Richard Bandler - Reframing. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Transformation of Meaning

Discussion

You have all been practicing the format called six–step reframing, with variations and with feedback from the observer. I want to be sure that you practice reframing with an understanding of our long–term goal. Our final outcome is for these formats to disappear from your behavior. Any format is a crutch, and is no substitute for 1) having full flexibility of behavior, 2) sensory experience, and 3) knowing what outcome you are going after. If you have those three characteristics of the professional communicator, that's all you need. All the patterning we've done on people such as Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, or successful business people, have enabled us to develop specific teaching formats. Formats are crutches, or excuses, or tricks, to get you to notice what's going on at the sensory level and to vary your behavior in order to achieve a specific outcome.

At this point, I don't do reframing as a separate chunk except for demonstration purposes in seminars. It's integrated into everything else that I do; I don't do any work without reframing. Every piece of work I do has reframing as a component part. It's only in seminars that I sort what I do into categories.

You will know that you are a pro when you go through a session, and at the end of it you discover that there's no uncertainty: you know that you got the changes that you went after. However, you don't know how you did it until you stop and ask yourself what you did systematically. That will be a natural outcome of taking the time and effort to use these formats explicitly until they become so smooth and practiced that they will be as automatic as shaking hands or driving a car; they will have become reflex responses to appropriate contextual cues, so that your behavior will always be appropriate and lead effectively toward the outcomes you want.

Do you have any questions?

Man: Let's say you ask a client to go inside and ask if the part of her that runs behavior X will communicate with her in awareness. She goes inside and comes back saying «Nothing happened.» What do you do?

One possibility is to say «Describe what your feelings are right now—how you sense yourself kinesthetically.» After she offers a description, you can say «Now begin to do behavior X. She'll either get up and begin to do it or she'll begin to feel what she feels like when she does X. As soon as you see a change that you can detect, you say «Stop. Now describe your sensations again.» There will be differences between the two descriptions. Any one of those differences can be used as a signal system.

The reframing format differs radically from the usual techniques in psychotherapy, because in this format I am a consultant; the client is her own therapist and hypnotist. Under normal circumstances I am the therapist and hypnotist and I take responsibility for accessing and eliciting responses. In this case, the client takes responsibility for doing that. I operate as her conscious consultant. If she cannot detect any communication, I ask her to begin to become the part of herself that does X. The physiological differences between her usual state and her beginning to do X will involve exactly the physiological changes that she can use as a signal system. When people engage in behavior they don't like, they usually experience major changes in muscle tone, skin temperature, etc. Any one of those changes will serve you well as a signal system, and will be experienced when you ask the person to do X behavior.

Sometimes you simply have to teach the person how to make distinctions in her internal experience. You ask her to describe her present internal state. Then you ask her to jump up and down for two minutes and ask her to notice the details of how her internal experience changes.

Sometimes a person is so self–anchored into a particular state that it's hard to get any changes. Jumping up and down, or doing any other behavior that is significantly different from her present state can loosen her up a bit.

Herb: When I first learned reframing in seminars, we would do each pattern in a half–hour or at most an hour. I have found in my practice that going through a pattern with a client sometimes takes several sessions.

Fine. That's not an unusual piece of feedback. I've heard that from others. Taking longer is a function of your familiarity and fluency with the sequencing, and also has a lot to do with your sensitivity to the needs of your clients. Sometimes reframing is such a major reorganization of the person that it appropriately takes three or four sessions to accomplish.

I claim that I can run through reframing with anybody in three minutes, but not if I involve her consciousness. So I assume that you asked the client's consciousness to detect the signals and offer reports. Without involving the person's consciousness, it takes me about one–tenth of the time to get the same changes. However, I do think that involving the client's consciousness is a desirable characteristic of this model, because it teaches your client to become autonomous after some period of time. She's been involved in a positive, participatory way at the conscious level in making these changes occur, so it will be easier for her to use the same process later on her own.

Reframing yourself is a fairly complex task. Reframing already involves a dissociation between the client's conscious mind and the part responsible for the problem behavior. If you reframe yourself, a third part of you has to be a programmer who keeps track of the process, which makes it a three–level task. If you successfully do reframing externally with others first, you can make the process of reframing automatic. Then reframing yourself is reduced to a two–level task, something that most people can cope with.

If you are a good hallucinator, you can also make it easier for yourself by seeing yourself over in the other chair. Then you ask yourself the questions and notice the responses that you get. That kind of explicit visual dissociation between the part of you that is client and the part of you that is acting as programmer can help you keep your behavior sorted.

Reframing yourself can also involve another problem. You will be using your own limitations to deal with those same limitations, which can lead to some blind alleys. As they say in Catch 22, «If you've got flies in your eyes, you can't see the flies in your eyes.» By reframing a number of other people who have different limitations than you do, you will gain flexibility in dealing with their limitations, and become better equipped to deal with your own.

In spite of the problems I've mentioned, I know a number of people who have reframed themselves and gotten very pervasive changes. If you do reframing successfully with other people for a month or so, you'll probably find yourself doing it for yourself anyway. If you are really eager for some personal changes, it will work for you.

Man: One of my clients is very verbal and conceptual, and he really wanted to follow the procedure, so I did it totally nonverbally and unconsciously with him.

Excellent. That is a really fine choice.

Man: Should the minimal cues that we get when we ask for a signal always be consistent throughout the whole procedure?

Yes. The only exception I can think of is when the signal you get at the beginning is very unpleasant. Then you want to adjust or change the signal right away, but keep the new signal consistent.

Jim: With one of my clients I didn't get anywhere with the first signal he detected—a kinesthetic feeling in his leg. I looked for another signal and got a very, very strong facial response.

My guess is that both signals were there to begin with, and that you could have used either one of them as a signal. You have to take into account your own degree of acuity, and also that your client may have idiosyncratic ways of approaching the process of reframing. Certain kinds of signals may seem more appropriate to a particular client, or to his parts.