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

Her numbness became her best friend for quite some time. It became a teacher. When a symptom becomes a teacher for you, it becomes an ally, because there is nothing in the world that can't be made useful in some way.

If you think of psychotherapy, hypnosis, and medical science in general as making war on symptoms, you will be very limited in what you will be able to do. Fighting with her own unconscious mind is something the client doesn't do very well, and your conscious mind won't be able to do it much better.

A long time ago, before I became an official hypnotist, I had a relative who had a tremendous problem with her weight. She was a member of Weight Watchers Anonymous and she did all kinds of things like putting signs on her refrigerator. What impressed me about her was that she always bought food so she could resist eating it. There was always food in the house to not eat.

I remember that one time when I was just a kid and didn't know much about things, I went to the supermarket with her. As we were walking through the supermarket, I was kind of bouncing along behind her. She was putting lots of things in the cart that she wouldn't eat. One of the things she was getting was a half–gallon of ice cream. I asked her why she was getting the ice cream, when the day before she'd gone to so much trouble to not eat it. She said she was getting it for me.

I told her 1 didn't like ice cream, and that she didn't need to get it for me. She took the ice cream out of the cart and tried to put it back in the bin, but she couldn't do it. She said "Well, maybe your mother would like some." I said "No, my mother doesn't like ice cream, either." So she started to put it back again, and then she said "Well, you're going to have some friends over tomorrow." I said "No, I've changed my mind." She almost set the ice cream down, and then stopped again. She searched her mind, trying to put the ice cream back. I reached over, took the half–gallon of ice cream, and put it back down in the bin. Then I looked at her and asked "What's the matter?" She said "I don't know. I think I'm leaving somebody out."

I remember being struck by how confusing that comment was. It didn't make any sense to me until years later. She had left out somebody in her life—herself. She was a professional housewife who had a house that never got dirty, because nobody ever dirtied it. Her husband worked seventeen hours a day, seldom came home, and refused to talk business with her because he thought that was impolite. However, there was nothing left to talk about. They had no children. She didn't have a car, because her husband didn't think that she should learn to drive; it wasn't safe in California. So she had an empty house with nothing in it, and no one to talk to. One might say she was empty.

I wish I had known then what I know now—that there is an unconscious purpose behind behavior. The purpose docs not need to be meaningful in the sense that Freud thought it did. When I was first interested in psychology, fool that I was, I took a couple of courses at the University. One of those courses was called "Interpretation of Interpersonal Documents." We were going to learn to interpret things the "real" way. In that course, I discovered that people attach much more meaning to behavior than there actually is. Behavior doesn't have that much meaning, but it has a tremendous amount of purpose, and I want to demonstrate this to you.

How many of you in here know how to do refraining already? What I would like to do, both for those of you who do not know what reframing means and for those of you who think you know how to do it, is to give you a way of doing reframing with the unconscious mind. The way we usually teach reframing in seminars, it is a way for your conscious mind to communicate with the rest of you about something you want to change, and to generate new and more satisfactory behaviors to choose from. Today I want to teach you how to use reframing as a way of communicating directly with someone's unconscious without using her conscious mind as an intermediary.

The way we're going to do reframing today will be a little bit unusual, because you are never going to know what you are working on. The person that you work with is not going to tell you what she wants to change. She is not even going to allude to it, and in fact she herself may not know what it is. We are going to do this by setting up an unconscious signal system. Rather than talking to people's feet, you arc going to talk to something else.

I) Selling up Unconscious yes/no Signals with the Unconscious. Before you can do the reframing part, you need to be able to set up a yes/ no signal system, so that you have a way of getting feedback. There are many ways of going about this. One way is to use what are called "ideomotor responses." Whenever a person moves some part of her body without consciously doing it, that's an ideomotor response. Traditional hypnotists use what are called finger signals. They have one finger lift for "yes" and another one lift for "no." F.rickson had a tendency to use arms —to have a whole arm move up relatively involuntarily. But you can use head nods, skin color changes—any signal that is nonverbal in nature and is something that you can observe.

Remember that unconscious movements are slow and relatively jerky. If you are using finger signals and your partner lifts her finger up quickly, the way she would if you just asked her to lift her finger, you say "That's the wrong mind. I am not interested in that mind."

The conscious reframing model that is in the book Frogs into Princes is designed to use the client's conscious mind as a messenger.

She notices responses internally and reports what they are to you.

Rather than using the client's conscious mind in that way, this afternoon I would like you to go through a procedure of learning to set up ideomotor responses so that you can see the "yes" or "no" responses. The way you are going to do that requires that you first substantially alter somebody's state of consciousness. You can alter her state in one of the ways that you have already learned. You figure out what would be a sequence of experiences that would lead your partner to be in a very altered state.

When you are working with the person, you might tell her to sit there and as she sits there, remember a time that she took a long trip in a car. She was driving down the highway—perhaps it was nighttime, perhaps it was daytime. Perhaps it started in daytime and worked its way towards evening. And as the dusk began to fall and she moved down that road, she began to notice the vibration in the steering wheel, the hum of the engine, the repetitive movement of visual objects rushing past her. The din of experience … as you moved on … and on … through the evening. And as you did so … you became more and more relaxed … and you told yourself you had to stay awake … this was very important… . But you felt very tired … and you might look at a clock … once … and look at it later … and feel as if an hour should have passed … but only minutes had gone by. … Sometimes you would appear to daydream for a second … and twenty or twenty–five minutes would have gone by. …

All of these descriptions … that you can use … will lead your partner more and more into an altered state… . And as she goes into that altered state … and begins to relax … and become even more comfortable … then I want you to begin …to suggest to her … that she can use her unconscious mind … as a resource … a resource that she can learn from … and communicate with … and really have an experience … which is one that will be satisfactory to her… . And that the only thing which is necessary … to build good rapport with her unconscious … is to have a channel of communication… .