Richard Bandler - Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

One of the things Virginia Satir does is to find the kinesthetic counterpart of her visual complaint, and vice-versa. So you can look at the husband and say:

"You don't understand what she said, do you? You really have no idea what she experiences. Have you ever had the experience that she went to bed first, and she's been sitting there watching TV in bed, eating crackers? And you come in and get into bed and feel all those cracker crumbs all over your skin. Did you know that's what she experiences when she walks in and sees your stuff lying all over the front room?"

So there's no fault, no blame. You don't say "You 'rebad" or "You're stupid" or anything like that. You say "Here's a counterpart that you can understand in your system."

He says " Well, when we're in public, and I want to express affection, she's always standing back, always pushing me away." And she says "He's always making scenes in public. He's pawing me all the time!" That is his way, of course, of simply being affectionate, but she needs to see what is going on. He complains that she moves away and he falls flat on his face. He reaches out toward her and nothing happens. So you find a counterpart and say to her:

"Have you ever had the experience of wanting and needing help, really seeing the need for companionship and assistance, and it's like you're standing in the middle of the desert and you look around in all directions and there's no one there? You don't see anybody and you are all alone. Do you know that's what he feels when he comes toward you and reaches out and you back up?"

The point is not whether those are actually accurate examples or not. The point is that you can use the principle of sorting people by representational systems, and then overlapping to find counterparts between them. That establishes something that even the major insurance companies in this country have adopted, "no-fault" policies. Family and couple therapists ought to at least have that, and have a way of demonstrating it.

As I stand back and give her space to see what I'm saying, and I get in close to him and make good solid contact with him, the teaching at the unconscious meta-level is this: I can get responses from her that he would love to get, and I can get responses from him that she would love to get. That's never mentioned; that's all at the unconscious level. So they will model and adopt my kinds of behavior to make their communications more effective. That's another way of making contact and establishing rapport with each individual member and then translating between representational systems, as a way of teaching them how to communicate more effectively.

Reference systems are also important. What if someone comes in and tells you "I don't know what I want." They are saying that they don't have a reference system. We taught a seminar just recently and a woman there said that she had a very difficult time. She could not decide what she wanted from a menu. She had no basis on which to make that decision. She said her whole life was like that; she could never decide things, and she was always dissatisfied. So we literally made up a decision strategy for her. We said OK, when you are faced with a decision, go inside and tell yourself what it is you have to decide, no matter what it is. Let's say you are in a restaurant. Tell yourself "You must choose food." Then go back to sensory experience and find out what your choices are. In other words, read the menu. As you read "hamburger" on the menu, make a picture of a hamburger in front of you, taste what it would taste like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. Then read "fried eggs," see fried eggs in front of you, taste what they would be like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. After she went through the process of trying that a few times, she had a way of making decisions, and started to make them quickly and unconsciously for all kinds of things in her life.

As she went through that process a number of times, it became streamlined in the same way that learning to drive a car does. It drops into unconsciousness. Consciousness seems to be occupied by things we don't know how to do too well. When we know how to do things really well, we do them automatically.

Man: We were wondering about accessing smells. We played with that a little bit and discovered that they went visual to see the object and then to the smell.

Not necessarily. You used the sequence you described. You said "What we discovered they do is..." and then you described yourself. That is a common pattern in modern psychotherapy, as far as I can tell. Thomas Szasz said "All psychology is either biography or autobiography." Most people are doing therapy with themselves instead of other people. To respond more specifically to your statement, people can access olfactory experience in many different ways. One of the things you can notice, however, is that when people access smells, they will flare their nostrils. That's a direct sensory signal, just as the eye movements we've been talking about are direct sensory signals, to let you know what experience the person is having. They may or may not precede that with a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory access, but you can see the nostril flare.

Turn to somebody close by; one of you decide to be A and the other to be B. I'm going to ask A to watch B respond to the question I'm going to ask. A, clear your sensory channels and watch your partner's nose. B, when was the last time you took a good whiff of ammonia?... Now is there any doubt about that? It's an involuntary response. Usually the person will breathe in at the moment the nostrils flare.

Let me ask you all to do something else which is along these lines to give you another demonstration. As a child, you had lots of experiences. Maybe you had a grandmother who lived in a separate house that had special smells. Maybe it was some special food, or a blankie, or a little stuffed toy animal, or something else special to you. Pick some object from your childhood and either feel it, talk to yourself about it, or see it in your hands. When you have it in any of those systems, breathe in strongly and let that take you whereever it takes you. Try that for a minute. That's one way of accessing smells.

There are as many ways to use this information as your ingenuity permits. If you use visual guided fantasy with your clients, there are some clients you use it with automatically and it works fine. Other people you wouldn't even try it with. What's the criterion you use to decide that, do you know? If they can visualize easily, you use visual guided fantasy, right? We're suggesting that you reverse that. Because for people who do not normally visualize in consciousness, visual guided fantasy will be a mind-blowing, profound change experience. For those who visualize all the time, it will be far less useful. The only thing you need to do in order to make it work for people who don't normally visualize is to join their system wherever they are—wherever their consciousness is—establish rapport and then slowly overlap to lead them into the system you want to engage them in fantasy with. It will be extremely powerful, much more powerful than with someone who already visualizes.

If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all. Let me ask you to do the following: Roll your shoulders forward and close your eyes and feel as though something or someone is pushing down on your shoulders. And then take those feelings, intensify them, and let them come up into a picture. Who or what do you find there? As you get the picture, I want you to notice some dimension of the picture that is connected with some sound that would be occurring if that were actually happening. And now hear the sound.

That's the principle of overlap. You can always go to the state of consciousness a person indicates by their predicates, and from there you can overlap into any other dimension of experience and train a person to do any of these things.

Richard: I know. I did it myself. Four years ago I couldn't see an image; in fact I didn't know that people did. I thought people were kidding when they did visual guided fantasies. I had no idea that they were actually seeing images. And when I figured out what was going on, I realized that there were these differences between people. Then I began trying to make images. Of course, the way I first tried to make images was by talking to myself and having feelings, which is the way people who have trouble making images usually go about it. They say to themselves "Gee, I should look at this even harder!" and then feel frustrated. Of course, the more I talked to myself and the more I had feelings, the less I could see images. I had to learn to do it by overlap: by taking a feeling or a sound and then adding the visual dimension.

You can use overlap to train a client to be able to do all systems, which I think is a benefit for any human to be able to do. You yourself can notice which of the representational systems you use with refinement and sophistication, and which you have difficulty with. Then you can use overlap as a way of training yourself to be as sophisticated in any system as you are in your most advanced.

Let's say you have good kinesthetics but you can't visualize. You can feel yourself reach out with your hand and feel the bark of some tree. You explore tactually until you have a really good kinesthetic hallucination. You can visualize your hand, and then you look past your hand inside your mind's eye and see what the tree looks like, based on the feelings—as you feel the roughness, the texture, the temperature of the bark. If you visualize easily and you want to develop auditory, you can see the visual image of a car whirling around a corner and then hear the squeal of the tires.

Man: Would a congenitally blind therapist be at a disadvantage?

Visual accessing cues are only one way to get this information. There are other things going on equally as interesting, that would give you the same information and other information as well. For instance, voice tone is higher for visual access and lower for kinesthetic. Tempo speeds up for visual and slows down for kinesthetic. Breathing is higher in the chest for visual and lower in the belly for kinesthetic. There are lots and lots of cues. What we are doing is giving one little piece at a time. Your consciousness is limited to seven—plus or minus two—chunks of information. What we are doing is saying "Look, you normally pay attention to other dimensions of experience. Here's another class of experience we'd like you to attend to, and notice how you can use it in a very powerful way."

I can get the same information by voice tone, or tempo changes, or by watching a person's breathing, or the change in skin color on the back of their hand. Someone who is blind can get the same classes of information in other ways. Eye movement is the easiest way that we've discovered that people can learn to get access to this class of information called "representational system." After they have that, we can easily teach them other dimensions.

You might think that a blind therapist would be at a disadvantage. However, blindness is a matter of degree in all of us. The non-sighted Person who has no chance of seeing has an advantage over most other communicators: he knows he is blind, and has to develop his other senses to compensate. For example, a few weeks ago in a seminar there wasa man who is totally blind. A year ago, I had taught him how to be able to detect representational systems through other means. Not only was he able to do it, but he was able to do it every bit as well as every sighted person in that room. Most of the people I meet are handicapped in terms of their sensory ability. There is a tremendous amount of experience that goes right by them because they are operating out of something which to me is much more intense than just "preconceived notions." They are operating out of their own internal world, and trying to find out what matches it.