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

When you want to change someone, you can give him experiences to get him to make a new and more useful generalization—one that would make his life more positive. Of course, the first thing you need to decide is what generalization you would like to build. How could you determine that?

Man: Ask him what he admires in somebody else.

Yes, you could do that, and then you'll find out what he thinks he could benefit from. I don't do it that way. I figure that if what he wants would be a good choice, he would have learned it already.

I don't buy into the "you shouldn't impose upon people" philosophy, because I think you end up doing it anyway without knowing it. I keep meeting people who are the result of that kind of imposition. When I ran a private practice, over half of the people who came to me were there primarily because they had been screwed up by therapists — often "non–directive" therapists. The therapists didn't know they were doing it. They were intending to help their clients in some way, and instead they screwed them up.

For example, some therapists teach their clients about self–esteem, and then they can feel bad about not having it. That happens over and over. Most people never felt bad about feeling bad when they first went to a therapist. They just felt bad. But when they were taught about self–esteem, then they felt bad about feeling bad, and they were worse off! When you give people concepts, you have to be careful to do it in a way that takes them somewhere useful.

Some therapists teach their clients to accept all their limitations so they can be happy. Sometimes that works really well. However, if they come in with hysterical paralysis, that probably won't be a very good way of working with them.

Man: What do you mean by "happy?"

I'm not talking about philosophy here; I'm talking about the subjective experience of enjoying something, it's a subjective, kinesthetic experience in which people have the absence of pain, and they have stimulation of the nervous system in such a way that they describe themselves as liking what they're getting rather than being in a state of desire. You see, if people come in to therapy whining and moaning and complaining, it seems to me that they're not happy.

If you as a clinician don't have your own life together, it's going to be really hard to figure out a basis on which to do something to help somebody else. When I did an ongoing training program, one of the most rigorous parts of the program was that my students had to get their own personal lives together — right away! Because if I found out they were having long, meaningful conversations all night with their wives and things weren't working out, and they felt like they had to have affairs, I canned them right out of the program. They knew I would do it, so they made sure they got their lives together.

It is of paramount importance to me for people to be able to take care of themselves. I'm not talking about being able to survive, but taking themselves to places that are enjoyable. I make jokes about my next book being titled "OK is Not Good Enough." I don't consider the paradigm of repair a good paradigm. The paradigm of repair in psychotherapy, where people come in unhappy and broken and you fix them, is only part of the picture. It makes more sense to me that we build models based on notions of generativity.

People are just beginning to do this in the area of physical health. For a long time, medicine used a model based totally on repair. However, the only really amazing thing that medicine has done is to invent innoculations. The fact that people can be injected with vaccines against polio which prevent them from getting it is a miracle. It's the finest thing medicine has ever done, and it's certainly not based on repairing what's gone wrong.

If you're generative, you modify things so they're better than they were when you started. You utilize the natural propensities of the system to make the system even more effective. That's the way I think about everything. I want to work with what's there in such a way that it's better than it needs to be — not just adequate. My personal criterion for doing successful work is whether people are happier. Those are just my own ethics. You can work towards unhappiness if you want. You see, whatever you do, you set up target states. If you're a lawyer, you don't work toward happiness, you work toward conviction: toward getting people convinced of things. If you're a clinician, hopefully you set up happiness and competence as target states.

A lot of therapists set up understanding as a target state. Clinicians have been very successful at building paradigms that give people understanding, so that people understand exactly what's wrong with them. They end up with clients who really understand, but they still can't cope with the world, and they can't make themselves happy. Other therapists have referred me dozens of clients who would sit down and give me a long, detailed explanation about where their problems came from, why they have them, and how they affect their lives. I'd say to them "Well, that's really interesting, but what do you want?" They'd say "I want to change it!" So I'd say 'Then why did you tell me all of that stuff?" They'd respond "Well, don't you need to know that?" I'd say "No, I don't have to know about that." They'd be flabbergasted, because they had just spent five years and $50,000 finding out why they were screwed up!

Husbands and wives often make each other unhappy because they set "being right" as a target state. So they end up being right, but everybody ends up being unhappy as a result.

We want to teach you to build learnings in the context of hypnosis. You can use these techniques to get any outcome you want. If you want to you can make people unhappy, you can make them ill, or you can give people hysterical paralysis or phobias. Those things don't seem eminently fruitful to me. However, if that's what you want to do, it's an ethical choice that you'll have to make.

The question I'm asking you is "What experiences could you give somebody that would result in building a useful generalization?" It's a practical question.

Man: If he already has a troublesome generalization, you could give him a counterexample.

Yes, that would work. I believe that learning can happen in a number of ways. One of the best ways to teach the conscious mind something is to provide it with a counterexample to what it believes. There's a nice example of this in our book Magic I. In one of our groups a woman who couldn't say "no" lay down on the floor and began to cry hysterically. She exclaimed that she was helpless and people walked all over her. I asked her "What do you mean 'people walk all over you'?" Then I started to walk across the room towards her to stomp all over her. Having been in enough of my groups, she was smart enough to get out ofthe way.

She said that she lived with two other women, and they constantly made her do everything and ran her life. I said "Well, why don't you do something primitive like turn around and say 'Don't do that'?"

Saying that got one of the most intense nonverbal responses I have ever seen in a person. She turned paler than she already was and said "I can't do that." I said "What do you mean you can't do that?" She said "Well, I can't tell them 'no.'" I asked "What would happen if you told them you wouldn't do the dishes or you wouldn't do something else?" She said "Oh, it's just impossible."

She ended up telling us a traditional story that would please a psychiatrist. She had learned not to say "no" when she was a little girl. One day she was about to go to the store with her mother, when her father said "Why don't you stay home with me?" She said "No, I'm going to go with mommy." She went with mommy, and when they came back to the apartment, her father was lying on the floor covered with blood. His hand was about two inches from the telephone. He had been an alcoholic, and had just died.