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

Often Milton would talk to his clients about what it was like to be a small child. He would say "And when you were a very young child, and you first learned to crawl, you saw toes and table legs, and the world looked a certain way. And when you first stood up, you had a whole new set of perceptions about the world. The whole world looked different to you. When you bent over and looked between your legs, the world looked different again. You can gain new perceptions for yourself as you change your abilities. And as you change your perceptions you have the possibility of acquiring new abilities." This kind of description is really an instruction to do something—to change your perceptions. He describes an experience we have all undeniably had of doing so, easily. "And you may be able to remember being a child, or think about what it would be like to only notice the carpet, and the little mysterious things in the fiber … to only notice the relationship of the underside of tables … and then one day you learned to stand. Perhaps you held onto someone's fingers or the side of the couch, and you looked at the world. Rather than looking up or looking down, now you could look straight ahead. And what you saw looked very different. It changed the things that you were interested in, it changed how you saw things, and it would change what you could do."

When you tell that kind of story, it doesn't matter if things actually occurred exactly that way. All that matters is that if adults look back at what it must have been like to be a child, it seems as if that would have occurred. That means that adults will universally respond to that kind of story in the same way.

If you get someone to recall that experience, and the next things you talk about are experiences that could serve as the perceptual base for changing a particular problem, that sequence is a command. It's not just a story. The command is to change your perceptions using this particular data.

We aren't going to go into detail about this kind of metaphor during this seminar. However, you can make what you do more powerful and have more punch by using this in a simple way. You can think about what kind of responses you can elicit that will make your change work easier. Then you can think of universal experiences that include those responses, and describe those experiences to your clients after you put them in a trance.

One response that's very useful to elicit when doing hypnosis is the experience that one's unconscious is wise and can be trusted. What are universal experiences in which people respond appropriately without thinking about it consciously? … You can talk about how when you run, your body knows just when to make your heart beat faster, and your breathing faster, and when to slow them down again. Consciously, you have no idea just how fast your heart should beat in order

to get the appropriate amount of oxygen to your cells, and there's no need to, because your unconscious has a wisdom about how and when such things should occur.

This afternoon, I want to spend some time teaching you reframing: an approach that you can use with hypnosis to deal with almost any difficulty. I also want to teach you how to arrange explicit "yes"and "no 11signals, because if you know how to do that, you can go through any procedure in a trance and get accurate feedback as you do it. But first I want to give you some background.

How many of you have ever had a client with hysterical paralysis or something like that? Many people think it's uncommon, but it's not. It's an interesting problem. When I first encountered hysterical paralysis, I was fascinated by it. I had read that Milton Erickson had taken hysterical paralysis and moved it from one part of the body to another, and I had always wanted to do that.

When I finally got a client with hysterical paralysis, I decided to try something similar to what Erickson had done. I hypnotized her and moved her paralysis from one arm to the other. She walked out being able to use her left arm, which she hadn't been able to move for three years. However, her good right arm was now completely paralyzed. I was delighted, and had her come back the next day.

She was somewhat perturbed at me, because changing her paralysis made it obvious to her that her paralysis had a hysterical quality to it. Before that—no matter what the doctors had told her—she knew that the paralysis wasn't really in her mind. The doctors kept saying "It's in your mind" and she knew it was in her arm. But when it changed to the other arm, it was hard to believe that it was only in her arm.

The next day 1 moved the paralysis from her arm to her leg. She had to limp out, but both of her arms worked perfectly. She began to get even more perturbed at me. Moving her paralysis around accomplished something very important. She had a belief, and I gave her counterexamples. She believed that her difficulty was not in her mind. But when you go into the office of somebody who is working with your mind and not your arm, and you walk out one day with your paralysis in the other arm, and the next day not in an arm but in a leg, that has a tendency to make you question whether or not you have a physiological problem. Not only did this serve as a counterexample to her old belief, but it began to teach her that the paralysis itself could be moved.

I assumed that the paralysis had some function in her life, so rather than take it away entirely, I moved it again. She ended up walking out with paralyzed fingernails, which she complained about bitterly! How would you feel if your fingernails were paralyzed? What if you started out with just a paralyzed arm, and ended up with the fingernails on every single finger of your hands paralyzed!

When Erickson wrote about the case in which he moved someone's hysterical paralysis, he alluded to the main criticism of hypnosis as a treatment procedure: that hypnosis only treats the symptom and not the "basic need," so a hypnotic "cure" will only result in some other symptom appearing.

This notion of needs evolved out of the work of Freud. He believed that people had certain needs. In those days they accepted "needs" as a well–formed description of something that happened inside someone's mind. Once someone had a need, there was nothing that could be done about it. It was only a question of how the need would express itself.

Let's say you had a need to get attention. If that need wasn't being fulfilled, you might break out in hives or something like that to get attention. The attention would be the "secondary gain" that you would get from having hives. If you had a need for people to be more supportive of you and take care of you, you might get a paralyzed arm.

Back in Freud's day there was another guy named Mesmer, and Mesmer used to do things that intrigued Freud. Mesmer would take somebody with hysterical paralysis and make the paralysis go away, but later on the person would end up having some other kind of problem.

Freud got the idea that if you cured someone's paralyzed arm, the symptom would of necessity express itself in another way. Her paralyzed arm might go away, but her face would break out in hives. He even gave this a name: "conversion." It's also called "symptom substitution."

Hypnosis has often been accused of only resulting in symptom substitution. Critics have claimed that while hypnosis may remove one symptom, the client will of necessity get another symptom in its place. When I entered the field of psychology, I was interested in testing this criticism of hypnosis.

I became very curious about hypnosis because just about everyone in the field of psychology told me "Don't learn about hypnosis. It only treats the symptom." I learned a long time ago that anything in life that is avoided strenuously is probably worthwhile, so this aroused my interest. While there are exceptions, I've noticed that people tend to avoid things that are very powerful.