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

After they are completely changed, you say "Now we can begin the trance. Close your eyes… . "Then you go through any hypnotic routine you want to. Afterwards they'll tell everyone "Hypnosis worked!"

Reframing is the simplest way you can get change in many symptoms. However, I'm not always for doing things simply; I'm for doing them artfully. Once you've done five smokers with straight reframing and you know you can get results that way, then begin to do it more creatively. Do yourself and your client a favor by doing it in a different and bizarre way. Do reframing in trance and take her to the Goddess of Cigarettes. Have her burn a package of Marlboros at her altar or something. Sometimes all you have to do for smoking is put the person in a trance and say "What I want your unconscious to do is find the most creative way for you to stop smoking without even knowing that you've done it." And sometimes you have to do a lot morel

People keep wanting to learn to do hypnosis so they can stop people from smoking and do weight control. When people ask "What do you do with smokers?" sometimes I say "Hand them a book of matches." Hypnosis is much too elegant a set of tools to think about as something that you use just for weight control or for smoking. That's like buying a Ferrari to go to the grocery store. There is something repulsive to me about using a really elegant set of tools in a trite way. Smoking and weight control are important, but the way you use (hypnosis to deal with a smoker is idiosyncratic to the person. What's much more important to me is to learn hypnosis as a set of skills, so you can use it idiosyncratically for anything.

Man: I did reframing in trance with a man on smoking, and got a lot of resistance. First he burst out of trance, and then he became a little kid. He started wiggling his feet and—

In NLP we have a principle that says "There is no resistance; there are only incompetent therapists." I mean that literally. I do not believe that there is resistance; there are only unskilled therapists. That shouldn't be taken critically. That should be taken as follows: every time you begin to encounter "resistance," you are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to delight yourself. If you say "Aha! I have done something which is incompetent, so now I am going to surprise and delight myself by doing something else 1' you will continually improve. If you think "He's not ready yet" he may change, but you will be stuck.

There's no resistance if you utilize every response. If somebody spontaneously goes into any state, utilize it. If he becomes a little kid, tell him to enjoy himself, If he comes out of trance, you can say "And what can I do for you now?" To be an effective communicator, all you have to do is respond appropriately to whatever spontaneously happens. If a person comes out of trance and you ask yourself "What did I do wrong?" that isn't an appropriate response. No formula works perfectly every time. People aren't willing to do anything rigidly. All kinds of strange things happen.

Once I put a man into trance, planning to do standard reframing. I said "Lift your right index finger for "yes" and your left index finger for "no" — and the guy went "Pur–ple!" At that moment, if you don't have patterns for utilization, you are stuck. I said "That's right, pur–ple\" I just fed it back to him in the same tonality and tempo. Then he said "Au–ra!" So I said "Pur–ple! Au–ra!" I continued "Now we'll take this meaningful message … "and I gave him some bizarre set of instructions for utilization. 1 had no idea what he was doing.

When he came out of trance, he reported to me that as I told him to lift up his "no" finger, he became engulfed in a big purple aura. The more he was in the aura, the more he knew that he was making some change. The aura was somehow or other saturating him and changing him. Who knows what that was about. Some purple cloud came down and changed him before I could get around to it.

If I had interrupted the purple cloud, I would have really gotten stuck. Instead I just went along with it, and it did my work for me.

I've had people who go way down into trance while I am doing unconscious work, and they are doing fine. Suddenly there's a pause, and they come all the way out of trance. They look at me, and I just sit there and look back at them blankly and wait. They look around and then all of a sudden they go back in. I don't even say anything; I just wait. When people come out spontaneously, I'm fairly patient and let them give me something to respond to. A lot of people are floaters. They go in and out of trance. So when they come out, 1 just wait, and then they will go back in, and 1 can continue. Then later they may float back up again. If you ask people to maintain an altered state, you are asking them to do something artificial. You have to be fluid in responding to their varying states.

Man: Could you use reframing for psychosomatic symptoms like headaches?

Reframing is great with psychosomatic problems. You have the option of using the symptom itself for a yes/ no signal. If the symptom is a migraine, for instance, you can have it hurt more for "yes" and less for "no."

Man: A lot of physicians' wives come to see me with psychosomatic symptoms. The symptoms don't do anything for the wives—the physicians just sneer at them and don't give them any attention or do things for them. It's hard to find a secondary gain.

You've already made an assumption about what the secondary gain is: that is has to do with getting attention. In the cases like that that I've done reframing with, the secondary gain has never been to get attention from the husband. It's usually a way of making a fool out of the husband. It's a way to keep the husband from being too pompous about being a doctor, by presenting him with an illness he can't treat.

They must give doctors courses in being pompous at medical schools. I meet lots of different kinds of therapists. I meet programmers from computer firms, and they are really different from each other. But most doctors have a really standard set of pompous analogues. Not all of them are pompous, of course; there are always exceptions to everything. But as a class, I don't know what they do to those poor people.

Man: If you spend two years interning, following other doctors around, it will make you pompous. It's modeling and mirroring. Susan: I've got a cold. Can you use hypnosis to take away a cold? A man came to me with a cold that he'd had for six months, and I made it go away. But his unconscious specified exactly how long it would take to go away. He'd had it for six months, and his unconscious wanted two days to make it go away.

Susan: I've only had mine for three days.

Well, I'm not going to take the time to do it now, if that's what you are asking. But I'll certainly give somebody else a set of procedures to do it with you. Is that acceptable?

Susan: Yes.

Who wants an interesting task? Woman: I'll do it.

OK. Do the following sequence. Put her in a deep trance and send her conscious mind away. There are several ways you can do that. You can send her conscious mind back to some pleasant memory. You can have it walk down a long tunnel and come out at the end in a place with gardens and fountains where she can swim, and then close the door so she doesn't eavesdrop unhelpfully. Set up a feedback mechanism so that you know when her conscious mind is there, and when it's not. You could have one of her fingers be up when her unconscious mind is there alone, and have it go down when her conscious mind returns. Use something like that so that you have feedback.

Then I want you to ask her unconscious if it would be willing to remove the cold, carte blanche. Get a "yes" or a "no." If you get a "yes" ask it if it will be willing to do so right now. If there is any hesitation whatsoever, whether you are using verbal or nonverbal signals, then go into the reframing format and find out if the cold serves any function whatsoever. If it does, come up with new ways of accomplishing that function. Get the unconscious to specify exactly how long it will take to make the cold go away. You do this with yes/ no questions too. You ask questions like "Would you be willing to take it away in one hour?"