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

that I think it's time to act. Go through this in pairs so that you get some experience now with the basic outline. Let me reassure you that it is quite appropriate for you to stumble a bit with this material. I'm asking you to employ an entire strategy for generative change, with a brief amount of instruction. If you were already able to do these things gracefully and smoothly, you would have wasted your time and money coming here. So I'm delighted that you are courageous enough to feel free to limit yourself to the choices I offer here. I remind you that these are simply more choices to be added to your general repertoire as an effective communicator. With some practice these choices will become as smooth and graceful as any other techniques you have learned to use.

(1) Select situation in which new behavior is desired.

(2) Pick a model.

(3) Watch and listen to the model behaving in the situation.

(4) Substitute your image and voice for the model's.

(5) Step into the movie to experience the kinesthetic feelings.

(6) Future–pace: What cue will trigger off the new behavior?

* * * * *

The strategy you all just used is designed for straight behavioral change. The only difficulty I noticed people running into was in dealing with "secondary gain." Let me use the problem that Nora worked on as an example.

Nora was interested in learning to have choices about smoking. Smoking is a habitual problem that has a profound set of secondary gains for most people. In other words, there are certain things that smoking does for Nora and other smokers that serve a positive purpose. It's actually better that she smoke, and get access to those experiences and those resources, than it would be for her to quit smoking. She wants to give up something that she knows is physiologically damaging. The difficulty is that if she were to give it up without anything else happening, she would lose access to certain resources and states of consciousness that are important to her.

I'm confident that if we were to get Nora to stop smoking without doing anything else, her unconscious mind is flexible enough that she would begin smoking again within a few months. If we were to make an overall judgement about her functioning, it is probably better that she smoke—even with the damaging physical consequences—and retain access to certain resources, than that she stop smoking and lose access to those resources. Any difficulties that involve secondary gain can be dealt with easily by using reframing. The new behavior generator is primarily for simple behavioral change. If there is secondary gain, use reframing.

The new behavior generator can also be combined with reframing in a useful way. If on the "generating new choices" step your partner doesn't create new alternatives quickly enough to satisfy you, you can say something like this:

"And as you continue to work, developing and considering various alternatives … I'd like to remind you of … some additional resources … sources of models that you might consider… . There may be other times and places in your life … when you had alternative behaviors which are more successful … at protecting you and getting you what you want and need … than X… . If there are, you might consider those alternatives. … In addition … you might quickly go on … a thorough search visually … and auditorily … for people whom you really respect and admire … who seem to have alternative choices … which are more effective than X … and still allow them the kinds of experiences that you desire for yourself …. Evaluate each one of those … allowing the part of you that runs X … to determine for you which, if any, of those are more effective than X. … Of course once your unconscious has determined … that it has these three methods of proceeding to do what X was supposed to do … more effectively than X … it will give you that 'yes' signal, and cause you to arouse … taking all the time you need."

The procedures we are teaching you do not have to be used in isolation. As you practice them ana become more effective in using them, you can begin to combine them and vary them in ways that make your learning more interesting for you.

Man: Have you ever gotten a congruent "yes" signal, and then not gotten the new behavior?

No. If I get a congruent response that says it will happen, it will. Sometimes the person has the new behavior for three or four months, and is just delighted, and then he goes back to the old behavior. To me that's a statement that I'm an elegant master of the art of change, that the person who was my client is quite responsive and easily able to make profound changes, and that some context in his life—his job, his family relationships, or something else—has changed so that the old behavior has become more appropriate than the new behavior we found. It's now my job to create new alternatives more appropriate for the new context.

Larry: I've heard that you could just take a person into the future and ask him what he would like to be like.

You're talking about pseudo–orientation in time. When you do that you put the person in trance, orient him into the future, and presuppose that he has already solved the problem he had when he first came to see you. Then you ask him to recount in detail just how he solved that problem, and what you did with him that was particularly useful. We've actually used this method as a way to develop new techniques that we then use with other clients.

There are lots of ways to do pseudo–orientation in time. It's one of my favorite approaches, but it's a little more advanced. If you can do the steps I just gave you, you've got the essential steps for making useful changes. This is the bare skeleton of how to proceed effectively. Variations such as pseudo–orientation in time require some artistry. I'm giving you what I consider the essential ingredients. The particular flavoring of the cuisine that you cook up in your office is going to be your artistry. I recommend that you feel free to restrict yourself to this bare outline until it is an automated part of your repertoire, and then get artistic. The bottom line is to be effective. After you can do that, you can get artistic.

1 like the work that you all did very much. Are there any other questions or comments about your experience that I might respond to now?

Beth: Kitty did this exercise with me, and I was dealing with something I've worked on for six or seven years in all different kinds of psychotherapy, from Reichian to gestalt to everything else around. This was something that happened way back in childhood which I alienated myself from, and couldn't get closure on. Anyway, using this new behaviour generator with the help of Kitty, who was doing it for the

very first time, the whole thing just fell into place. I don't know just what words to use. It just happened. There was unification, acceptance, and forgiveness, that I had never been able to experience before. And I have spent a long time trying to get at this with many different approaches. Thank you.

That was a testimonial, not a question. But I also asked for comments, so it was perfectly appropriate. Thank you.

Using exquisite models for the new behavior generator is based on what we call a "referential index shift" — "becoming" another person. If you do a really complete referential index shift, it's called "deep trance identification," one of the hardest hypnotic phenomena of all. Deep trance identification is a state of consciousness in which you assume the identity of someone else. You do it so completely that for that period of time you don't know you are doing it. Of course, there are varying degrees of this. It's possible to adopt the nonverbal and verbal behavior of another person so completely that you automatically acquire many skills that he has, even though you have no conscious representation of those skills. It's essentially what we did with people like Milton Erickson in order to learn quickly to be able to get the results they got.