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

Early in my career as a hypnotist I had a lot of problems with clients dropping into a trance when I just wanted to talk to them. I wasn't yet making a systematic distinction in my own behavior. If you don't make distinctions, your normal behavior will be a reinduction signal, whether you want it to be or not.

If you make a distinction in your behavior between when you talk to a client at the unconscious level, and when you communicate at the conscious level, that gives you systematic choices about whether or not to keep his conscious resources around. If you have a private practice, you can use two chairs: one for trance states, and the other when you want to communicate with his conscious mind. Soon just indicating which chair to sit in will serve as an entire induction.

A special kind of anchoring is particularly useful when you want to elicit hypnotic responses. It's called analogue marking, and involves marking out certain words nonverbally as you're talking to someone. I can mark out these words as separate messages with my voice tone, a gesture, a certain expression, or perhaps a touch.

I might talk to you about people who are really able to relax– people who can allow themselves to be comforted by the situation they find themselves in. Or I could tell you a story about a friend of mine who is able to learn easily to go into a deep trance. As I said that last sentence, I was marking out "learn easily" and "go into a deep trance" with a slightly different tone of voice and with a wave of my right hand. They constitute separate messages within the obvious message, that your unconscious will identify and will respond to appropriately.

At this point I have connected a certain tone of voice and a certain gesture with the words relaxation and trance for many of you. Now, all I need to do is use that tone of voice more and more often, and your unconscious knows what to do. That voice tone conveys the message much more effectively than telling you to go into a trance, because it bypasses your conscious mind.

All of this is anchoring. A word like "relax" is itself an anchor—a label for something in your experience. In order to understand what I mean when I say the word "relax," you have to go inside and access your personal experiences related to that word. You have a fragment of the experience as a way of understanding the word itself. And as you are feeling comfortable, I connect that experience with a certain voice tone. Now my voice tone also becomes an anchor for that response.

You can use any discriminable aspect of your behavior to do this. Milton Erickson would sometimes move his head to the right or the left when he wanted to mark something out for special attention. The same voice will sound slightly different when coming from a different location in space. The difference may not be enough for you to notice consciously, but it will be enough for you to respond to unconsciously, even if you have your eyes closed.

By the way, analogue marking isn't something new. Your clients already do it, and if you listen to what they mark out for you, you can learn a lot. When I was running a private practice, I got really bored after a while, so I sent a letter to all the psychiatrists I knew, asking them to refer me their most outrageous and difficult clients. They sent me fascinating people.

One psychiatrist sent me a woman who would wake up in the middle of the night sweating profusely and vibrating, and no one could figure out what was wrong with her. She was terrified because this occurred quite frequently, and she had been in therapy for several years without any reduction in her symptoms. The psychiatrist was giving her pills to try to control her symptoms. He even hooked her up to an EEG machine for hours at a time, waiting for one of these fits to occur so he could measure it. Of course the fits would never happen until he took her off the machine. He'd hook her back up again, and then she'd sit there for hours longer, and again nothing would happen.

This woman was quite conservative and from a wealthy area of town. When she came to see me she was terrified, because her psychiatrist had told her I was a weirdo who did strange things. But she wanted to change desperately, so she came to me anyway.

She was sitting in my office looking very timid when 1 walked in. I sat down, looked straight at her and said "You've been in therapy too long. So your conscious mind obviously has failed utterly to deal with this problem and the conscious minds of your therapists have failed utterly to deal with this problem. I want only your unconscious mind to tell me exactly what I need to know to change you—nothing more and nothing less—and I don't want your conscious mind to intrude unhelpfully. Begin speaking now!"

' That's a strange set of instructions, isn't it? I had no idea if she would be able to deal with those instructions on any level, but she answered in a really interesting way. She looked back at me and said "Well, I don't know. I'll be sitting in my room at night and I'll switch off the electric light, I'll lie down in my bed … and, you know, it's really very shocking because I've been in treatment for years now, but I still wake up scared and covered with sweat."

• If you listen to that communication, it's pretty straightforward. The words that she marked out were "electric shock treatment." That gave me the information I needed. Her present psychiatrist didn't know it, but in the past another psychiatrist had given her electric shock treatment.

Some time ago her husband had become wealthy and moved her from a neighborhood where she lived around people whom she loved and enjoyed, to a very fancy house on a hill where there were no other human beings. Then he went off to work and left her there alone. She was bored and lonely, so she began to daydream to entertain herself. She was seeing a psychiatrist, and her psychiatrist "knew" that daydreaming was "escaping reality" and that escaping reality was bad. So he gave her electric shock treatment to cure her. Every time she began to daydream, her husband put her in the car and took her down to the hospital where the doctors hooked her up to the electric shock machine and zapped her. They did this 25 times, and after 25 times she stopped daydreaming.

However, she still dreamed at night. She tried not to dream, but as soon as she began to dream, she began to experience electric shock. It had become an anchored response. She had all the physiological indications of it. When I went to school, this was called classical conditioning. However, her psychiatrist didn't believe in classical conditioning, so this never occurred to him.

This is an example of well–intentioned psychotherapy that created a problem. The people who gave her the shock treatments really believed they were doing her a favor. They believed daydreaming was escaping reality, and therefore bad. So rather than channeling her fantasies in a useful direction, they gave her electric shock treatment.

I'd like to have you all practice using analogue marking to get a response from someone else. I want you all to pair up and first pick some observable response to get from your partner. Pick something simple, like scratching her nose, uncrossing her legs, standing up, getting you some coffee—whatever you want. Then start talking to her about anything, and weave instructions to do the response you selected into your conversation. You can include the instructions one word or phrase at a time, marking them out tonally or visually, so that your partner can respond to them as one message.