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

Man: That's difficult with contacts. I wear contacts and I can't just take contacts off in times of stress like I could glasses. So I've learned how to defocus with my contacts still on.

You have an interesting presupposition, which is that you have to blur things somehow. You're assuming that in times of stress you don't want to be able to see what's going on until you can cope. It seems to me that times of stress are times when it's particularly useful to be able to see clearly. As soon as you have effective ways of coping, you won't need to blur your vision.

As I said before, years ago Bates came up with eye exercises to improve vision. For the most part his program was very successful, although it took time and was a lot of work. The main drawback was that the Bates program didn't deal with secondary gain. So if you were diligent and exercised, you could wipe out the only way you had to do something useful. That part of you would have to come up with a new way. It's a lot easier to change if you don't have to overcome your own internal parts.

Woman: Could you use reframing for weight problems?

That's definitely a heavy subject. Ambiguity is very important in hypnosis, you know. Obesity is no different than most anything else. You can do it with reframing.

Woman: Well, 1 haven't had much success. I've done reframing and clients have lost weight, but then they haven't been able to maintain their new weight.

Well, think about it, There is something which makes it more advantageous for them to be fat than to be thin. One possibility is that none of their responses will work as a thin person. The choices that they have available as a human being work as a fat person, but not as a thin person. If you grew up your whole life being heavy, you were never

the fastest runner. You were never the first one chosen to be on

your

track team. You weren't the first one chosen to be a square dancer. There are lots of experiences that you didn't have, which constitute the basis for knowing how to respond as a thin person.

If this is the case for your clients, you could create an alternative childhood for them—one that contains experiences which serve as a basis for responding in new ways as an adult. I do that with most people in whom I make radical changes.

In what I just said, I'm making assumptions about what the second ary gain is. I would use reframing to find out which part gets her to get fat again. I would find out what it does for her, and then I would know what experiences to provide.

One very nice thing about hypnosis is it gives you the ability to create alternative history. Erickson's story about the "February Man" is a good example. Erickson had a woman come in who didn't know how to bring up children and be kind to them and be a good parent, because she hadn't had one. She had been raised by governesses. Erickson went back into her personal history and appeared every so often as the "February Man" and gave her the experiences she was missing. Those experiences then provided her with the basis upon which to relate to her own children.

Hypnosis is just a tool. You can do just about anything with it. It's a tool to create any context or any response. But you have to know what response you want in order to be systematically effective.

Woman: I have a question about dealing with smoking. Could you regress somebody to a time just before they smoked and then reframe her to go the other way? She decided to smoke at some point, so could you reframe her to make some other choice?

Yes, and then she'll end up having total amnesia for ever having been a smoker. That's a slick move; however, you have to be very careful when you do things like that. I've done that with people. I've hypnotized them and removed their knowledge of ever having been smokers. I have regressed them to before they smoked and then given them an entirely different set of experiences. The problem is that other people in their lives began to think they were nuts.

If you do this with someone who has just moved to a new city, it doesn't matter, I did this with a client who was married, and when she got home, her husband offered her a cigarette. She said " I don't want one of those." "All right" he said, "You quit, huh?" She looked at him and said "I never smoked." He said "Don't give me that. You've smoked for twenty years." "I never smoked in my life!"

Woman: You could give the person amnesia for those conversations, too.

You could, but if you do it that way, you have to keep building on the change. You have to have her go into an amnesic state every time somebody says "Oh, you used to smoke." She will eventually begin to become confused and disoriented, because so much of her experience is in the amnesic state. She has yellow stains on her teeth, and she doesn't know where those stains came from. She asks her dentist, and the dentist says Smoking stains. She says "But I've never smoked." The dentist says "You're kidding!" Your client says congruently "No, I've never smoked." The dentist then writes a journal article about this new phenomenon.

You have to be somewhat graceful about how you do these things. I did it one time to try it. It worked very well, but the ripples that resulted from that change were a bit disastrous.

Man: Couldn't you include in the instructions that other people will assume that she has been a smoker? You would instruct her not to be too disturbed by that, just to ignore it.

Yeah, I did that with the woman I told you about, but it became disturbing for her anyway. I said "People will act bizarre and unusual about you, but you'll take it with a grain of salt and figure that they are just confused." But she began to become upset about how many of them were doing it. She thought the whole world was going crazy.

Woman; So what do you do now instead?

The simplest way is to just use reframing. You don't even need to put people in a trance; you can just use standard refraining. It works perfectly. Then you put them in a trance to remove the physical addition.

Woman: How do you remove the physical addiction in a trance? Direct suggestion.

Woman: Do you say "You are no longer addicted?"

No. That isn't direct suggestion. That's dumb. I'm serious. If you say "You will no longer have the physical addiction" you haven't said how. Some of your clients will be flexible enough to find a way, but most won't. You need to build up a context in which they can respond that way easily, If you do it too directly, you won't get the response very often. If you say "You will no longer want cigarettes" you're less apt to get it than if you say "Cigarettes taste unpleasant." You're even more apt to get it if you have the thought of smoking a cigarette be unpleasant. Better than that, you have them be totally proud every time they refuse a cigarette, even though they really do want one. You can create contexts in which the response is a natural one.

Usually I remove the addiction in this way: I go in and verify— either through finger signals or verbalization or head nods—that the unconscious knows what feeling accompanies the physical addiction. Then I ask the unconscious to spontaneously connect that feeling with another set of sensations, like pleasure or delight or curiosity, each time the feeling occurs. That way they'll end up doing something other than smoking.

You can use reframing with smoking and other drug addictions, obesity, and most other problems people want you to cure with hypnosis. You can reframe them first to solve the problem, and then hypnotize them in order to satisfy their request for hypnosis. You can make reframing a prerequisite to doing hypnosis. Rather than challenge what they came in for, hypnosis, tell them that you're a very special hypnotist. Explain that you're very thorough and don't want to use hypnosis to do anything detrimental, so you need to make lots of careful checks first. Then you go through the standard reframing. "Before I can put you into a trance, there are certain things I have to know. Go inside and ask if the part that is responsible for this pattern of behavior… . " If you act as if reframing is just the preamble, they'll hurry through the reframing so that they can get to the "real stuff."