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

At one point in the conversation she used a perfect idiom. She said "Well, I just felt like I was going down the drain." And I said to her "People don't go down the drain. Other things do!" And sure enough, when she called me the next day, she'd dumped all the booze in the house down the drain. I was there for two weeks, and I know she didn't drink again during that period of time,

I consider that a really interesting example of conversational reframing. There wasn't a wasted move in the conversation on either my part or her part. And what made it work, of course, was my ability to notice the sensory–grounded responses I was eliciting, and her ability to do that as well. She was quite sensitive to minimal cues and so forth. I suppose a person who is about to commit suicide would be, since this is their last time around.

In this example I skipped most of the steps I asked you to go through in refraining. However, the essence of what I did was the same kind of symptom subsititution — "What would you do if you didn't drink?"

One of the big advantages of hypnosis is that people's responses are amplified and slowed down. There's nothing you can do with a person in trance that you can't do with a person out of trance, as far as I know. I'm able to induce every deep trance phenomenon in the waking state. However, hypnosis slows the person down enough so that you can keep track of what's happening, and stabilize states long enough to be able to do something systematically. To do it in the waking state requires sensitivity, speed, and flexibility. With hypnosis, you stabilize a person in a particular altered state, so that she will stay there long enough for you to be able to do something.

Woman: In general, when do you use hypnosis—with what kinds of problems?

When I feel like it. Seriously, that is the only distinction I can figure out that makes hypnosis more relevant than something else. I started doing hypnosis for only one reason: I got sick of listening to my clients talk. I was so tired of it that I was becoming ineffective as a therapist, because I was not paying attention and responding to them in a way that was useful. I was responding to them out of boredom.

So I began just zapping them into a trance and finding out how little information I could work from and still give them what they wanted. Then the whole process of therapy became interesting again. Now I use it intermixed with everything else as a way of coloring what I do, mostly to keep me interested. I know 1 could get the personal changes more quickly and methodically, but for me, to sit down and do formal reframing is a boring task. Even though it's fast, it's laborious, because I have done it too many times. If I do something too many times, I don't want to do it anymore.

Hypnosis is a way of doing things in a bizarre and unusual way. Now I mainly create alternative realities with hypnosis. I create realities other than the ones that a person lives in—for instance, one in which she is a unicorn, because unicorns can do what she wants to be able to do but thinks she can't. I regress people to a younger age than when they first had to wear glasses and have them keep child–like eyes and grow up, as a way of working with myopia. It depends upon what people want. I just go for it in whatever way I think would be interesting.

Man: I'm becoming more and more interested in giving up my glasses and having normal vision. Could I do that using hypnosis? Do you have any astigmatism? Man: Yes. My left eye's really bad.

Well, that makes a difference. So far I haven't been able to do much with astigmatism. That doesn't mean it can't be done; I just haven't figured out a way to do it yet.

Myopia isn't too hard to deal with, because nearsighted people are just squeezing their eyeballs too hard. When they try to see something, they squint and strain, and that results in improper focus and blurred vision. All they have to do is learn the meaning of the word "focus." That's not really very difficult. William H. Bates developed a way of doing that years ago, and wrote Better Eyesight Without Glasses. It's just that people don't use it.

Do you know that optics is the only field that has ever claimed to be closed? If you read the literature from the 'forties and 'fifties, opticians thought there was nothing more to discover. Now it's opened again. Recently there have been some whackos who blew the field apart completely with light fibers and lasers and holograms. However, earlier introductory texts actually stated that the field of optics was a completely closed science! They claimed proudly that they knew everything that could be known, and that theirs was the only closed science.

The behavior of most modern eye doctors is still based on the idea that optics is a closed field. Most eye doctors have a very strong and very limited belief system about what is possible. Corrective lenses were originally designed to correct your eyeballs. Originally they gave you one set of glasses to wear for about three days, and then a weaker set for another three days, and so on, until your eyes got better. Then you gave all of the glasses back to the doctor. They don't do that anymore. Now they sell you one, and you keep it until your eyes go one way or another, and then they sell you another pair.

Man: So how about myopia? You say your cure for myopia is teaching people how to focus. How do you do that?

The way I go about that is to regress them to a time before they first wore glasses. Then I test their eyes, to make sure that they did not have myopia at that age. When I bring them back to their present age, I leave them with "child eyes" and grow up everything else from the eyeball out. I don't know what that means, but I've done it with a lot of people and it has worked.

I discovered this method when I did age–regression with someone who wore glasses. We used to do weird hypnosis groups where we just went around and zoned everybody out. I had age–regressed a man who was wearing glasses, and as he got younger, he couldn't see anymore. He was regressed to five years old, and he said "Hi there. I can't see anything. Why do I have to have this thing on my face?" and he reached up and took his glasses off.

I became curious, so I gave him a fairly standard eye test with his glasses off. I didn't have an eye chart, but there were letters on a poster on the wall, and I asked him to tell me what the letters were. He didn't know the names of the letters, so I had him draw them for me. He drew whatever he saw with squiggly lines. His writing was just like a child's. Then I brought him back up to be an adult and gave him the same test. Without his glasses he could no longer tell what the letters were. I regressed him to five years old, and he could see again. That was spontaneous. I gave no suggestions for that to occur. When I brought him out the last time, I gave him these instructions: "Now your eyes are going to stay five years old, and the rest of you is going to grow up." That's all it took for him to be able to see.

Woman: Did you do that all at one time?

Yes, during one evening. The results lasted for about two months, and then slowly his eyes started to get bad again. That's when \ started using reframing to find out what his purpose was for having blurry eyes. It turned out that over the years he had learned to do lots of things by having blurry eyes. Ordinarily he had what we call "see–feel circuits." When he looked at something, he instantly had feelings about it. Having blurry vision stopped the sec–feel circuit. During a time of stress, if he couldn't see something unpleasant, he wouldn't have the unpleasant feelings. I had to give him other ways of interrupting see–feel circuits, to take care of the secondary gain that came from having blurred vision.