Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

Another person said "Will you, the part of me that is responsible for this pattern of behavior, accept the choices generated by my creativity?" And the answer was "No." And properly so. Your creativity doesn't know a thing about your behavior in this area. The part that's got to make a selection is the part that is responsible for your behavior. It's the one that knows about that.

Man: What if the unconscious creative part refuses to give any choices?

It never happens if you are respectful of it. If you as a therapist are disrespectful of people's creativity and their unconscious, it will simply cease communicating with you.

Woman: My partner and I found that our conscious minds were most unaccepting of change.

I totally agree with that. That's very true of therapists, especially if the choices were left unconscious. It's not necessarily true of other groups in the population. And it figures, because therapists have very nosy conscious minds. Almost every modern humanistic psychotheo-logy I know implies that it is necessary to be conscious in order to make changes. That's absurd.

Woman: I'm confused about awareness and consciousness. Gestalt therapy talks about the importance of awareness, and—

When Fritz Perls said "Lose your mind and come to your senses," and to have awareness, I think he was talking about experience. I think he suspected that you could have sensory perception without intervening consciousness. He wrote about what he referred to as the "DMZ of experience," in which he said that talking to yourself was being as far removed from experience as you could be. He said that making visual images was a little bit closer to having experience. And he said having feelings was being as close as you could get to having experience, and that the "DMZ" is very different than behaving and acting in the real world.

I think what he was alluding to is that you can have experience without reflexive consciousness, and he called that "being in the here and now." We call it "uptime." It's the strategy we've used to organize our perceptions and responses in this workshop with you. In uptime, you don't talk to yourself, you don't have pictures and you don't have feelings. You simply access sensory experience and respond to it directly.

Gestalt therapy has an implicit rule that accessing cues are bad, because you must be avoiding. If you look away, you are avoiding. And when you are looking away you are in internal experience, which we call "downtime." Fritz wanted everybody to be in uptime. However, he was inside telling himself that it was better to be in uptime! He was a very creative person and I think that's what he meant, but it's really hard to know.

Woman: You said we'd see when reframing doesn't work.

I certainly did as I walked around the room! You will try it and it won't work. However that's not a comment on the method. That's a comment about not being creative enough in the application of it, and not having enough sensory experience to accept all the cues that are there. If you take its "not working"—instead of a comment about how dumb and stupid and inadequate you are—as a comment about what's there for you to learn and begin to explore, then therapy will become a real opportunity to expand yourself, instead of an opportunity for self-criticism.

This is one of the things I've discovered teaching hypnosis. I think it's one of the main reasons that hypnosis has not proliferated in this society. As a hypnotist you put somebody into a trance and present them with some kind of a challenge such as "You will be unable to open your eyes." Most people are unwilling to put themselves to that kind of test. People say this to me all the time in hypnosis training seminars: "What happens if I give them the suggestion and they don't carry it out?" And I say "You give them another one!" If they don't get exactly what they intended, they think they must have failed, instead of taking that as an opportunity for responding creatively.

There's a really huge trap there. If you decide before you begin a communication what will constitute a "valid" response, then the probability that you'll get it is reduced severely. If, however, you make a maneuver, some intervention, and then simply come to your senses and notice what response you get, you'll realize that all responses are utilizable. There's no particularly good or bad response. Any response is a good response when it's utilized, and it's the next step in the process of change. The only way you can fail is by quitting, and deciding you are not willing to spend any more time with it. Of course you can just continue to do the same thing over and over again, which means you'll have the same failure for a longer period of time!

There was a research project that I think you all are entitled to know about. Out of a group of people, one third of them went into therapy, one third of them were put on a waiting list, and one third of them were shown movies of therapy. The people on the waiting list had the same rate of improvement! That is a comment about that research project, and that's all it's a comment about. That finding was presented to me as if it were a statement about the world. When I made a comment that the only thing I could discern is that it was a statement about the incompetency of the people doing therapy in the project, it struck them as a novel idea that actually that might be a possibility.

I came to psychology from mathematics. The first thing that made sense to me as I entered the field of psychology is that what they were doing was not working, at least with the people who were still in the hospitals and still in the offices—the other people had gone home! So the only thing that made sense to me is that what they were doing with their clients was what I didn't want to do. The only things not worth learning were what they were already doing that wasn't working.

The first client that I saw was in somebody's private office. I went in and watched this therapist work with a young man for an hour. She was very warm, very empathetic, very sympathetic with this guy as he talked about what a terrible home life he had. He said "You know, my wife and I really haven't been able to get together, and it got so bad that I really felt I had strong needs and I went out and had this affair," and she said "I understand how you could do that." And they went on and on like this for a full hour.

At the end of the hour she turned to me and she said "Well, is there anything that you would like to add?" I stood up and looked at the guy and said "I want to tell you that I think you're the biggest punk I have ever met! Going out and screwing around behind your wife's back, and coming here and crying on this woman's shoulder. That's going to get you nothing, since you aren't going to change, and you're going to be as miserable as you are now for the rest of your life unless you grab yourself by the bootheels, give yourself a good kick in the butt, and go tell your wife how you want her to act with you. Tell her in explicit enough words so that she will know exactly what you want her to do. If you don't do that, you're going to be as miserable as you are now forever and no one will be able to help you." That was the exact opposite of what that therapist had done. He was devastated, just devastated. He left the office and went home and worked it all out with his wife. He did all of the things I'd told him to do, and then he called me up on the telephone and told me it was the most important experience of his life.

However, during the time he did that, that therapist utterly convinced me that what I had done was wrong! She explained to me all these concepts about therapy and about how this wouldn't be helpful, and convinced me that what I had done was the wrong thing.

Man: But she didn't stop you from doing it.

She couldn't! She was paralyzed! But she was right. It wouldn't have worked with her. However, it was perfect for him. If nothing else, it was just the opposite of what she had been doing all that time. It wasn't that what I did was more powerful than what she did, it was just more appropriate for him, given that all those other things hadn't worked. That therapist didn't have that flexibility in her behavior. She did the only thing that she could do. She couldn't do gestalt therapy because she couldn't yell at anybody. It wasn't a choice for her. She was so nice. I'm sure there were some people who had never had anybody be nice to them, and that hanging around her was such a new experience that it had some influence on them. However, that would still not help them make the specific changes that they came to therapy for.

Woman: What we did was to ask the conscious mind of the partner "Will you agree not to sabotage, not to try to—"

Oh, there's a presupposition there that the conscious mind can sabotage! You can ignore the conscious mind. It can't sabotage the unconscious. It couldn't sabotage the original choice that it didn't want, and it's not going to be able to sabotage the new ones either.

What you're doing with reframing is giving requisite variety to the unconscious. The unconscious previously had only one choice about how to get what it wants. Now it's got at leas four choices—three new ones and the old one. The conscious mind still hasn't got any new choices. So given the law of requisite variety, which is going to be in control? The same one that was in control before you got here, and that is not your conscious mind.

It's important for some people to have the illusion that their conscious mind controls their behavior. It's a particularly virulent form of insanity among college professors, psychiatrists, and lawyers. They believe that consciousness is the way they run their lives. If you believe that, there is an experiment you can try. The next time somebody extends their hand to shake hands with you, I want you to consciously not lift your hand, and find out whether your hand goes up or not. My guess is that your conscious mind won't even discover that it is time to interrupt the behavior until your hand is at least half-way up. And that's just a comment about who's in control.

Man: How about the use of this method in groups?

I hope you notice how we have used it here! While you are doing reframing, you spend about seventy to eighty percent of the time alone, waiting for the person to get a response. While you are doing that you can start with someone else. Each of us used to do ten or fifteen people at a time. The only limitation on how many people you can do at one time is how much sensory experience you are able to respond to. You set your limitations by the refinement of your sensory apparatus.

I know a man who does it with groups, and he takes them all together through each step. "Everybody identify something. Everybody go inside. What did you get?" "I got a feeling. ""Intensify for 'yes.'" "What did you get?" "I got sounds." "Have them get louder." "What did you get?" "I got a picture." "Have it brighten." He makes everybody else wait instead. That's another approach. It's easier if you have a homogeneous group of people.

Man: I'm kind of curious. Did you ever do this with somebody who had cancer—have them go inside and talk to the part that is causing the cancer?

Yes. I worked as a consultant for the Simontons in Fort Worth. I had six people who were terminal cancer patients, so I did them as a group, and that worked fine. I had enough sensory experience, and there was enough homogeneity in them as a group, that I could do it that way. The Simontons get good responses just using visualization. When you add the sophistication of all representational systems and the kind of communication system we develop with reframing, I don't know what the limits are. I would like to know what they are. And the way to find out is to assume that I can do anything and go out and do it.

We had a student who got a complete remission from a cancer patient. And he did something which I think is even more impressive: He got an ovarian cyst the size of an orange to shrink away in two weeks. According to medical science, that wasn't even possible. That client reports that she has the X-rays to prove it.

Those of you who went through medical school were done something of a disservice; let me talk about that for a moment. The medical model is based on a scientific model. The scientific model does the following: it says "In a complex situation, one way to find out something about it scientifically is to restrict everything in the situation except one variable. Then you change the value of that variable and notice any changes in the system." I think that's an excellent way to figure out cause-effect relationships in the world of experience. I do not think it is a useful model in face-to-face communication with another human being who is trying to get a change. Rather than restrict all behavior in a face-to-face communication, you want to vary your behavior wildly, to do whatever you need to do in order to elicit the response that you want.

Medical people for a long time have been willing to admit that people can psychologically "make themselves sick." They know that psychological cognitive mechanisms can create disease, and that things like the placebo effect can cure it. But that knowledge is not exploited in this culture in a useful way. Reframing is one way to begin to do that.

Reframing is the treatment of choice for any psychosomatic symptom. You can assume that any physiological symptom is psychosomatic, and then proceed with reframing—making sure that the person has already made use of all medical resources. We assume that all disease is psychosomatic. We don't really believe that's true. However, if we act as if that's true, then we have ways of responding appropriately and powerfully to people who have difficulties that are not recognized as psychosomatic by medical people. Whether it's aphasics that we've worked with, or people with paralysis that had an organic base, that wasn't hysterical according to the medical reports, we still often get behavioral changes. You can talk about it as if the people were pretending to be changed, but as long as they pretend effectively for the rest of their life, I'm satisfied. That's real enough for me.

The question for us is not what's "true," but what is a useful belief system to operate out of as a communicator. If you are a medical doctor and somebody comes in with a broken arm, then I think the logical thing for you to do is to set the broken bone, and not play philosophical games. If you're a communicator and you take the medical model as a metaphor for psychological change, then you've made a grave error. It's just not a useful way of thinking about it.

I think that ultimately the cures for schizophrenia and neurosis probably will be pharmacological, but I don't think that they have to be. I think they probably will be, because the training structures in this country have produced a massive amount of incompetence in the field of psychotherapy. Therapists just aren't producing results. Some people are, but what they are doing isn't being proliferated at a high enough rate. That's one of the functions that I understand us to have: to put information into a form that allows it to be easily learned and widely disseminated.