Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

I'll tell you the extremes you can take this to. I had a client who had a severe hallucination that was always with him. I could never discern quite what it was. He had a name for it which was a word I'd never heard. It was a geometric figure which was alive and that followed him everywhere. It was his own sort of personal demon, but he didn't call it a demon. He could point to it in the room, and he interacted with it. When I asked him questions, he would turn around and ask "What do you think?" Before he came to me he had been convinced by a therapist that this was a part of him. Whether it was or not, I don't know, but he was convinced that this was a part of him that he had alienated. I reached over and said "I'm going to lift up your arm, and I want you to put it down only as fast as you begin to integrate this."Then I pulled his arm down quickly, and that was it. The integration occurred— whammo, slappo—because I had tied the two together with words.

I once asked a TA therapist which part had total control over his conscious ongoing behavior. Because it didn't seem that people had a choice about being their "parent," or their "child." So he named some part; TA has names for everything. I said "Would you go inside and ask that part if it would knock your conscious mind out for a while?" And he went "Ah, well... "I said "Just go in and ask, and find out what happens." So he went inside and asked the question... and his head fell over to one side and he was gone! It is amazing how powerful it is to use language. I don't think people understand the impact of verbal and non-verbal language at all.

At the beginning of therapy sessions very often I'll say to people "If anything begins to occur to your conscious mind which is too painful in any way, I want to say to your unconscious mind that I think it has the right and the duty to keep from your conscious mind anything that is unpleasant. Your unconscious resources can do that and they should do it—protect you from thinking about things which are unnecessary in that way, and make your conscious experience more pleasant. So if anything unpleasant begins to arise in your conscious experience, your unconscious mind can slowly allow your eyes to flutter closed, one of your hands to rise up, and your conscious mind can drift away into a pleasant memory, allowing me to speak privately with your unconscious mind. Because I don't know what the worst thing that ever happened to you was...."

I'm saying when X occurs, respond this way, and then I'm providing X. I'm not saying "Think about the worst thing that ever happened." I'm saying "I don't know ..." This is the same pattern that's in Changing with Families, the pattern of embedded questions. Virginia never says "What do you want?" She says "Gee, I ask myself why a family would travel six thousand miles to see me. And I don't know, and I'm curious." When I say "I don't know exactly what the most painful and tragic experience of your whole life was," it'll be right there in consciousness.

People do not process language consciously. They process language at the unconscious level. They can only become conscious of a very small amount of it. A lot of what is called hypnosis is using language in very specific ways.

It's one thing to alter someone's state of consciousness and to give them new programs, new learnings, new choices. Getting them to know that they've been in an altered state is something else entirely. Different people have different strategies by which they convince themselves of things. What constitutes somebody's belief system about what hypnosis is, is very different from being able to use hypnosis as a tool. It's much easier to use trance as a therapeutic tool with people who don't know that they've been in a trance, because you can communicate so much more eloquently with their unconscious processes. As long as you can establish unconscious feedback loops with that person, you'll be able to alter their state of consciousness and they are more apt to have amnesia.

My favorite case of this was a guy named Hal. He came to a seminar that a student of mine had set up and at the last minute she decided that she was an inadequate human being and left the State. The people all showed up at the seminar and someone called me and said "All these people are here, what should I do?" It was nearby, so I went over and I said "Well, I'll spend the evening with you. I don't want to teach a seminar, but I would like to know what you all hoped to get." Hal said "I have been to every hypnotist I've ever found; I have gone to every seminar I could ever find on hypnosis, and I have volunteered myself every time, and I have not gone into a trance."

I thought that was dedication for somebody who had failed over and over again. And so I thought "Well, wow! This is really interesting. Maybe this guy really is an 'impossible,' and maybe there's something interesting here." So I thought I'd try it. I did a hypnotic induction and the guy went right through the floor! He went into deep trance and he demonstrated all the most difficult hypnotic phenomena. Then I aroused him and said "Did you go into a trance?" And he said "No." I said "What happened?" And he said "Well, you were talking to me and I sat here and listened to you talk, and I closed my eyes, and I opened my eyes." I said "And did you X?" and I named one of the trance phenomena he had just demonstrated. And he said "No." So I thought, "Ah! well, it's just a function of his amnesia."

I hypnotized him again and gave him implicit hypnotic commands to remember doing all the things he did. He still had no memory whatsoever. All the people in the room, of course, were going crazy because they've seen him do all these things. I tried things like saying "Tell Hal what you saw" and they all told him. And he said "That's not going to work on me. I didn't do that. I would know if I did that." The interesting thing about Hal was there was more than one of him, and they had no connection with one another, no means of communicating with one another. So I thought well, I'm going to have to mix it up a little bit. I said "While you remain in the conscious state, I'd like to ask your unconscious mind to demonstrate to you that it can do things by lifting your hand so that only your right arm is in trance." His arm began to involuntarily float up. I thought "Now this is going to convince this guy," because only his arm was in trance. And he looked me straight in the eye and said "Well, my arm is in trance, but the rest of me can't go in."

By the way, I have a rule which says I have to succeed. So I tried videotaping him and showing him the videotape. He couldn't see it! We'd turn on the videotape, and he'd just go into a trance and that was it. He could not watch the videotape. I told him that if he had not been in a trance, he would be able to watch the videotape. So he sat there with the videotape machine, and he would turn it on and drop out. We'd turn it off and he'd come back. He'd turn it on again and drop out again. He sat there for the rest of the evening trying to watch himself go into a trance. He couldn't do it. So he became convinced that he had been in a trance, but he didn't understand it.

This taught me a lesson. I stopped worrying about whether people knew they were in trance or not and only noticed the results that I could get, utilizing it as phenomenon of change. Hypnotists do a terrible thing to themselves. Hypnotists are always worried about convincing people that they have been in trance, and it isn't important. It is not essential to their changing; it is not essential for anything. Whether they know that they've gone into trance or not, they will notice that they have the changes.

The same is true of anchoring and reframing. As long as you use sensory experience to check your work, it's irrelevant whether your clients believe that they have changed. They will find out in experience—if they bother to notice at all.

The information and patterns that we have been presenting to you are formal patterns of communication that are content-free. They can be used in any context of human communication and behavior.

We haven't even begun to figure out what the possibilities are of how to use this material. And we are very, very, serious about that. What we are doing now is nothing more than the investigation of how to use this information. We have been unable to exhaust the variety of ways to put this stuff together and put it to use, and we don't know of any limitations on the ways that you can use this information. During this seminar we have mentioned and demonstrated several dozen ways that it can be used. It's the structure of experience. Period. When used systematically, it constitutes a full strategy for getting any behavioral gain.

We are very slowly tapering off teaching and doing therapy because there's a presupposition common in the field of clinical psychology which we personally disagree with: that change is a remedial phenomenon. You find something that is wrong and you fix it. If you ask a hundred people "What would you like for yourself," ninety-nine will say "I want to stop doing X."

There is an entirely different way to look at change, which we call the generative or enrichment approach. Instead of looking for what's wrong and fixing it, it's possible simply to think of ways that your life could be enriched: "What would be fun to do, or interesting to be able to do?" "What new capacities or abilities could I invent for myself?" "How can I make things really groovy?"

When I was first doing therapy a man came in and said "I want to have better relationships with people." I said "Oh, so you have trouble relating to people?" He said "No, I get along fine with people. I enjoy my relationships a lot. I'd like to be able to do it even better." I looked into my therapy bag to see what to do for him, and there wasn't anything there!

Very rarely do people come in and say "Well, I'm confident but, boy, you know, if I were twice as confident things would be really wonderful." They come in and say "I'm never confident." I say "Are you sure of that?" and they say Absolutely

The idea of generative change is really hard to sell to psychologists. Business people are much more interested, and they're more willing and able to pay to learn how to do it. Often we do groups in which about half of them are business people, and half of them are therapists. I say "Now, what I want you to do is to go inside and think of three really different situations." The business people go inside and sell a car, win a lawsuit, and meet somebody they really enjoy. The therapists go inside and get beaten up as a child, have a divorce, and have the worst professional failure and humiliation of their life!

We are currently investigating what we call generative personality. We are finding people who are geniuses at things, finding out the sequence of unconscious programming that they use, and installing those sequences in other people to find out if having that unconscious program allows them to be able to do the task. The "cloning" thing we did for the ad agency is an example of doing that at the corporate level.

When we do that, things which were problems, and would have been meat for therapy, disappear. We completely bypass the whole phenomenon of working with problems, because when the structure is changed, everything changes. And problems are only a function of structure.

Man: Can that present new problems?

Yes, but they are interesting, evolutionary ones. Everything presents problems, but the new ones are much more interesting. "What are you going to evolve yourself to become today?" is a very different way of approaching change than "Where is it wrong?" or "How are you inadequate?" I remember once I was in a group with a gestalt therapist and he said "Who wants to work today?" Nobody raised their hand. And he said "There's really no one in here that has a pressing problem?" People looked at each other, shook their heads, and said "No." He looked at the people and said "What's wrong with you? You are not in touch with what's really going on if there's no pain here." He really made that statement; I was flabbergasted. Suddenly all these people went into pain. They all said "You're right! If I have no pain, I'm not real." Boom, they all went into pain, so then he had something to do therapy with.

That model of change does not produce really generative, creative human beings. I want to make structures that are conducive to creating experiences which will result in people who are interesting. People come out of therapy being lots of things, but rarely interesting. I don't think that it's anybody's fault. I think it's a result of the whole system and the presuppositions that underlie the system of psychotherapy and counseling. Most people are totally unconscious of what those presuppositions are.

As I walked around watching and listening to you practicing reframing, I saw a lot of you reverting to other patterns that I'm sure are characteristic of your habitual behavior in therapy, rather than trying something new. And that reminded me of a story:

Some fifteen or so years ago when the Denver zoo was going through a major renovation, there was a polar bear there, which had arrived at the zoo before a naturalistic environment was ready for it. Polar bears, by the way, are one of my favorite animals. They are very playful; they are big and graceful and do lots of nice things. The cage that it was put in temporarily was just big enough that the polar bear could take three nice, swinging steps in one direction, whirl up and around and come down and take three steps in the other direction, back and forth. The polar bear spent many, many months in that particular cage with those bars that restricted its behavior in that way. Eventually a naturalistic environment in which they could release the polar bear was built around this cage, on-site. When it was finally completed, the cage was removed from around the polar bear. Guess what happened? ...

And guess how many of those students at that university are still going down the maze, still trying to find the five-dollar bill? They sneak in at night and run down the maze to look and see if it just might be there this time.

We have been deluging you with information for three days now, totally overloading your conscious resources. And we'd like to offer you a couple of allies in this process which we have discovered are helpful to some people. Do people read Carlos Castaneda here? He's a whacko multiple personality with an Indian friend. There's a section in book two or three in which Don Juan gives a piece of advice to Carlos. We would not give this piece of advice to any of you, but we will repeat it for whatever it's worth.

You see, what Juan wanted to do to Carlos—which we wouldn't, of course, want to do to you—was to find some way of motivating him to be congruent and expressive in his behavior at all times, as creative as he could be as a human being. He wanted to mobilize his resources so that each act that Carlos performed would be a full representation of all the potential that was available to him—all the personal power that he had that was available to him at any moment in time.

Specifically what Juan told Carlos was "At any moment that you find yourself hesitating, or if at any moment you find yourself putting off until tomorrow trying some new piece of behavior that you could do today, or doing something you've done before, then all you need to do is glance over your left shoulder and there will be a fleeting shadow. That shadow represents your death, and at any moment it might step forward, place its hand on your shoulder and take you. So that the act that you are presently engaged in might be your very last act and therefore fully representative of you as your last act on this planet."