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

The same difference appears if you compare American boxing and Oriental martial arts. In the Oriental martial arts you never oppose the force from another person; you take the force and utilize it to move in the trajectory that you want to move anyway. What I just had you do is a very precise kinesthetic metaphor for the difference between some traditional direct–command forms of hypnosis and the kind of patterning that we're teaching you here.

Man: When you notice an abreaction, do you ever ask the client to supply the content?

I don't. Asking for content is a traditional psychotherapeutic choice. I don't need content, so 1 don't ask for it. It slows me down. But each person has needs for feedback, and a belief system about what is appropriate and important. Your clients may have been trained by you or other psychotherapists to believe that they have to talk about the content of their experience. If either one of those conditions is true about the interaction, then you ought to involve content in it to satisfy those needs.

Man: Did Milton Erickson ever ask for content?

I think Erickson's done everything. I'm sure that at some point with some clients, he has gotten lots of content. I've also seen him do pure process, content–free therapy, so I know he had the full range. If you can do pure process work without any content, you already know how to work with content. That gives you the full range of choices about how to proceed.

This afternoon you've done two exercises out of the ten methods we've talked about. You did them very well, and were able to induce relatively nice trances. You won't know any of these other eight induction techniques until you do them. Make yourself a little promise for your own evolution as a human being. I'm only a hypnotist, so this is only a suggestion. As a communicator you owe it to yourself to have lots of choices about securing various outcomes. Make arrangements with friends and / or colleagues, or use your private practice to practice privately, and systematically go through the other ways of getting the same outcome. If you have ten ways to induce a trance, you'll always get it. Using a meta–strategy called "finesse," you can begin one type of induction, and if the response is not emerging quickly enough to suit your needs or the client's needs, you very smoothly go on to the next class of inductions and do one of those. If the response still isn't developing rapidly enough, you go on to the next one. The client's experience will be that you are smoothly going through a number of communications with him. He wilt never know that you tried one method, decided it wasn't working quickly enough, and went on to another.

We have attempted to engage your attention today, and to indicate that there arc worlds upon worlds of possibilities that each one of you brought here with you, that we would like to help you find the resources to get access to. Today we have covered a significant number of the patterns that we consider important in successful hypnotic communication and successful communication in general. We have gone through a series of induction techniques, and we ask that you add those techniques to your present unconscious repertoire as alternative ways of accomplishing things that you already know how to accomplish by other methods.

If you felt that we were moving too fast today, covering more material than you could assimilate at the conscious level, let me reassure you that you are absolutely right. That's a deliberate part of the technique that we have evolved in doing this kind of instruction, understanding that your unconscious mind will represent for you anything that you missed consciously. We thank your unconscious mind for its attention, and ask that your unconscious mind make use of a naturally occurring set of states that is going to happen later on for you tonight.

Sometime this evening you are going togoto sleep. During sleep and dreaming, natural integrative processes go on all the time in very dramatic and interesting ways. Sometimes you remember the content of such dreams; sometimes you do not. That's irrelevant with respect to the integrative function that dreaming has. I call upon your unconscious minds, during the natural integrative processes of dreaming and sleep tonight, to make use of that opportunity to sort through the experiences of today. Your unconscious can select and represent those portions of what we or someone else did that were effective in eliciting certain responses that you would like to add to your repertoire.

So your unconscious can sort through the experiences of today, both the ones you are aware of and the ones that were going on outside of your awareness, and store in some useful form whatever it believes would be useful additions to your repertoire, so that in the days and weeks and months to come, you can discover yourself evolving your own behavior, coming up with new choices appropriate for your needs in context, and doing things that you learned here without even knowing about it.

At the same time that you are having these bizarre and unusual dreams, we call upon your unconscious to ensure that you sleep soundly and that you will awaken rested and refreshed, and join us here to being the seminar tomorrow morning in this room.

Thank you for your attention today.

The topic this morning is utilization. Once you have achieved an altered state, how do you utilize it in a useful way? Today I'm assuming that you already have attention and rapport, and I'm assuming that you've already done an induction 1and your client is sitting there in an altered state.

The major positive attribute of an altered state of consciousness is that you don't have to fight with a person's belief system. The unconscious mind is willing to try anything, as far as I can tell, if it is organized and instructed in an appropriate way. The conscious mind is continually making judgments about what is possible and what is not possible, rather than simply trying some behavior to find out whether it is possible or not. The conscious mind with its limited belief system is typically extremely limited in terms of what it is willing to try, relative to what the unconscious is willing to try. The unconscious typically doesn't have those kinds of restrictions.

If a person arrives in your office and says "I can't do this and I want to" a useful assumption to make is that she has already done everything she is capable of to try to make that change with the resources she can get to consciously, and has failed utterly. So the least interesting part of the person to communicate with will be her conscious mind. One way to avoid fighting with someone or having "resistance" is simply to get the conscious mind out of the way and go directly to the "boss."

A question many of you have been asking since this workshop began is "What do I do once I get someone in a trance?" The simplest way to utilize any induction is to give the person a content–free set of instructions that essentially says "learn something," "change now." We call these ''process instructions" because they are very specific about the process the person is to go through to change and solve problems, but very unspecific about the content. The what is left ambiguous, but the how is specified. Following many of the inductions we did earlier, we gave a brief process instruction. The benediction we gave you at the end of the day yesterday was essentially a process instruction. In that benediction we instructed you all to review your experience, pick out the useful pieces, and use them in the future. Notice that the content was left out. We didn't say which experiences to pick, exactly when to use those experiences, or what to use them for. All those specific details are left to the unconscious mind of the listener.