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

Erickson took him back into his personal history and gave him an experience in which he became convinced that he would no longer engage in crime, because he wasn't good at it. That event never actually occurred. However, if you ask that man today about that event, he will recall it for you with a great deal of detail, and it will be as real to him as anything that actually occurred.

Sometimes there is some meaningful purpose in taking a person back through unpleasant memories. It might provide you with information so that you can catch a criminal and prevent him from committing a crime against someone else. Possibly information from that event may be needed for some other purpose.

A friend of mine worked with a couple who had been assaulted, and they both had complete amnesia for having been assaulted. In fact, the only way they knew they had been assaulted was that they were both covered with bruises and lacerations. They were told that the lacerations were inflicted by some weapon, and that their money and their property were gone. The police kept insisting that they had been beaten and robbed. The man and the woman both said "We don't know. We don't remember anything."

I did some hypnotic investigation and discovered chat this couple had not been attacked; they had gotten into a car accident. After the crash, somebody pulled them out of their car and stole the car and their belongings. When I went through the experience with them to find out what had occurred. I chose to do it with only one of them, and took the other one out of the room; there was no need for both of them to suffer. Being the sexist I am, I decided it was best that the man suffer. However, I had him go through the experience in a different way to minimize any unpleasantness for him. Instead of going through the experience in the way he had before, I had him watch himself go through it.

I took this precaution both because I wanted him to be able to do it comfortably, and because he had been knocked unconscious. If someone got knocked out the first time through an experience, if I have them relive it in the same way, they will get knocked out again.

A student of mine had been in an accident and wanted to relive the experience. A lot of people had tried to work with him to get him to do this. They would have him start out with the feeling of the steering wheel and the sound of the engine, and then the visual experience of the trees, and then a horn honking, and then he would pass out. They would have to do all kinds of things to wake him up, and then they'd try again.

They could have anticipated that he'd pass out, because in the accident he hit a tree and got knocked out. If you relive something and do it in exactly the same way, you will go through the same experience in the way that you did the first time. If you got knocked out the first time, you'll get knocked out when reliving it.

If somebody has been attacked or raped or been in a car wreck, reexperiencing–the feelings they had then is not going to be useful, If someone is telling you about his heart attack, you don't want him to relive it in exactly the same way. "Oh, you had a heart attack last week. What happened?" That is the craziest thing you can ask somebody. If you do it well enough, you are going to give him another heart attack.

Many women who have been raped or attacked, subsequently have trouble with men. I'm not talking about having trouble with the man who attacked them, but with their husbands and their loved ones. Sometimes they can't even live in the house that they lived in, or walk down a street without absolute terror. Those women are reliving their unpleasant experiences over and over again. No one should have to suffer that way. If somebody was unfairly attacked, that is enough unfair pain. Having any more than that seems very unjust to me.

There is a procedure that allows you to separate out part of an experience, so that it's possible to relive it in a new way. You have them begin the experience, and then step outside of it so that they see themselves going through it. They hear what was going on at the time, but they watch themselves go through the event as if they were watching a movie. When they do it in this way, they don't have to have the feelings that they had when they were there. They can have feelings about the experience. This procedure is described in detail in Chapter II of Frogs into Princes, so I won't explain it here. We call it the phobia technique or the visual–kinesthetic dissociation.

When you have people relive unpleasant experiences, keep these ideas in mind. As a precaution against them re–experiencing the feelings, have them see themselves going through the experience. If you want to be really safe, have them watch themselves watching themselves go through the experience, as if they were in the projection box at a movie theatre, watching themselves watch the movie. If you have them go through an event this way, when they remember it later on, they won't experience the terror. That is a real gift to give someone who has been beaten or brutalized somehow. If they go back through that event from the position of watching themselves watching themselves, it will diffuse the intensity of the feelings and prevent them from building any generalization that would make them have to feel those unpleasant feelings again.

Next we'd like to spend some time teaching you what we call calibration exercises. Calibration refers to the process by which you tune yourselves to the nonverbal signals that indicate a particular state in a particular person. Throughout this workshop you have all been calibrating yourselves to recognize the signs of altered states in another person. Some of those signs will be fairly universal, while others will only be useful with a particular person.

In a way everything we're teaching you in this seminar can be summed up in three statements. To be an effective communicator you need to: I) know what outcome you want, 2) have the behavioral flexibility to vary what you are doing to get the outcome, and 3) have the sensory experience to know when you've got the response that you want.

Most of what we've taught you so far is designed to give you specific ways to vary your behavior in order to get the results you want. We suggest that you think of it in this way: The meaning of your communication is the response you get. If you use this as a guiding principle, you will know that when the response you get is not the one you want and expect, it's time to vary your behavior until you get it. We teach many specific ways to do this, and when those don't work, we suggest you try something else. If what you are doing is not working, then any other behavior has a better chance of getting the response you want.

If you don't have enough sensory experience to notice the response that you're getting, you won't have a way of knowing when you've succeeded or failed. You see, sometimes people ask me if I ever work with the deaf and the blind. I tell them "Yes, always."

We use calibration exercises to increase your sensory acuity. Your ability to notice minimal nonverbal responses will dramatically increase your ability to be an effective hypnotist in particular, and an effective communicator in general.

When Frank, a friend of mine, was about eighteen or nineteen years old, he was a very good Golden Gloves boxer. He was also supporting his family by working as a janitor at a state mental hospital. As he walked around on the wards, he would shadow box just to stay in shape for boxing.

On one ward there was a catatonic who had been in the same position for two or three years. Every day the personnel stood him up at the end of his bed and locked him onto it. He had catheter tubes and feeding tubes and everything. Nobody had been able to make contact with this man. Once as Frank walked by on an errand, shadow boxing as usual, he noticed that this guy responded to his boxing with little flinches in his head and neck. This was a major response for this guy. So Frank ran down to the nurses' station and pulled out the guy's file. Sure enough, he had been a professional prize fighter before he became catatonic.