Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

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All right. Are there any comments or questions about this last exercise we did? Some of you surprised yourselves by the guesses you made, right? And others of you scored zero.

Whether you did well or not is really irrelevant. Either way, you got important information about what you are able to perceive, and whether or not what you hallucinate has any relationship to what you perceive.

You can take the training we're giving you and you can notice as you are communicating with a client or a loved one that the responses that you are getting are not the ones that you want. If you take that as an indication that what you are doing is not working and change your behavior, something else will happen. If you leave your behavior the same, you will get more of what you are already getting. Now, that sounds utterly simple. But if you can put that into practice, you will have gotten more out of this seminar than people ever get. For some reason, that seems to be the hardest thing in the world to put into practice. The meaning of your communication is the response that you get. If you can notice that you are not getting what you want, change what you're doing. But in order to notice that, you have to clearly distinguish between what you are getting from the outside, and how you are interpreting that material in a complex manner at the unconscious level, contributing to it by your own internal state.

The exercise you just did was essentially limited to one sensory channel. It was a way of assisting you in going through an exercise in which you clean up your visual input channel. You also get some kinesthetic information through holding hands. You can do it auditorily as well, and also kinesthetically. You can generalize that same exercise to the other two systems. If you are going to do it auditorily, A would close his eyes. B would then describe the experience without words, just using sounds. The tonal and tempo patterns will be distinctive and since A's eyes will be closed, all he has is the auditory input.

Or you could just think about the experience and talk about cooking lunch. That's the way couples often do it with one another. He makes a picture of his wife having an affair and then they talk about going camping, right? And he goes (angrily) "Yeah, I'd really like to go with you. I think we'd have a good time. I'm going to bring the ax so I can chop up some firewood."

Another thing couples do is fight in quotes. Do you know about quotes? Quotes is a wonderful pattern. If any of you have clients who work at jobs and have resentment for their bosses or fellow employees, but who can't really express it because it's inappropriate, or they might get fired or something, teach them the pattern of quotes in language. It's marvelous because they can walk up to their employer and say "I was just out on the street and this man walked up to me and said 'You're a stupid jerk.' And I didn't know what to say to him. What would you do if somebody walked up to you and said' You’re a jerk.? Just right out on the street, you know."

People have almost no consciousness of any meta-levels if you distract them with content. Once at a conference I talked to a large group of psychologists who were pretty stuffy and asked a lot of dumb questions. I told them about quotes as a pattern. Then I said for example—I even told them what I was, doing—Milton Erickson once told me a story about a time he stayed at a turkey farm, and the turkeys made a lot of noise and kept him awake at night. He didn't know what to do. So finally one night he walked outside—and I faced all those psychologists out there—and he realized he was surrounded by turkeys, hundreds of turkeys everywhere. Turkeys here, and turkeys there, and turkeys all over the place. And he looked at them and he said "You turkeys!"

There were a couple of people there who knew what I was doing and they absolutely cracked up. I stood on the stage in front of these people who were paying me a fortune and I went" You turkeys!" They didn't know what I was doing. They all sat there nodding seriously. If you are congruent, they will never know. If you feed people interesting content, you can experiment with any pattern. As soon as I said "I'm going to tell you a story about Milton" everybody went "content time" and that was all it took.

In the middle of telling the story, I even turned around and laughed at the top of my lungs. And then I turned back and finished it. They just thought it was a weird behavior, because I laugh a lot. Or I could have made the laughing part of the story. "Milton turned around and laughed." At the end of the day all these people came up to me and said "And I want to tell you how important this has been to me" and I said "Thank you. Did you hear the story about Milton? I don't want you to think that it's about your

You can try any new behavior in quotes and it won't seem to be you doing it. Quotes gives you a lot of freedom to experiement with gaining flexibility, because it means that you can do anything. I can go into a restaurant and walk up to a waitress and say "I just went in the bathroom and this guy walked up to me and said 'Blink,'" and find out what happens. She'll blink, and I'll go "Isn't that weird?" and walk away. It wasn't me, so I didn't have to worry about it. It's a big piece of personal freedom; you are no longer responsible for your own behavior because it's "someone else's behavior."

When I was going to psychiatric meetings and stuff, I would walk up to someone and say "I was just in a conference with Dr. X, and he did this thing I've never seen anyone do before. He walked up to this person, lifted up his hand like this, and said 'Look at that hand.'" Then I'd do a fifteen or twenty minute trance induction and put the person into a trance. Then I'd slap him in the stomach so he came out, and say "Isn't that a weird thing for him to do?" He would go "Yeah, that's a really weird thing for him to do. He shouldn't do things like that." And I'd go " I would never do anything like that. Would you?" And he'd say "No!"

Quotes also works great if you're doing therapy with a family that fights and argues and won't listen, because you can lean forward and you can say "I'm so glad you're such a responsive family, because with the last family that was here I had to look at each and every person and say 'Shut your mouth.' That's what I had to tell them. "It reminds me of a group we did in San Diego; there were about a hundred and fifty people and we told them "The next thing that we'd like to tell you is how couples often fight in quotes."

"Well, if you were to tell me that, you know what I would say to you?"

"Well, if you told me to do that, I'd just tell you to go to hell!"

"Well, listen, if you ever said that to me I'd reach right over and..." The trouble is they usually lose quotes, and actually get into a fight.

Most of you have heard quotes in family therapy. You ask "How did it go?" If they stumble on reporting an argument, they'll start in quotes and then they'll be into it again! All their non-verbal analogues will support it. Quotes is a dissociative pattern, and when the dissociation collapses, the quotes go.

Grief is usually a similar pattern. What's going on in the grief-stricken person is this: they make a constructed visual image of being with the lost person. They are seeing themselves with the loved one who is now dead or gone, unavailable somehow. Their response called "grief or "sense of loss" is a complex response to being dissociated from those memories. They see their loved one and themselves having a good time, and they feel empty because they are not there in the picture. If they were to step inside the very same picture that stimulates the grief response, they would recover the positive kinesthetic feelings of the good experiences they shared with that person they cared very much about. That would then serve as a resource for them going on and constructing something new for themselves in their lives, instead of a trigger for a grief response.

Guilt's a little different. There are a couple of ways to feel guilty. One of the best ways to feel guilty is to make a picture of the response on someone's face when you did something that they didn't like. In this case you are making a visual eidetic picture. You can feel guilty about anything that way. However, if you step outside the picture, in other words reverse the procedure that we use with grief, what happens is that you will no longer feel guilty, because then you literally get a new perspective.

It sounds too easy, doesn't it? It is too easy. Ninety-nine out of a hundred depressed clients that I have seen have exactly the same pattern. They will be visualizing and/or talking to themselves about some experience that is depressing to them. But all they will have in awareness are the kinesthetic feelings. And they will use words which are appropriate: "weighed down, burdened, heavy, crushing." However, if you ask them any questions about their feelings, they will give you an elegant, non-verbal description of how they create their depression. "How do you know you're depressed? Have you felt this way a long time? What started this syndrome?" The exact questions are wholly irrelevant; they are just ways of accessing that process.

Depressed people usually make a series of visual images, usually constructed and outside of awareness. Usually they have no idea that they are making any images. Some of you had that experience with your partners today. You told them that they were accessing in a system, and they went "Oh, I don't know about that" and they didn't, because that wasn't in their awareness. Depressed people are running profoundly effective hypnotic inductions by seeing images and talking about them outside of awareness and responding in consciousness with only the feelings. They are going to be bewildered about where their feelings come from, since where they come from is totally outside of their awareness.

Many, many people who have weight problems are doing the same thing. They will have a hypnotic voice that goes "Don't eat that cake in the refrigerator." "Don't think about all the candy in the living room." "Don't feel hungry." Most people have no idea that commands like that are actually commands to do the behavior. In order to understand the sentence "Don't think of blue" you have to access the meaning of the words and think of blue.

If a child is in a dangerous situation and you say "Don't fall down," in order for him to understand what you have said, he has to access some representation of "falling down." That internal representation, especially if it is kinesthetic, will usually result in the behavior that the parent is trying to prevent. However, if you give positive instructions like "Be careful; pay attention to your balance and move slowly," then the child will access representations that will help him cope with the situation.

Man: Can you say more about guilt?

Guilt is like everything else. It's just a word, and the question is "What experience does the word refer to?" For years now people have walked into psychiatric offices of all kinds and said "I have guilt." Therapists have heard the word "guilt" and said "Yeah, I know what you mean." If that same person had walked in and said "I have some X," those therapists wouldn't have made the jump to thinking that they understood what the person meant.

The point we are trying to make about guilt and depression and jealousy and all those other words is that the important thing is to find out how it works—find out what the process is. How does someone know when it's time to be guilty as opposed to when it's not time to be guilty? And we said that an example—and this is ONLY ONE example—of how to feel guilty is to make eidetic images of people looking disappointed, and then feel bad about it. There are other ways you can feel guilty. You can make constructed images or you can talk yourself into feeling guilty. There are lots and lots of ways to go about it. It's important with each individual that you find out how they do it, if you want to change that process to something else. If the way they make themselves feel guilty is with eidetic images, you can have them change the eidetic image into a constructed image. If they do it with constructed images, you can have them change it into an eidetic one. If they talk to themselves, you can have them sing to themselves.