scaring the pants off you when you go near freeways." She went inside, and then said "Well, the part said 'No, I'm not willing to tell you.'"

Rather than go to unconscious reframing, I did something which may sound curious, but it's something I do from time to time when I have suspicions, or what other people call intuitions. I had her go inside and ask if the part knew what it was doing for her. She closed her eyes, and then she came back outside and said "Well, I... I don't... I don't believe what it said." "Well, go inside again, and ask if it's telling the truth." She went inside again, and then said "I don't want to believe what it said." "Well, what did it say?" "It said it forgot!"

Now, as amusing as that sounds, I always thought that was a great response. In some ways it makes sense. You are alive for a long time. If a part organizes its behavior to do something and you really resist it and fight against it, it can get so caught up in the fight that it forgets why it organized its behavior that way in the first place. How many of you have ever gotten into an argument and in the middle of it forgotten what it was that you were intending to do in the first place? Parts, like people, don't always remember about outcomes.

Rather than going through a lot of rigamarole, I said "Look, this is a very powerful part of you. Did you ever think about how powerful it is? Every single time you go near a freeway, this part is capable of scaring the pants off you. That's pretty amazing. How would you like to have a part like that on your side?" She went "Wow! I don't have any parts like that!" So I said "Go inside and ask that part if it would like to do something that it could be appreciated for, that would be worthwhile, and that would be worthy of its talents." And of course that part went "Oh, yeah!" So I said "Now go inside and ask that part if it would be willing to have you be comfortable, alert, breathing regularly and smoothly, being cautious and in sensory experience when you go onto a freeway on ramp. "The part went "Yeah, yeah. I'll do that." I then had her fantasize a couple of freeway situations. Earlier she was incapable of doing that; she would go into a terror state because even the fantasy of being near a freeway was too scary. When she went through it this time she did it adequately. She then got in a car, went out to the freeway, and did fine. She enjoyed it so much that she drove for four hours and ran out of gas on the freeway!

Man: At one point it looked like there was strain showing on Dick's forehead. I just wondered if he really was bothered or just concentrating.

If you were working with someone and you had a serious doubt about that, then you owe it to yourself to verify your suspicion or deny it. The easiest way, of course, is the same methodology. I would look at

Dick and say "I noticed a furrowed brow. That sometimes indicates tension, or sometimes simply concentration. I don't know which." It only takes an extra thirty seconds to have him go inside and ask the part of him that's wrinkling his brow to increase the tension there if it has some input to this process that it would like to make manifest, and decrease the tension there if not. That would give you an immediate verification, without any hallucination. You don't have to hallucinate, and he doesn't have to guess. You've got a system which allows you to get direct sensory signals in order to answer your questions.

I hope those of you who are hypnotists recognize a couple of patterns going on here. One is fractionation: alternating from turning inward and coming back to sensory experience—in and out of trance.

Whether you are hypnotists or not you've probably heard of finger signals or ideomotor signals. A hypnotist will often make arrangements with the person in a trance that s/he will lift the right index finger with honest unconscious movements for "yes" responses, and the left index finger for "no." What we did here is nothing more than a system of natural finger signals. Finger signals are a wholly arbitrary imposition by the hypnotist. Reframing leaves much more freedom on the part of the client to choose a response signal system which is most congruent with what they need at the time. It's a naturalistic technique that also makes possible signals that can't be duplicated by consciousness. However, it's the same formal pattern, the same principle, as finger signals. Using natural signals also allows different parts to use different channels instead of having them all use the same system.

Now, what if at some point he had gotten increased sweating in the palms, sensations in the front of the leg, visual images, a sound of a racing car—all these signals as responses? I would have said "I'm glad there are so many parts active in your behalf. In order to make this thing work, go inside and thank them all for the responses. Ask all those parts to be exquisitely attentive to what happens. First we'll take the perspiration in your hands; we'll work with that part. I guarantee all the other parts that no behavioral changes will occur until we do the ecological check and I have verified that they all accept the new behaviors.