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

After that, she just never said "no." That meant she probably didn't keep her virginity too long. She was a homosexual, which I thought was interesting. That one experience with her father was enough for her to build the generalization that if she said "no," somebody was going to die.

I put her in a "double–bind" by telling her that I wanted her to go say "no" to someone on the other side of the room. She said "No, I won't do that." And I said "Did I die?" She said "What?" And I said "You just said 'no' to me. Am I dead?" She went through another set of visible changes and then said "Well, you're special."

1 had given her an experience of a counterexample to her generalization that if she said "no" people would die. At that point she could say "no" to me and know I would live, but she still couldn't say "no" to anybody else. So I had other people come up and tell her to say "no." 1 had to build a broader base of experience on which she could do something else.

This took a long time. You see, there's something terrible about knowing you're wrong, but not knowing what you're supposed to do differently. I didn't know how to do hypnosis then. Had I known how to do hypnosis, I could have changed her generalization much more easily, gracefully, and without all the struggle and pain.

Let me pose another possibility for building generalizations. Any time you define something as being new, you can just build new generalizations for it. If you define something as new, you can build a generalization without destroying or changing one that's already there. Give me an example of when that would be useful.

Man: Don't you do that with children?

I hope so. But I want you to give me a specific example.

Man: If you're teaching someone to multiply and he doesn't know anything about it, then you can give him a generalization about learning multiplication without breaking an old one. Right.

Judy: I disagree with that. I think that when you teach addition, you don't have any generalizations to break. In teaching my children multiplication, 1 teach them that it's based on addition. It's sort of like addition, but it's just a little bit different. So in that example I think you do have generalizations to break.

Sometimes hypnotic communication flies right by, doesn't it? Judy just said in essence "When I teach my children multiplication, I do in fact have to break generalizations, because I teach them that it's like addition." Now, I agree with her reasoning. The reason that she has to break generalizations is that she thinks multiplication and addition are related to one another and she teaches her children that they are. They are related to one another, but no more or less than addition is related to subtraction or division or exponents or anything else. If she taught multiplication as a totally new thing, she wouldn't have to break an old generalization.

Man: This workshop on hypnosis is an example. I wasn't aware that I knew anything about hypnosis until I came in here. For me it's totally new learning, so I'm not breaking any generalizations about living— being–growing. Since I assumed there were no old ones to begin with, I'm just making new ones.

I'm suggesting to you that there are at least two ways of building new generalizations. One way is to break an old one, and the other way is to simply build a new one. You see, one nice thing about people is that they can have incompatible generalizations within themselves. There's nothing that prevents them from being able to do that. There's a whole form of therapy based on trying to get rid of all your incompatible generalizations so you can be one–dimensional. According to that system, to be authentic is to be totally consistent.

There's no need to break old generalizations or get a person to be completely consistent, it can be simpler to define something as being new, so that the person has no generalizations and therefore no limitations. That doesn't mean the person will know what to do, but it does mean he won't have any interference once he finds out.

The nice thing is that you can define anything that exists as something new. You see, if you have a generalization that you can't get along with your mate, you can go for something besides "getting along." You can build a totally new kind of relationship that's different than any thing that you ever had before, because now you're going to understand something that you didn't really know about before. Before you were trying to survive. You were trying to get your way or be right. You never stopped and thought about what it would be like if both you and your mate did everything you could do to make your partner make you feel good.

If I can build a new outcome for you, and then teach you specifics about how to get there, either consciously or unconsciously, your other limitations can make it easier for you to get there. They won't get in the way of your new generalization; instead they'll get in the way of your doing all the other things that you used to do and which didn't work. So the limitations that somebody has can become assets.

Another way you can build generalizations unconsciously is to build learnings that encompass everything. In Greek society there was an occult group based on something called mathematics. Mathematics is now considered a science, but not long ago people who did mathematics were considered sorcerers, and thought of themselves that way. It was like practicing magic or some religion. Mathematicians at that time discovered that there were two sets of numbers. First they discovered positive numbers, and then they discovered subtraction, and with subtraction came negative numbers. This caused a division in mathematics. Some mathematicians thought that everything was addition. There were others who believed that the right way to think about numbers was subtraction. Those two groups had wars about who was right.

Then someone came along and said "Hey, we can put both of these principles into the same schema and call it algebra." The idea of algebra didn't require breaking any generalizations or violating anything. It only required being inclusive; it required getting a larger picture.

I used to go to lots of psychotherapy groups to find out what group leaders did. At one seminar they locked us all in a room and told us we were all jerks. They said the reason we were jerks was that we felt bad about ourselves. They said that since we sometimes felt stupid and helpless, or didn't feel like we were worthwhile, we were dummies. This was true because we had another choice. That choice was to feel good about ourselves.

They went through a rigorous procedure of torturing us for days and days, and somehow this was supposed to make us feel better about ourselves. What they didn't teach us is that feeling good or bad about yourself is really part of something bigger called feedback. You see, if you feel bad about yourself, but that doesn't lead you into changing your behavior so you can feel good about yourself, it's not very useful. If you feel good about yourself, but you're doing things that hurt other people and you don't get feedback about that, that's not useful either. Just because you feel good about yourself doesn't mean that you're doing good things; and doing good things doesn't mean that you're going to feel good later on.

One of the things that has amazed me more than anything else in my experience with human beings, is that people who are supposed to be in love, fight. And when they fight they do things that could really affect their relationship negatively over a long period of time. Usually it's because they forget what they are doing with each other. They forget that they arc together to be intimate. It slips their minds, and they start arguing over where they're going to go on vacations, how to bring up the kids, who should take out the garbage, and other wierd little things. And they arc really effective at making each other feel bad. They have forgotten something that would tie meaningfulness to the whole experience.