Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

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.

Or you could ask all those parts to form a committee and ask them to choose one signal. Then have the committee make its collective needs known to the creative part, and so on.

Man: What if in step five the part doesn't agree to take the responsibility?

Well, then something went wrong earlier. If the part that says "No, I won't take responsibility" is the same part that selected three patterns of behavior which it believes are more effective than the original pattern, that doesn't make any sense at all. That's an indicator that your communication channels got crossed somewhere, so you go back and straighten them out.

Man: Backing up one step, what if it doesn't help you select? You ask "Will you select from all these possibilities?" and it says "No, I won't."

You can say "Stupid, I'm offering you ways which are more effective than your present pattern and you're saying 'No'! What kind of a jerk are you?" I'm serious. That works really well. You get a response then! However, that's only one possible maneuver. There are lots of other maneuvers. "Oh, then you are entirely satisfied with all the wasted energy that is going on inside?" Use whatever maneuvers you have in your behavior that are appropriate at that point to get the response you want.

Woman: What kind of reports do you get about what happens when your new behavior occurs?

Usually people behave differently for a week before they notice it. Conscious minds are really limited. That's the report we get a lot. I used reframing with a woman who had a phobic response to, curiously enough, going over bridges, but only if they had water under them. She lived in New Orleans where there are a lot of bridges with water under them. There's one bridge in New Orleans called the Slidell Bridge, and she would always say "Especially the SLIDEell Bridge," accented that way. After I had done reframing with her, I said "Are you going to cross any bridges on the way home?" And she said "Yes, I'm going over the SliDELL bridge." That difference was enough of an indication for me that I knew that the reframing was going to work.

She was in that workshop for three days and never said a word. At the end of the workshop, I asked her about the work we had done on Friday. "You've been driving over bridges this weekend, and I want to know if you had any of that phobic response." She said "Oh, I really hadn't thought about it." A few days earlier she had been working on it as a problem. Two days later she was saying "Oh, yeah, they are just expressways over water." That's very, very close to the response that Tammy offered us yesterday. When Tammy fantasized doing it, she went "Well, it was driving across a bridge." It no longer had that incredible impact, that overwhelming kinesthetic response. People have the tendency not even to think about it. They have a tendency to discover it afterwards, which to me is really much hipper anyway than if they are surprised and delighted with it.

That same woman in New Orleans also said "Well, it's a really amazing thing. Actually I wasn't phobic of bridges!"

"If you weren't phobic of bridges, how come you freaked out when you got on them?"

"Because they go over water. You see, the whole thing had to do with almost drowning when I was a little kid; I was underneath a bridge, drowning."

"Do you have a swimming pool?"

"Now that you mention it, no."

"Do you swim very often?"

"I don't swim at all. I can't swim."

"Do you like showers or baths?"

"Showers"

She made a generalization somewhere in her past that said "Don't go near water; you'll drown." When that part noticed that she was going over a bridge, it said "Bridges go over water, and water's a good place to drown, so now is the time to be terrified."

We always have follow-ups. People come back or telephone, so we make sure that the changes they want did occur. Typically we have to ask for a report—which seems to me really appropriate. Change is the only constant in my experience and most of it occurs at the unconscious level. It's only with the advent of official humanistic psychotherapies and psychiatry that people pay conscious attention to change.

In Michigan, I worked on a phobia that a woman had. I didn't know what the content was at the time, but it turned out that she had a phobia of dogs. After we had done the work, she went to visit a friend who had a dog. What was really amusing to her as she walked in and saw the dog, was that the dog looked so much smaller. She said to her friend "My God! What happened to your dog? It's shrunk!"

Man: Dick's signal system gave a positive response that it received three new choices from his creative part. What if he got a negative?

It doesn't matter if you get a "yes" or "no." It only matters that you get one or the other. The "yes-no" signals are just to distract the conscious mind of the person you are working with. If you get a "no," then you offer it another way to go about it. "Then you go to your devious part and tell it to ally itself with your creative part and trick this part of you into having new choices." It doesn't matter how you do it.

I probably would have had him construct a creative part. I wouldn't have been satisfied that he had access to his creativity. I know there are lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. You can say "Do you know anyone else who is able to do this? I want you to review with vivid detail in picture and sound and feeling what they do, and then have this part of you consider those possibilities. "That's just a way of doing what we call "referential index shift."

What if you say to the person "Do you have a part of you that you consider your creative part?" And they say "No." What are you going to do? Or they hesitate; they say "Well, I don't know." There's a really easy way to create a creative part, using representation systems and anchoring. You say "Think of the five times in your life when you behaved in a very powerfully creative way and you didn't have the faintest idea how or what you did, but you knew it was a positive and creative thing that you did." As s/he thinks of those five in a row, you anchor them. You then have a direct anchor to the person's creativity. You've assembled one. You've organized their personal history. Or you can ask "Do you have a part of you that makes plans? Well, have it come up with three different ways you can plan new behavior." The word "creative" is only one choice out of a myriad ways of organizing your activities.

The only way you can get stuck in a process like this is if you try to run it rigidly. You say to a client "Well, do you have a part of you that you consider your creative part?" If they look you straight in the eye and say "No," then start making up other words. "Do you realize that you have a part of you that is responsible for all glunk activities? And the way you contact that is by touching your temple!" You can make up anything, as long as the result is that they generate new ways of accomplishing the intention. That is as limitless as your own creativity. And if you don't have a creative part, create one for yourself!

There are a lot of other ways that this could have not worked, too. Do you realize that that's what people in here are doing again? You all saw it work. And you're asking "What are all the ways it could have not worked?" I'm sure you could manufacture a hundred ways to make this not work. And in fact many of you will. The point is, when you do something that doesn't work, do something else. If you keep doing something else, something will work. We want you to make it work with each other so that you have a reference experience. Find someone you don't know to be your partner and try reframing. We'll be around if you get stuck.

Reframing Outline

(1) Identify the pattern (X) to be changed.

(2) Establish communication with the part responsible for the pattern.

(a) "Will the part of me that runs pattern X communicate with me in consciousness?"

(b) Establish the "yes-no" meaning of the signal.

(3) Distinguish between the behavior, pattern X, and the intention of the part that is responsible for the behavior.

(a) "Would you be willing to let me know in consciousness what you are trying to do for me by pattern X?"

(b) If you get a "yes" response, ask the part to go ahead and communicate its intention.

(c) Is that intention acceptable to consciousness?

(4) Create new alternative behaviors to satisfy the intention. At the unconscious level the part that runs pattern X communicates its intention to the creative part, and selects from the alternatives that the creative part generates. Each time it selects an alternative it gives the "yes" signal.

(5) Ask the part "Are you willing to take responsibility for generating the three new alternatives in the appropriate context?"

(6) Ecological check. "Is there any other part of me that objects to the three new alternatives?" If there is a "yes" response, recycle to step (2) above.

* * * * *

Once at a workshop for a TA institute, I said that I believed that every part of every person is a valuable resource. One woman said "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!"

"I didn't say it was true. I said if you believe that as a therapist you'll get a lot further."

"Well, that's totally ridiculous."

"What leads you to believe that that's ridiculous?"

"I've got parts that are not worth a dime. They just get in my way. That's all they do." "Name one,"

"I have a part that no matter what I do, all the time I'm trying to do anything, it just totally tells me I can't do it, and that I'm going to fail. It makes everything twice as hard as it needs to be."

She said that she had been a high school dropout. When she decided to go back to high school, that part said "You'll never be able to do it; you're not good enough; you're too stupid. It'll be embarrassing. You won't be able to do it." But she did it. And even when she did that, when she decided to go on to college, that part said "You're not going to be able to do it."

So I said "Well, I'd like to speak to that part directly." That always gets TA people, by the way. They don't have that in their model. Then I look over their left shoulder while I talk to them and that really drives them nuts. But it's a very effective anchoring mechanism, because from that time on, every time you look over their left shoulder, only that part can hear.

"I know that that part of you is doing something very important for you, and it is very sneaky about how it does it. Even if you don't appreciate it, I do. I'd like to tell that part that if it were willing to tell her conscious mind what it's doing for her, then perhaps it could get some of the appreciation that it deserves."

Then I had her go inside and ask the part what it was doing for her that was positive. It came right out and said "I was motivating you." After she told me that, she said "Well, I think that's weird." I said "Well, you know, I don't think it would be possible for you to come up here right now and work in front of this entire group." She stood up defiantly and walked across the room and sat down. Those of you who have studied strategies and understand the phenomenon of polarity response will recognize that this part was simply a Neuro Linguistic Programmer that understood utilization. It knew that if it said "Aw, you can go to college, you can do it," she'd say "No, I can't do it." However, if it said to her "You're not going to be able to cut the grade," then she would say "Oh, yeah?" and she would go out and do it.

Now what would have happened to that woman if we had somehow gotten that part to stop doing that, but without changing anything else? ... She wouldn't have had any way to motivate herself! That's why we have the ecological check. The ecological check is a way of being sure that the new behavior fits with all the other parts of a person. Up to step six we have essentially created a communication system between the person's consciousness and their unconscious part that runs the pattern of behavior they are trying to change. And we have succeeded in finding more effective alternative behaviors in that area. I don't know, of course, when I've finished that, whether this is going to be beneficial for them as a total person.

Let me give you another example of this. I've seen mousy little people who went to assertiveness training and became aggressive—so aggressive that their husband or wife left them and none of their friends will talk to them anymore. They go around yelling at people and being extremely assertive, so abrasive that they no longer have friends. That's sort of a polarity flip, or a swing of the pendulum. One way to make sure that doesn't happen is to have some device like the ecological check.

When you have completed communication and created alternative new behaviors for the part that originally ran the problem behavior, you ask for all other parts to consider the repercussions of these new patterns of behavior. "Is there any other part of me that has any objection to the new choices in my behavior?" If another part objects, it will typically use a distinctive signal. It may be in the same system, but it will be distinctive as far as body part. If suddenly there's tension in the shoulders, you say "Good, I have a limited conscious mind. Would you increase the tension in my shoulders if it means 'Yes, there is an objection,' and decrease it if it means 'No.'" If there is an objection, that's a delightful outcome. That means there is another part, another resource, that's active in your behalf in making this change. You are at step two again, and you recycle.

One of the things that I think distinguishes a really exquisite communicator from one who is not, is to be precise about your use of language: use language in a way that gets you what you want. People who are sloppy with language get sloppy responses. Virginia Satir is precise about her use of langauge, and Milton Erickson is even more precise. If you are precise about the way you phrase questions, you will get precise kinds of information back. For example, somebody here said "Go inside and ask if the part of you responsible for this behavior is willing to change?" And they got a "No" response. It makes perfect sense! They didn't offer it any new choices. They didn't say "Are you willing to communicate?" They said "Are you willing to change?"