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

About six months later Carlos Castaneda's book Journey to Ixtlan was published. Near the end of the book is a really vivid description of a double induction. Don Juan is talking into one ear, and Don Genaro is talking into the other ear simultaneously. The descriptions we had gotten from people that we had done double inductions with before I read the book matched the description that Carlos gave perfectly— feeling split down the center of his body, and so forth.

You can tell from the description in the book that Carlos is what we call a "derived kino." He takes images and words and pays most attention to the feelings that he derives from them. With such a person, the double auditory input really does cause a sensation of kinesthetic splitting. Each message will be processed by the opposite hemisphere, and the derived feelings will be experienced in the same half of the body as the auditory input. The difference in the auditory input to the two ears will be represented differently in the two halves of the body. The differences in those two kinesthetic representations will be most evident at the mid–line, giving an experience of being split or divided.

Leverage inductions, pattern interruption, and overload are all similar in that they give you ways of getting a wedge in the other person's experience to start the process. You use those methods to break the state of consciousness he walks in with, in favor of a more fluid state. Once you have overloaded, interrupted, or created a leverage situation, you simply become more directive, and link that situation with what you want to develop. "And as whatever is going on continues, you will find your eyes becoming drowsy and beginning to close and develop a deeply relaxed state." You proceed to develop a trance, and then go on to use the trance state as a context for the change work that you want to accomplish.

Another induction method is just straight personal power. You just congruently tell somebody to go into a trance. If they go into a trance, fine. If they don't, you wait until they do. Of course, all the other patterns—nonverbal mirroring, etc. — are available to you at the same time. If you tell someone to go into a trance, and your behavior is absolutely one hundred percent congruent that they are going to go into a trance, they will. You have to be completely congruent for this maneuver to work. If you are congruent in your expectations, you will elicit the appropriate response.

There are additional maneuvers you can add that allow you to be more effective. If the person replies "I really want to, but I'm notable to"you say"Of course, you aren't able to. I'm waiting for him, " So you dismiss the conscious response in favor of waiting for something else to emerge. If he objects, and you don't respond but just wait expectantly, he is likely to go back and try to go into trance again, until he gets it right.

A meta–strategy for creating congruency in yourself is to remember that you can fail only if you set a time limit on yourself. Most people think they have failed if they don't get a deep trance instantly. That's only a signal that you have to do more, or try something different.

If you have any personal hesitations or incongruencies about what you allow yourself to do, a way to create congruency in yourself is to use the language pattern called "quotes." You can say "Let me tell you about the last time I went to Phoenix to see Milton Erickson. I walked into Milton's office, and then Milton came rolling into the room in his wheelchair, and he looked at me and said "Go into a trance!' " When you use quotes, you set a frame around your behavior that says "This is not me; this is a report of an experience I had." However, of course, you deliver any induction you want to with full force. If you get the trance response, great; you utilize it. If you don't get the response, and you are unwilling to continue until you do, then you can always dismiss it. 'That's what Milton said to me; of course I wouldn't do that myself." The pattern of quotes is a really nice way totry on new behavior that you are unsure of. You can allow yourself to know what it would be like if you were able to do it, by actually doing it as if you were someone else.

Another induction procedure is called "stacking realities." I guess the easiest way to explain a stacked reality is to tell you about doing a group in Michigan once. I was sitting there in Weber's Inn, talking to a group of people about metaphor. And as I began to talk to them about metaphor, it reminded me of a story that Milton Erickson had told me about a group that he had done once at the University of Chicago, in which there were a large number of people sitting around just like this in a sort of semi–circle, and he was up at the front. Now, as he sat there talking to this group of people at the University of Chicago, the story that seemed most appropriate at that point in time was a story that his father had told him about his grandfather who came from Sweden. His grandfather Sven was running a dairy in Sweden, and he found that the cows settled down better if he talked to them in a calm, soothing voice about whatever was on his mind… .

What I've done is to embed story inside of story inside of story until I overload your conscious capacity to keep track of which statement refers to which thing. Even in a sophisticated group of people like this, if I were to go on with the story now and deliver induction messages inside of the story, it would be difficult for you to know which of the realities I was referring to. Am I talking about Grandfather Sven talking to the cows, Erickson talking to a group in Chicago, Erickson's father telling him a story, or is it me talking to you? While your conscious mind is trying to figure that out, your unconscious will be responding.

Let's take an example that is more related to therapy. Let's say a woman comes to see me and says "I have this presenting problem X." I invite her to notice the wind moving the tops of the redwood trees as she looks out of the office window, and begin to relate to her a story about a young woman who had once come to me and sat in that very chair and had watched … closely … the tops of the same redwoods waving … not pushed, of course, by the same wind … back and forth … and that young woman had fallen into a deep reverie, and even as she was listening to the tone of my voice, she remembered a dream in which she had gone to the country to visit someone … someone special who had made her feel particularly comfortable… .

I've just included the beginning of a hypnotic induction inside of the stacked reality. With the stacked reality I overload the person's conscious ability to keep track of what level of reality I'm now operating on. The result then is a confusion, but typically a much more gentle confusion than you get with sensory overload. One way to increase this effect is to incorporate aspects of present reality into the story. The redwoods exist in present reality as well as in the story, so if I talk about the redwoods, it is easy to go back and forth between the two realities. Soon a client gives up trying to keep track of which reality I'm talking about.

Inside of any of those realities, I can then embed a process instruction to make changes. "And as I talked to that young woman who had come to visit me … even as she had her dream … the contents of which I didn't know, nor did I need to … it was only important that she did … and the changes which are attendant upon such dreams … would manifest themselves in a graceful way in her future behavior. Even as I watched her in her dream …I remembered something that had happened once when I visited an old friend of mine in Phoenix, Arizona."