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

I went to see him because I was curious about his multiple personality clients. I met one of his clients in an altered state and met four or five of her personalities and the demon that possessed her. As far as I can tell. I can induce that in anybody. In fact, the way he went about introducing me to these personalities is exactly the way I would go about inducing them as a hypnotist.

The woman was sitting there in a chair, talking to us about how she has a lot of amnesia in her life. Nobody else does, right? Yet this psychiatrists convincer for knowing that you are a multiple personality is if there is any period of your life that you can't remember! He makes up a name for whatever period you have amnesia for. According to this psychiatrist, the period that you don't remember wasn't you; that was another personality. He would give it some name like "Fred." Then he ignores your ongoing behavior, hits you on the head unexpectedly and calls this name "Fred! Fred! Come out! Come out!" If you say "What do you mean 'Fred, come out?'" he ignores you until suddenly some other personality emerges. That's a great way to make multiple personalities. I'm convinced that MP's are manufactured by parents and well–meaning therapists; they are not spontaneously derived.

Man: When you do deep trance identification, you don't want to have the person become someone else at six years of age. How do you get him to grow up again?

You just tell him to be someone else. Children don't pretend to be somebody else who is only six years of age. They pretend to be someone else at whatever age they know the person at. You can tell children anything, and as long as you do so meaningfully, they'll obey you. Once you have age–regressed the person, you say "Now, while you continue to play and have a good time, your unconscious mind is going to learn about… . " Then you just give him direct suggestions: "Sort through everything you know unconsciously about so–and–so—the way he looks, the way he sounds, the way he moves, the way he responds—and make that a single unit so that you will emerge spontaneously in fifteen minutes being totally that adult."

Let me caution you again. Deep trance identification is fairly complicated and difficult. It's useful as a learning strategy, but there are much easier ways to accomplish most of the things you want to do. For most changes, the new behavior generator or some other technique will work equally well and be a lot easier to do.

Pain is a fascinating thing in that it's very useful up to a point, and then it's no longer useful. This is true for a lot of other things as well. A little adrenalin in an emergency can be useful, but too much can be incapacitating, depending on the task. For something really simple ami strenuous, like lifting a car off someone, the more adrenalin the better. But for any task that requires fine coordination, like fixing a watch or putting a key into a keyhole, too much adrenalin is disastrous.

One thing I do to deal with pain is provide a context in which the natural response is to miss pain. This is an overall strategy for hypnosis: to create a context in which the natural response is the one I want.

In the classic Erickson story on pain control, they brought in a woman who was dying of cancer. They brought her to Erickson in an ambulance, put her on a gurney, and rolled her into the office. The woman looked at Erickson and said "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life. My doctor sent me here so that you could do something about the pain. Drugs don't help my pain. Surgery doesn't help my pain. How are you going to be able to help my pain with just words?"

Erickson, sitting in a wheelchair, swayed back and forth and looked at her, and paced all her beliefs by saying "You came here because your doctor told you to come here, and you don't understand how just words could control your pain. Drugs don't even control your pain. Surgery doesn't even control your pain. And you think this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard of. Well, let me ask you a question. If that door were to burst open right now … and you looked over and saw a great big tiger … licking its chops hungrily … staring at only you … how much pain do you think you'd feel?"

The point is, he presented a context in which nobody is going to be aware of pain. Pain simply doesn't exist when you're about to be eaten by a tiger. An experience where there is no pain is something that can be anchored and continued as a particular altered state. Erickson said "Later the doctors didn't understand her when she said she had a tiger under her bed and she just listened to its purr."

There are lots and lots of ways of approaching pain control. You have to think of what it would take, if you had physiological pain, to get you to not notice it. Going to the dentist and having him drill through your tooth hurts. When he hits a nerve, physiologically the signals go through your nerves and your brain goes "Uggh!" That happens. Yet there are people who go to the dentist, get no novocaine, and feel nothing. They don't do hypnosis, either. Dentists will tell you about them. The dentist drills right into their nerves, and they don't respond. The last dentist I went to said "I can never understand this. It hurts me, but they don't feel a thing!"

Who are the people who can do that? They are people with no consciousness of kinesthetics. They are people who haven't got any feelings, so they can't feel pain. The only thing that will get through is putting their hand on a hot plate. By the time it burns up to the elbow, they may notice, These are people who typically get hurt a lot. They have a tendency to get skinned knees and bump into things, because they have no consciousness of their kinesthetics and haven't learned to be cautious. As a strategy to work with pain, you can make somebody into someone like that.

The questions you always need to ask yourself are "What is it that you want?" and "Where would that happen naturally?" There are contexts in which you can move around and feel things but not feel pain. Have you ever hurt your hand? Have you ever cut your finger so that it really hurt? Or have you smacked it with a hammer so it really throbbed with pain? And during the period of time when it was throbbing, did you ever forget about it for some reason? In what context would that occur? Man: In an emergency.

Sure. An emergency is one classic example. For most people it doesn't even take an emergency. All they have to do is be distracted by anything else. Humans have such a limited amount of conscious attention. The rule is that 7± 2 chunks of information is all people can attend to. So give them nine chunks if you want to distract them. Give them something else to do–anything else.

Once I worked with a man who had severe pain. He had been in an accident that had resulted in a back injury. I don't know the medical details, but there was some physical reason why he ought to have pain. He came in and said he wanted hypnosis. I said I didn't know if I could help him with his pain, I had a procedure that worked very well, but only on people who are mature and intelligent, and frankly, I didn't know if he was mature enough.

I told him "Look, the most mature and intelligent people arc the ones who are able to see things from different perceptual points of view." By the way, according to Jean Piaget, this is actually true. So I explained Piaget's theory and test of intelligence to this man.

According to Piaget, being intelligent means being able to tell what things would look like from different perspectives. If I wanted to test a child, I could use a block of wood and a thimble. I'd bring the child over, show him the thimble, and place the block of wood in front of the thimble to block the child's view of the thimble. Then I'd ask "Is there anything behind the block?" If the child says "No" he's not very "mature." The "mature" child can visualize the thimble when it's hidden, and he can also see what the thimble, the block of wood, and they themselves would look like from the other side of the table. The testers literally ask "What would it look like if you were over there on the other side of the table?" The better you can see things from different points of view, the more "mature" and intelligent you are. One consequence of that kind of visualization is that you become dissociated from your feelings. This is what some modern methods teach kids to be able to do. They teach kids to grow up and be dissociated from their feelings, because that's what it means to be "mature."