Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Woman: Can you do this with yourself?

Yes, with two qualifications. Tomorrow we're going to teach a pattern called "reframing" which teaches you how to establish an internal communication system with some sophistication and subtlety. If you have such an internal communication system, you can always check internally to make sure that all parts of you are congruent. If you get a "go-ahead," of course you can do it by yourself. If there's some hesitation, reframing gives you a way of getting congruence, internal agreement.

Another precaution is that you get a really good anchor for a powerful, positive "blast-out" experience, so that if you begin to collapse back into the old unpleasant feelings, you can bring yourself out. Feeling more unpleasantness will not help you in this at all. I had a powerful anchor. Make sure you have one for yourself. I would recommend that you do it with somebody else if you have a very intense phobic response. It isn't that difficult, and it obviously doesn't take that long. Find somebody else, if only to operate the bail-out anchor if you begin to go back into the unpleasantness. You can go slightly into the phobic response and say to your friend "Look at what I look like now, and what I'm breathing like now. If you see that again, squeeze my hand." That would be adequate. You can run the rest of it yourself.

Woman: Can you do this with children?

Children don't seem to have that many phobias. For those who do, this will work fine. Whatever you do with kids, I recommend that you sneak up on it. A friend of mine had a nine-year-old kid who was a lousy speller. I said "Look at this list of ten spelling words." The kid looked at it, and I said "Now close your eyes and tell me what they are—not how to spell them." He had some difficulty doing that; he didn't have well-developed visualization. However, I said "Remember the Wookie in Star Wars? Do you remember when the Wookie opened his mouth and showed his teeth like this?" And he went "Oh, yeah!" and then he was visualizing immediately. I had him print the words out in the Wookie's mouth. There's always some experience somewhere in a person's personal history that has the requisite qualities you need. If you combine that experience with the task that you are trying to do— and especially with children, make a game out of it—there is no problem. "What do you think the Wookie would see if he were watching you go through that thing with your dad?" That's another way of getting the dissociation.

Children are really fast. As an adult you are a lot slower than a child. You are less fluid in your states of consciousness. The primary tool that we offer people who work with children is to use anchoring as a way of stabilizing what you are trying to work on, to slow the kid down enough so that you can cope. Because kids are really fast.

Woman: Why two steps of dissociation?

You don't need it. That's just a guarantee; it's insurance that she doesn't collapse back into the old feelings. If we had only dissociated her one step, if she collapsed she would collapse right back into the old experience, and it would be very difficult to get her back out. By doing it in two steps, if she begins to collapse, she will collapse into the first step and it's easier to get back out. You can tell whether she is up above or back down here by the changes in posture and skin color and breathing, etc. Knowing that, if I see her collapse from two to one, I give a squeeze here, or I say "Now let her feel the old feelings over there.

You watch from up here." Those are ways of insuring that she doesn't just re-experience the bad feelings.

Woman: You asked Tammy to take the feeling and find a picture of herself at a younger age. What if she can't find one?

That's a statement about the therapist, not the client. It should be taken as a comment about what the therapist is doing, indicating that the therapist should change his behavior and do it differently.

Let me answer your question in this way. I don't believe that Tammy actually had the experience that she watched herself go through. She may or may not have; I don't know. But it is irrelevant. Once a very well-known therapist was visiting with us, and we received an emergency referral, a suicidal woman. The psychiatrist had given up, saying "Here, would you please take this woman over? I'm out of choices." Since this famous therapist was staying with us, we thought it would be an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate some of the uses of hypnosis Erickson had taught us. Because for that therapist, at that point in his evolution, hypnosis was a dirty word. He thought it was "manipulative." And we told him "There are ways in which Ericksonianhypnosis is far less manipulative than any insight, conscious-mind therapy we have ever run across. Let us demonstrate with this woman."

So we began to work with this woman. The visiting therapist was sitting there watching and listening. About ten minutes into the session, he got a revelation. It was obvious. I said "Do you have something you want us to do?" I had never had a chance to watch this therapist work live before. He took over and started going "Blood... stairway... childhood, younger brother... mother cries... screams." He developed this incredible fantasy, which he then essentially "sold" to this woman. At first the woman would go "Gee, I don't remember anything like that." Finally the woman went "Uuuuhhhh! That's it! I must have done it!" very much like a family reconstruction, if you've ever been through one of those with Virginia Satir. Suddenly the woman made all these internal connections, and the visiting therapist did all this therapy about this past experience and the woman changed dramatically. Her behavior changed dramatically, and she stayed changed, too. She was a continuing client of ours.

Now, when she came back in two weeks, we couldn't resist. We induced a somnambulistic trance, and established an anchor for amnesia so that we could erase anything we did during that session— because she was doing fine and we didn't want to interfere. We just wanted to check and find out what had happened. We asked her unconscious mind if in fact the experience described by the therapist during the session—or anything approximating it—had ever occurred. The answer was unequivocally "No." However, that is no different than what just happened here. If the experience that Tammy generated has all the elements of whatever the original experience or set of experiences was, it will serve as a metaphor which will beas effective as an actual, factual, historical representation. And from my sensory experience I can guarantee that it was effective.

Woman: What I still don't understand is what youdo if the client is stuck because she has an expectation of getting a picture of a childhood incident, and now she's sitting there doing this and she can't get a picture.

OK, that's the same choice point as the congruent "I don't know" that we talked about earlier. Ask her to guess, make it up, lie, fantasize; it doesn't matter.

Actually, age regression is a very easy phenomenon. We said "Go back through time." She had very little conscious idea what we meant by that, but she responded quite easily to it.

Man: What specifically were you seeing on her face?

The same response that she originally demonstrated when we asked her about the feelings of the phobia. I watched her age regress until I saw a very intense example of it. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. There was whiteness around the eyes and the side of the face. There was some kind of scrunching of her chin. There was an increase in moisture on her skin, especially on the bridge of her nose. When that became intensified, I said "Now look at an image, that image there."

If you tell people to go back through time and they frown, that's also a cue. And you might try something tricky like saying "Well, go forward in time." "Go through time, jump back in time." "Go around time." Anything. It doesn't matter. The specific words you use are wholly irrelevant as long as you get the response you want.

Another way to think about it is that everybody with a phobia knows the feelings of the phobia. They have a fragment of the experience, so they can get the rest by overlap. How do you find your car keys when you want to go to the store and you don't know where they are?

Woman: I start feeling around through my pockets.

Man: I go through the house and look.

Man: I search my mind, going back to try to visualize where they are.

Woman: I shake my purse so I can hear them.

OK. If all else fails, you can go back to the front door and walk in again. Now, if you think about the responses we just got, those include the three main representational systems. If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all by overlap. She had the feelings here. The feelings, once anchored, stabilized her state of consciousness. Everything that she accessed as she closed her eyes and went back in her personal history had that set of feelings in common, guaranteeing that whatever picture she selected would be in the class called phobic experiences.

I used the same principle to help her have a complete focused visual

image of herself at a younger age. At first she had only a picture of herself, but no context. I ask her what color shoes she is Wearing. I presuppose that she can see her feet and her shoes, and that she can see

colors. She accepts the presupposition; she says "Black." Since she can see the shoes, then obviously "logically," she can see what they are on top of, the surface she's standing on. I request that. When she gets the surface, it blends into walls and into trees, or whatever the rest of the image was. It's a very easy overlap, or intersection, technique that allows me to assist her in recovering the image by constructing portions of it, a little at a time.

Man: What’s the difference between this techniques and systematic desensitization?

About six months. That's the major difference, which is a very expensive difference. My understanding is that it's straight conditioning. We have simply associated a new set of feelings, namely competence and strength, with the auditory and visual stimuli.

There is another very important difference. We are picking a specific set of feelings and assorting it, instead of just trying to wipe out the set that is there. The people that I've observed desensitization are usually trying to eliminate a certain kind of behavior rather than replacing it with something which is a positive response. They are the kind of people who answer "Not bad" when you ask "How are you feeling?"

We claim that every piece of behavior has a positive function. It's the

best choice a person has in context. It was far better for Tammy to be

phobic about bridges than it was to have no program at all. If you do systematic desensitization, and you don't replace the "negative" behavioral pattern with something positive, it takes a long time because the person will fight. It's their only defense. That's why it takes six months, because a person has to randomly put something else in its place.

Man: There is a replacement, though, with relaxation.

Sometimes it's done that way, but relaxation is not the resource that everyone is going to need in a phobic situation. If you're driving across a bridge, you don't want to become relaxed suddenly. If somebody is in a situation in which they need to cope and you give them feelings of relaxation, they may not cope! There may be real, genuine dangers in that situation, so one of two things will happen: either the symptom will come back later because it's protective, or the person will get hurt. We got a very strong anchor for confidence and for the resources that she has as an adult woman. We used that; we did not use relaxation. She was very alert during this process. Desensitization was an important step, in that people were able to cure phobias with it. I think that it just needs to be dressed up a little bit. Instead of using relaxation and associating it with everything, try associating other things besides relaxation. There are much more powerful resources in people.