Richard Bandler - Trance–formations. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Structure of Hypnosis

In either case …I would like this opportunity …to ask your unconscious to prepare some material… . The carpenter who approaches … the construction of a building… has … as his basic … tools to begin with … boards … nails … and the tools he brings… . The boards and the nails … have no meaning … until they are assembled … in a particular form … and attached to one another, … So, too, with little marks on paper… . The particular marks on paper that we call the alphabet are constructed … by small … boards or sticks… . And it's a lot easier to see … clearly … the finished product … that the carpenter … can construct …a house … a garage … than it is to see that same form … while the boards … and the nails are still separated … one from the other… .

There are natural … ways … of perceiving … which can be learned… . From the air … an entire skyline … for example … the San Francisco waterfront … can be taken in with a single glance … and its meaning discerned… . And indeed … from an airplane it's much easier to see such things , . . and to grasp … the entire … meaning of the waterfront of San Francisco … than it is to wander down among the buildings… . The same is true in many other areas of our life… .

So whether your unconscious chooses … to have you return with a sense of refreshment … or causes you to go in deeper, so signal me by causing one or both hands and arms to lift… . It's a choice that Heave entirely to your unconscious. … I would request that whichever choice it makes, it begin to assemble those materials … that I have been referring to … so that your perceptions can be ordered … in a new and more efficient way… . (She opens her eyes and stretches,)

As usual, I spent only the first four or so utterances staying with the pattern I said I was going to use, and then just went into everything else I wanted to do. I began by making statements that could be immediately verified in Barb's experience. At any point in time, we all have available to us a potentially infinite amount of sensory–grounded experience. The artistry is in knowing what part of sensory experience to choose to mention. It's particularly useful to choose anything that you guess would be outside of her awareness until you mention it. I was fairly certain, for example, that she was aware of the tone of my voice. And indeed she was. That came as no surprise. However, she was less aware of the feeling of the rung of the chair and the support it offered to the heels of her feet. So when I mentioned that, you could see more observable changes in her. She had to change her present consciousness in order to verify that what I said was true.

Two things happened by that maneuver. Number one, I gained credibility; what I said matched her experience. The second thing is that since she wasn't attending to the sensation of her feet touching the rung of the chair until I mentioned it, it was also a covert instruction to change her present consciousness—in this case in the direction of attending to a body sensation.

I made half a dozen remarks like that. Then there was a sudden shift in the kind of verbalizations I offered Barb. What did I do?

Woman: Then you went into metaphor,

I did something else before that.

Man: You started leading.

Yes. First I was just pacing: making statements describing her experience. And then what kind of statements did I make? Man: Suggestions to close her eyes.

I made suggestions about eye closure, but she was already doing that. We call that an incorporation. She was doing something, so I incorporated it into what I said.

Right after eye closure, I started making statements about internal states that I wanted her to develop. I said things like "a growing sense of comfort and security as you sit here." For me, the nonverbal signs that she already offered—slower breathing, muscle relaxation, etc. — have the name "comfort." They may not for Barb. The word "comfort" has as many different meanings as there are people in this room. When I use words like "comfort," I'm no longer talking in sensory–grounded terms. I'm suggesting that such states develop in her—whatever those words may mean to her.

I hope that you all have some appreciation for what the rest of my statements were about. I have to explain that Barb had asked me earlier for a particular kind of change with reference to an academic skill that she wants. I told a series of metaphors directed toward preparation for that change. You may be able to find some way of making sense out of that, and you may not. She has a way of making sense out of it, and that's the important thing.

Barb: I didn't at the time. It was just so many words. I just quit trying to deal with it consciously.

Exactly. And that's one of the responses that I want. "It was so many words that I just quit trying to make sense out of it. What the hell are you talking about? Carpenters and the San Francisco skyline. And from a plane, it's different than it is walking around among the buildings,"

In other words, the latter part was tailored to the request that she had made of me earlier. As I told the metaphors, her conscious mind did not understand. However, I received signals that her unconscious understood the reference and was beginning the preparations that I had requested of it. Are there any questions about what I did?

Man: You decided not to pursue the hand levitation?

No, I offered her a choice. I always do.

Man: Didn't you get some resistance to levitation and then give her an alternative?

There was no resistance. Her hand began to lift. The movements in her fingers and thumb were already there. Then I offered the second alternative, and her unconscious selected that one. If I had not offered the second choice, her hand would have continued to rise.

I made suggestions about hand and arm levitation and got twitches, which almost always precede the actual movement. At that point I remembered I was supposed to be demonstrating inductions, not trance phenomena. So I made the suggestion about her bringing herself out with a sense of refreshment and renewal and delight that she had achieved so much so quickly.

A good hypnotist is like a good government. The less you do to achieve the outcome effectively, the better you are at your job. My way of thinking metaphorically about what Barb and I did is that she allowed me to enter a loop with her in which I could feed back certain parts of her experience which allowed her to alter her state of consciousness radically. But the entire time, she was leading in the sense that I was being responsive to the changes in her, incorporating those, and then making a suggestion about where we ought to go next. She accepted all the suggestions I made to her. If she had indicated at any point that I was making a suggestion that was not appropriate for her, I would have offered alternatives.

Man: How would you know when a suggestion was inappropriate for her?

A reversal of all the growing signs of trance would indicate that. Any reversal of the muscle flaccidity, the breathing changes, the lower lip size changes, or skin color changes would have indicated to me that I had just proposed something that was not appropriate for her.

Man: I was wondering what you thought of her nervous laugh at the very beginning when you said her hands were experiencing warmth. She laughed but you ignored it.

'That was when I interrupted and said "I hope you noticed that response." The response I was referring to was the muscle flaccidity, the pupil dilation and an immediate body sway. Immediately following my comments she laughed. She would not have laughed if I had gone on with the induction. Her laughter was a recognition that it was working. I had said only two sentences and it was already working and she detected a change. Is that true, Barb?