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

You see, one of the things that you may have noticed … is that if you've ever been in a room with a woman and her young baby … and when she looks at that baby and you see her face … there's something very special there … and very meaningful there… . And that special quality is something that's more important… .

Now … in my years of working with people … I've seen many people who forgot… . I've seen mothers who come in and yell at their children in front of me—they scold them, they strike them, they make them feel bad… . They've forgotten that special feeling, and they think what they're talking about is more important. . , . That's a terrible waste. …

When you see your husband doing that idiosyncratic behavior, you will have palms on your hands … and if you feel that good feeling inside you, that pleasant thread of enjoyment, not only will you have palms, but you'll have someone special in them… .

Now, I don't know , . . if you feel that you can afford … to do otherwise … but I know that as I go through life, it's important to me … to be able to appreciate and to enjoy all the qualities … that make a special person unique … and individual … not just some of

them, because what you're learning here is not just a way … that your unconscious can assist you in taking one piece of behavior and making it tolerable … but a way in which your unconscious can begin to appreciate every idiosyncratic piece of behavior… .

I remember when I was young …I didn't like the crust on bread …. And when I'd get a sandwich, the first thing I'd do is peel the crust off and feed it to the dog… . I had to be very covert about this because

my mother believed that the crust on Wonder Bread was nourishing. My mother was very naive. Now as time went on, I discovered that not all breads tasted like rubber; I discovered that there were some breads on which the crust really did taste good. There was San Francisco French bread, certain kinds of rye bread, and certainly cinnamon toasts of odd, interesting fashions. And I discovered that as time went on my tastes… changed … from one thing to another … and as your tastes change and you learn to appreciate something … that you didn't before … it makes you aware … and more alert … to just exactly what it is … that makes something important.

Now above and beyond all of this … there's something else going on here … which is that you've begun …a process … which can continue for many years … about learning to use your unconscious resources … to go deeper into a trance if you wish to … or just to communicate … with the unconscious portions of yourself … for the purpose of learning … and change… .

Now, one of the things that will help you … is to realize … the significance of one foot as opposed to the other. If you very slowly begin to move your right foot, you can wake yourself up … but if you hold that right foot still … and begin to move your left foot, something else will happen… . Try it. … Now isn't that interesting …. Now why don't you use that right foot … and under your own control and steerage bring yourself right back here to the Grand Ballroom. OK, thank you. You can go sit down now.

What I just did with Linda can be thought of in many different ways, because it includes a lot. Some of it was quite explicit and straightforward, and some of it was not. At the simplest level it's a process instruction. It included hypnotic language patterns and guided Linda through a sequence that will lead to learning.

You can also think about what I did as reanchoring. I accessed positive experiences and attached them to situations in which she used to be irritated with her husband. I instructed her to do that verbally, but the verbal part of my behavior was probably the least important part in getting the response from her. I was also anchoring tonally: I used one tone of voice to anchor her positive memories from the past, and another to anchor what her husband does. Then as 1 talked about her husband's behavior, I shifted to the tone that anchored the positive memory, to give her a new response to her husband.

Along with that, I was makinga content reframe: I was changing the meaning of her husband's behavior. Now seeing or hearing her husband do those things will simply be an indication that he is the unique person who is special to her.

I included another pattern that we haven't talked about yet, and several that we won't teach you consciously. The pattern I'm thinking of is a fairly complex one, and makes use of a kind of metaphor that we haven't taught very often. You see, there are two kinds of metaphor. One kind is based on isomorphism. That is, if a woman comes in who has two daughters that argue, I might tell her a story about a gardener who had two rosebushes which were snarled together in his garden. If you use isomorphic metaphor to produce change, you tell a story that has a one–to–one relationship to what is occurring, and then either build in a specific solution, or provide a very ambiguous, open–ended solution. You can read about that kind of metaphor in David Gordon's book. Therapeutic Metaphors,

There's another kind of metaphor that elicits a response which is really a command to do something or to avoid something. This kind of a story elicits a response without necessarily being parallel to anything in the person's life. I might tell a story about a person I know who was completely convinced that he was right about a particular way of doing something. He and I and several others were all involved in designing a computer, and we all had our own ideas about how to do it. He wanted to do something with the transformer that none of the rest of us thought could be done. When we disagreed he yelled at us and told us that he wasn't even going to waste his time talking to us about it. He said that we didn't know, and we didn't understand, and he was smarter than us. So he just went in and took the transformer, hooked it up, (lipped the switch, and it electrocuted him and killed him.

That kind of metaphor is very different from an isomorphic metaphor. It elicits a response of avoiding something. It's an exaggerated example of what I just did when I told Linda about the mothers who had forgotten about what they'd had children for.

I used other examples of this kind of metaphor. I told a story about myself, and how my tastes changed naturally as I grew up. That story isn't parallel to anything I know about Linda; it's simply a story that elicits a response—the response of things changing spontaneously. That's a response that can be very useful when doing hypnosis.

This kind of metaphor is particularly effective if you use stories that are universal in order to elicit responses. By universal I mean stories that everyone can relate to and will respond to in the same way. Almost everyone has experienced liking some food and later disliking it, or vice–versa, so I know that if I describe such an experience, almost everyone will respond to it in the same way: by accessing an experience which indicates that spontaneous change is possible.

Milton Erickson used to use this pattern very effectively. He put people into a trance, and then talked about going to school for the first time and being faced with the alphabet. "At first it seemed like an overwhelming task. But now each letter has formed a permanent image in your brain and has become the basis for reading and writing."

That's a universal example, for people in this culture, of something difficult becoming easy. Even if it didn't happen quite that way, as an adult looking back, it seems as if it would have happened that way. That means it's an experience that you can use with anyone to elicit the response of something difficult becoming easy. When people ask for help in making a change, you can be sure that the change will seem difficult to them. So it can be really useful to elicit the response of something difficult becoming easy.