Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

There is nothing that we have offered you so far, nor is there anything we will offer you during the rest of this seminar or in an advanced workshop, that isn't already in someone's behavior somewhere. What we've done as modelers is to figure out what the essential elements are, and what is unnecessary. Every therapy has dissociation. Every therapy has the kinds of sorting techniques we're using here, whether it's chairs or knee anchors or words. What is useful to have in every therapy is some way of doing all that: some way of sorting, some way of dissociating, some way of integrating. The names you use are wholly irrelevant, and most psychotheologiesare also irrelevant. There's really nothing that different between what we did and what gestalt people do by taking people back through time. TA people do a process called " redecision." They are all very, very similar.

We looked at all those different processes and tried to find out what the essential elements were, and what was extra and unnecessary. Then we streamlined it to try to find something that works systematically. I don't think there's anything wrong with desensitization, except that sometimes it doesn't work. That's because there are a lot of things that are extra, and some things that are essential are not always there. Some people who do desensitization also add the necessary resources unconsciously. But when they teach somebody else to do it, they don't teach that, because it's not in their consciousness. Our function as modelers is to sort those things out.

The other thing is that I don't know what kind of desensitization you are referring to specifically. Some use meters and machines. I am a far more sophisticated biofeedbackmechanism than any set of machines. I use really sophisticated sensory apparatus and internal responses as a way of amplifying or diminishing certain parts of the response that I am receiving. That's part of what makes one-trial learning possible in the kind of work we've been doing here with anchoring.

Man: What if a client is unable to use visual imagery?

It is not essential that people visualize to be able to do the phobia process, because the same formal pattern can be done auditorily or kinesthetically. The pattern of this technique does not require visualization. We wanted to use all systems as a demonstration. We don't need to do it with all systems. You could also first take a little time to teach the person how to visualize, using overlap.

Woman: Could you do this process without touching?

Sure, you can use a tonal anchor or a visual anchor. You can do it without touching. However, I would recommend that you do it with touching. Kinesthetics is an irresistible anchoring system. When somebody is touched, they feel it. When you make a visual sign at someone, they may look away or close their eyes.

Man: So the bail-out anchor could be a certain tone of voice?

Yes. Tonal anchors in this society are the most powerful because most Americans do not hear consciously. The number of people in this country who hear is almost nil, slightly more than the number of card-carrying musicians.

In England it's considered important to make class distinctions. In order to make class distinctions, you have to be able to hear different accents and tonalities. So English people are more acute at hearing tonal changes. Anyone who is bilingual or polyglot, and who has learned a tonal language, will have a good sensitivity to those kinds of changes.

Most people in the U.S. do not actually hear the sequence of words and the intonation pattern of what they, or other people, say. They are only aware of the pictures, feelings and internal dialogue that they have in response to what they hear. Very few people are able to repeat back, in the same intonation, what you say to them. We hear people literally. We donot add anything or subtract anything from what they say. That is a rare human experience, and for a long time we didn't realize that; we thought everybody heard words.

The real beginning of all this work started when we began taking people's words as a literal description of their experience, not just a metaphor. We started communicating back as if they were literally the way they had described themselves, and we found out that was the case. When someone says "When I focus on those ideas they feel right, but I tell myself it wouldn't work," that is a literal description of their internal experience.

Now we would like you to pick a partner, preferably somebody you have not had much contact with. It's easier to operate at the process level with strangers because their behavior is less apt to be an anchor for some behavior in you. We assume that you are all going to get changes with one another, given your usual patterns of communication. Try something new. The whole point of going through the exercise is to be exposed to new material and to do it, to discover how well it fits with your own personal style as a communicator. Until you engage all your sensory channels in playing with this material, you won't have it. Understanding fully is to be able to comprehend it in all representational systems, including behavior.

We'd like you to practice the two-step visual/kinesthetic dissociation process that we did with Tammy here. You don't need a full-blown phobia. You can use this process with any unpleasant response, to become familiar with the pattern. This, orthe "change history" process will work for nearly any presenting problem that I know of. Anchoring will get you almost everything. When you're done, use bridging or future-pacing to be sure that the new response will be triggered by the context where it's needed. Go ahead.

OK. How did it go? What questions do you have?

Woman: I noticed I was getting distracted because my partner was using many words that didn't match the experience I had internally.

What you need is a very subtle maneuver: You say "Shut up!" or you kick your partner!

One of the things that all of you can learn from this is that it's very easy to learn to talk in a way that matches your client's experience. The way to do that is described in our book, Patterns I. It describes the patterns of language that sound specific, but are actually simply process instructions with zero content.

For example, here's an exercise you can all do. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax.

Sometime within the last five years, each of you has had a very strong experience in which you learned something of great value for yourself as a human being. You may or may not have a conscious appreciation of exactly which episode in your life history this is. I would like you to allow that experience to come up into your consciousness. Sit there for a moment, with feelings of comfort and strength, knowing you're actually here, now. With those feelings of comfort and strength, let yourself see and hear again what it was that happened to you back there. There are additional things to be learned from that experience. I would like you to allow yourself the treat of seeing and hearing yourself go through that again so as to make new understandings and learnings which are embedded in that experience in your past history….

And when you've seen and heard something that you believe to be of value for yourself, I would like you to pick a specific situation that you know will occur within the next couple of weeks. Notice—again by watching and listening with feelings of strength and comfort — how you can apply that new learning and that new understanding to this new situation that is going to arise in the next couple of weeks. In so doing you are making elegant use of your own personal history, and you are transferring understandings and learnings from one part of your personal history, so as to increase your choices as a creative human being in the present. Take all the time you need, and when you finish, drift back and rejoin us….

Some of you may have a clear, solid, resonant understanding of what you've succeeded in doing; some of you may simply have a sense of well-being, a feeling of having done something without actually understanding in detail explicitly what it was that you were able to do by making use of a particularly powerful experience from your past in a new way....

Now I'd like you to begin to drift back slowly, understanding that if you've completed the process to the best of your conscious understanding, fine.... If you haven't yet finished, you've set into motion a process which can be completed comfortably outside of your awareness as you return your attention slowly here to this room….

Now, what did I actually say? I didn't say anything! Zero. There was no content to that verbalization. "To do something of importance for yourself... certain learnings... unconscious understanding from that specific experience in your past." None of those have any content. Those are pure process instructions. And if you have the sensory experience, you can see the process happening as you do it. That is where your timing is very important.

Let me give you a very different experience. I'd like you to close your eyes and visualize a rope... which is green. How many of you already had a different colored rope? If I give you instructions that have any content whatsoever, as I just did, I am very, very apt to violate your internal experience. I will no longer be pacing you adequately.

A skill that all communicators need is the ability to give process instructions: instructions that have no content whatsoever. That's the sense in which I mentioned earlier that Ericksonian hypnosis is the least manipulative of all the forms of psychotherapy I've ever been exposed to. In any communication with content there's no way for you to not introduce your own beliefs and value systems by presupposition. However, if you restrict yourself to process work, to content-free verbalizations with your clients, you are guaranteeing that you are respecting their integrity. If you do secret therapy there's no way that you can interfere with their beliefs or value system because you don't know what they are. You don't have any idea what they are doing, and there's no need for you to, either.

Woman: Why do you have to integrate the negative anchor, instead of just ignoring it altogether?

Lots of people go to hypnotists to stop smoking. The hypnotist hypnotizes them and says "From this point on, cigarettes will taste terrible." And he wakes them up and sends them away, right? They don't smoke any more because it tastes terrible. However, that leaves them with a whole set of dissociated motor patterns. It's the same with alcoholics. Alcoholics Anonymous says "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." That's a statement to me that their program fails to integrate motor programs which can still be triggered at a later date by the presence of alcohol. So all it takes is one drink and they have to continue—binge drinking—or one cigarette later on and boom! that person is a smoker again.

Dissociated motor patterns can always be triggered unless you integrate them. If you dissociate and sort someone, make sure you put them back together. Don't leave those dissociated motor patterns lying around. That's one of your professional responsibilities. People have enough dissociations on their own already. They don't need more.

Man: Have you ever worked with multiple personalities?

Multiple personality is a little bit complicated, because it depends upon who messed the person up in the first place. You really need to know the model of the therapist that wrecked the person to begin with. I have never personally met a multiple personality that wasn't madeby a therapist. That doesn't mean they don't exist, it's just that I've never met one. My guess is that there might be a few out there somewhere, but I'll tell you there aren't as many as therapists keep creating and bringing to me.