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

People said "Don't learn hypnosis, because it only treats the symptom" and my first response was "Well, I'd like to be able to treat the symptom. If I can't do anything else, that might be worthwhile." They said "No, no. If you only treat the symptom and you cure it, it will pop out somewhere else."

Since I am a mathematician, the idea of getting something to pop out somewhere else was so much like an equation that it was attractive. I thought "Oh, I'd like to be able to do that! "So I started learning about hypnosis, and experimenting to find out what happened when you took away symptoms. I tried taking a few volunteers who had some problems, hypnotizing them, and removing symptoms carte blanche, without doing anything else. I wanted to find out where the symptom came out, to find out if there was some systematic pattern in how the conversion took place. Any good mathematician is going to ask the question "How does the symptom know where to come out next?" Nothing is random. If atomic particles aren't random, it takes a lot of audacity to think that symptoms can violate the laws of physics.

I began to notice that there were certain patterns to how symptoms came out. The new symptoms seemed to accomplish the same purpose that the old ones had accomplished. When I removed someone's symptom with hypnosis, she got another symptom that resulted in getting the same goodies.

The other thing that I noticed —which I hate to inform the world of psychology of—is that the symptom didn't always come back. In fact, people were better off when it did come back. If the only way someone could get attention was with her paralyzed arm, and I hypnotized her and took that symptom away, then she simply did not get attention. That seems to me less useful than having a conversion.

When I watched therapists work, I started noticing that very often they succeeded in "fixing" someone by making the person more limited! That may be a difficult idea to understand at first. However, if somebody is not in touch with her feelings—for example, if she is closed off to the world as a way of protecting herself against a lot of the hurt and suffering that one can feel in life —and you take that away from her, she ends up getting slaughtered emotionally. That doesn't strike me as being a useful outcome.

I know a man who had that happen. The clinician who worked with him thought his ideology was more important than his client's experience. The therapist believed it was good for people to feel everything intensely, so he set about teaching his client to respond intensely without asking the question "When he does feel things intensely, how is he going to deal with that?" That clinician didn't consider that the mechanisms which have protected his client from feeling things intensely must be there for a purpose.

The difference between conscious reasoning and unconscious response is that responses seem to have purpose and not meaning. It's very hard for people to understand the difference between those two, because they usually try to figure it out consciously. And, of course, consciously you are trying to discern the meaning of the difference between meaning and purpose. That is a really good way to confuse yourself. And as some of you begin to engage in that process, I want to speak to the rest of you.

Purpose is simply a function. If something has a function, it accomplishes something. What it accomplishes is not necessarily worthwhile. However, it is habitual. It accomplishes something that at some time in the history of that organism had a worthwhile meaning to it. Most of you who are clinicians have noticed that people engage in behaviors which would be useful and appropriate for someone who is five years old, but not for an adult. However, once the program for the behavior was set up, they continued to use it.

For example, there are some adults who cry and whine to get their way. They don't realize whining isn't going to help them any more. When you whined as a child, if you had the right parent, you got things you wanted. But when you go out into the world as an adult, it only works with a few people. So you whine about the fact that it doesn't work, and get even less of what you want.

When I learned about hypnosis, I decided I'd find out if you could just make something go away without ramifications. I hypnotized eight smokers, and just took away their smoking habit. There were no detectable ramifications at all with four of them. If ramifications aren't detectable, that's satisfactory to me. If there is some underlying "pressing need" that never surfaces, that's all right with me. If the Freudian analyst says it will hang on forever, that's OK, too. If it works, I don't care if it leaves some "pressing need" as long as it never has an impact on the person's life.

However, with the other four people whom I worked with, conversions did take place. I checked up on all of them periodically, because I wanted to find out if anything had occurred that was unusual, strange, inordinately pleasurable, or an interference in their lives. 1 also had them come in and sit around in my office, because I wanted to observe whether there were any radical changes in their behavior that they didn't report.

Another man who had been a smoker had a very interesting and unusual response. When this man called me to report, he said the following: "Everything is going beautifully. I haven't even wanted a cigarette. Everything has been really cool. I haven't had any other problems whatsoever. By the way, do you do any marriage counseling?"

Now, I noticed a certain incongruity in his communication, so I told him to get his wife and come over to my office immediately. When they arrived, I seated them in the waiting room and left the room. At that time my wating room had a videotape unit set up in it so that I could watch people. I discovered that 1 could learn much more about people in the waiting room in five minutes than I could in my office in an hour. So I used to spy on people a lot. I had it set up so that no matter where a person moved in that room, 1 could hear and see them.

This couple sat in there and waited and waited, and I waited and waited. I kept watching them until I noticed something interesting. They were both engaging in such meaningful activities as reading magazines and staring out the window. There wasn't a lot to do. He was pacing around, and she kept looking at him and trying to talk to him. At one point he sat down next to her, and she opened her purse and pulled out a cigarette. She lit the cigarette and then stopped and stared at him. She took a drag off of the cigarette and looked at him again. He glanced at her smoking, got up, and moved away from her. She continually tried to engage him in conversation, but he would just give her short answers and go back to his magazine.

At that point I went out into the waiting room, lit a cigarette, handed it to the man, told him to smoke it, and left the room. He took the cigarette, and although he didn't want to smoke it, he kept it in his hand. He didn't smoke the cigarette, but he began to talk to his wife.

It had occurred to me that there was a strong possibility that over the years they had developed a signal system using cigarettes, I later used a little hypnotic investigation and verified that my hunch was correct. In their day–to–day routine they both engaged in lots of activities until one of them paused and lit a cigarette. Then the other would do the same thing, and they would pay attention to each other. They hadn't done that in the last two weeks, since I took away his smoking. They had ignored each other completely because that signal system was gone. That's a good example of something which is not meaningful in itself, but which has a purpose.

Another man came to see me because of ringing and pain in his ear. It had started with a small earache some time earlier; then he went deaf in that ear and also had chronic pain in the ear. He'd had five operations, and now there were no nerves left in that ear/Doctors had taken everything out, yet his ear still rang, and he still had the same pain he'd had before the operations. The doctors knew there was nothing left in his ear to hurt or make noise, so they decided that it must be psychological. Their timing was not something I would be proud of, but at least they didn't keep operating. They have to be complimented for that. At least they didn't say "Well, maybe it's the other ear!" Or "Let's go for the left cerebral hemisphere!"