Richard Bandler - Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

I watched a woman at a party once. For three hours she had a great time — talking, dancing, showing off. Just as she was getting ready to leave, someone spilled coffee all down the font of her dress. As she cleaned herself up, she said, "Oh, now the whole evening is ruined!" Think about that: one bad moment was enough to ruin three hours of happiness! I wanted to find out how she did that, so I asked her about her dancing earlier. She said she saw herself dancing with a coffee–stain on her dress! She took that coffee–stain and literally stained all her earlier memories with it.

Many people do that. A man once said to me, "I thought I was really happy for a week. But then I looked back and thought about it, and realized that I wasn't really happy; it was all a mistake." When he looked backwards, he recoded all his experience and believed he had a rotten week. I wondered, "If he can revise his history that easily, why doesn't he do it the other way? Why not make all the unpleasant experiences nice?"

People often revise the past when they get divorced, or if they find out their spouse has had an affair. Suddenly all the good times they enjoyed together over the years look different. "It was all a sham." "I was just deluding myself."

People who go on diets often do the same thing. "Well, I thought that diet was really working. I lost five pounds a week for three months. But then I gained a pound, so I knew it wasn't working." Some people have successfully lost weight many times, but it never dawned on them that they were succeeding. One little indication that they're gaining weight and they decide, "The whole thing was wrong." One man came to therapy because he was "afraid of marrying the wrong woman." He'd been with this woman and he thought he loved her, and really wanted to marry her, to the point where he'd pay to work on it in therapy. The reason he knew that he couldn't trust his ability to make this kind of decision is that he had married the "wrong woman" once before. When I heard him say that, I thought, "I guess when he got home from the wedding, he must have discovered that this was a strange woman. I guess he went to the wrong church or something." What on earth does it mean that he married the "wrong woman"?

When I asked him what it meant, I found that he had gotten a divorce after five years of marriage. In his case, the first four and a half years were really good. But then it got bad, so the whole five years were a total mistake. "I wasted five years of my life, and I don't want to do that again. So I'm going to waste the next five years trying to figure out if this is the right woman or not." He was really concerned about that. It wasn't a joke to him. It was important. But it never dawned on him that the entire question was inappropriate.

This man already knew that he and this woman made each other happy in many ways. He didn't think about asking himself how he was going to make sure he got even happier as he stayed with her, or how he was going to keep her happy. He had already decided that it was necessary to find out if this was the "right woman" or not. He never questioned his ability to make that decision, but he didn't trust his ability to decide whether to marry her or not!

Once I asked a man how he depressed himself and he said, Well, like if I go out to my car and find there's a flat tire."

"Well, that is an annoyance, but it doesn't seem like enough to get depressed. How do you make that really depressing?"

"I say to myself, 'It's always like this,' and then I see a lot Pictures of all the other times that my car broke down."

I know that for every time his car didn't work, there were probably three hundred times that it worked perfectly. But he doesn't think of them at that moment. If I can get him to think of all those other times that his car worked fine, he won't be depressed.

Once a woman came to see me and told me that she was depressed. I asked her, "How do you know that you are depressed?" She looked at me and told me that her psychiatrist had told her. I said, "Well, maybe he's wrong; maybe you're not depressed; maybe this is happiness!" She looked back at me, raised one eyebrow, and said, "I don't think so." But she still hadn't answered my question: "How do you know that you're depressed?" "If you were happy, how would you know that you were happy?" "Have you ever been happy?"

I've discovered that most depressed people have actually had as many happy experiences as most other people, it's just that when they look back they don't think that it was really that happy. Instead of having rose–colored glasses, they have gray lenses. There was a marvelous lady up in Vancouver who actually had a blue hue over experiences that were unpleasant for her, but experiences that were pleasant had a pink hue. They were well sorted out. If she took one memory and changed the hue, it changed the memory totally. I can't tell you why that works, but that is how she does it subjectively.

The first time one of my clients said, "I'm depressed," I replied, "Hi, I'm Richard." He stopped and said, "No."

"I'm not?"

"Wait a minute. You're confused."

"I'm not confused. It's all perfectly clear to me."

"I've been depressed for sixteen years."

"That's amazing! You haven't slept in that long?"

The structure of what he's saying is this: "I've coded my experience such that I am living in the delusion that I have been in the same state of consciousness for sixteen years." I know he hasn't been depressed for sixteen years. He's got to take time out for lunch, and getting annoyed, and a few other things. Try to stay in the same state of consciousness for twenty minutes. People spend a lot of money and time learning to meditate in order to stay in the same state for an hour or two. If he were depressed for an hour straight, he wouldn't even be able to notice it, because the feeling would habituate and thereby become imperceptible. If you do anything long enough, you won't even be able to detect it. That's what habituation does, even with physical sensation. So I always ask myself, "How is it possible for this guy to believe that he's been depressed all that time?" You can cure people of what they've got, and discover that they never had it, "Sixteen years of depression" could be only 25 hours of actually being depressed.

But if you take this man's statement, "I've been depressed for sixteen years," at face value, you're accepting the presupposition that he's been in one state of consciousness for that long. And if you accept the goal that you're going to go after making him happy, you'll be attempting to permanently put him in another state of consciousness. You may in fact be able to get him to believe that he's happy all the time. You can teach him to recode everything in the past as happiness. No matter how miserable he is at the moment, he'll always appreciate that he's happy all the time. He'll be no better off, moment to moment — only when he looks into the past. You've just given him a new delusion to replace the one he walked in with.

A lot of people are depressed because they have good reason to be. A lot of people have dull, meaningless lives, and they're unhappy. Talking to a therapist won't change that, unless it results in the person living differently. If someone will spend $75 to see a psychiatrist, instead of spending it on a party, that's not mental illness, that's stupidity! If you don't do anything, then of course you're going to be bored and depressed. Catatonia is an extreme case of that.

When someone tells me she's depressed, I do the same thing I always do: I want to find out how to do it. I figure if I can go through it methodically step by step, and find out how she does it well enough that I can do it, then I can usually tell her something about how to do it differently, or else find somebody else who is not depressed and find out now that person does that.

Some people have an internal voice that sounds slow and depressed and makes long lists of their failures. You can talk yourself into very depressed states that way. It would be like having some of my college professors inside your head. No wonder those people are depressed. Sometimes the internal voice is so low that the person isn't consciously aware of it until you ask her. Because the voice is unconscious, she'll respond to it even more

powerfully than if it were conscious — it will have a stronger hypnotic impact.

Any of you who have done therapy for a long time during a day may have noticed that there are times when you mentally drift away while you are seeing clients. Those are called trance states. If your client is talking about bad feelings and being depressed, you'll begin to respond to those suggestions, like anybody does in a trance. If you have "up" and cheerful clients, that can work for you. But if you have clients who are depressed, you can go home at the end of the day feeling terrible.

If you have a client who depresses herself with one of these voices, try increasing the volume of that voice until she can hear it clearly, so it won't have the hypnotic impact. Then change the tonality until it's a very cheerful voice. She'll feel a lot better, even if that cheerful voice is still reciting a list of failures.

Many people depress themselves with pictures, and there are a lot of variations. You can make collages of all the times things went wrong in the past, or you can make up thousands of pictures of how things could go wrong in the future. You can look at everything in the real world and superimpose an image of what it will look like in a hundred years. Have you heard the saying, "You begin dying the moment you're born." That's a great one.

Every time something nice happens, you can say to yourself, "This won't last," or "It's not real," or "He doesn't really mean it." There are many ways to do it. The question is always, "How does this person do it?" A detailed answer to that question will tell you everything you need to know in order to teach him how to do something else instead. The only reason that he doesn't do something more sensible is that it's all he knows how to do. Since he's done it for years, it's "normal" — unquestioned and unnoticed.

One of the wildest propensities in our culture is to act as if things are normal under any circumstances. The most elegant demonstration of that is New York City, as far as I'm concerned. If you walk down Broadway, no one's looking around and muttering "Good Lord!"

The next best demonstration is downtown Santa Cruz. People are doing things, right out on the street, that would put any mental hospital to shame. Yet there are men in business suits walking down the street talking to each other as if everything is completely normal.

I came from a "normal" environment, too. In my neighborhood, when I was nine years old and had nothing to do, I'd hang around with the guys. Somebody would say, "Hey, why don't we go out and steal a car?" "Let's go down and rob a liquor store, and murder someone."

I thought the way to succeed in life was to go live with the rich people. I thought if I hung around them, it would rub off. So I went to a place called Los Altos, where people have money. Los Altos Junior College at that time had sterling silver in the cafeteria, and real leather chairs in the student center. The parking lot looked like Detroit's current year showroom. Of course when I went there, I had to act like all that was normal, too. "Ho hum, everything's cool."

I got a job working with a machine that you communicate with, called a computer, and started as an information science student. They didn't have the department yet, because someone had stalled the funding for a couple of years. Since I was in school and there was no major there for me, I was lost in an existential crisis. "What will I do? I'll study psychology." About that time I got involved in editing a book about Gestalt Therapy, so I was sent to a Gestalt Therapy group to see what it was all about. This was my first experience of group psychotherapy. Everybody was crazy where I grew up, and everybody was crazy where I worked, but I expected people who went to therapists to be really crazy.