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

Woman: At a conference recently I heard the Simontons mention how much they learned from you. They gave the example of adding representational system overlap to their visualization techniques.

Yes. They get good results just by having patients visualize the white blood cells eating up the cancer cells. If you overlap from that visualization into congruent sounds and feelings, it becomes much more powerful. Did they mention anything about the difference between conscious and unconscious belief systems?

Woman: They mentioned that they realize the difference, but they don't know how to deal with it.

That's exactly where we left off. I was with them long enough to feel that they had a good, clear, solid, resonant understanding of the notion of representational systems and overlap. They found it easy to do, and they were delighted by it.

They also recognized that reframing has advantages, just in terms of requisite variety, but they didn't have enough experience with it to incorporate it into their system. If they used unconscious six–step reframing, they would be able to work with the large numbers of cancer patients who are not willing to consciously adopt the belief that they are responsible for their disease.

Woman: Can you work simultaneously with more than two parts in reframing?

Yes. I have worked with as many as twelve or fifteen at the same time.

Woman: So you might have six objecting parts talking to each other, and to the part that is responsible for the behavior?

Yeah, I get them all together in a conference. But I never talk with more than one at any moment, unless I have first gotten them all together to elect a spokespart that will communicate for all of them.

I say «Now, all you other guys hold; we're going to go over here to part A and find out blah blah blah.» And then after that «Now, do any of the other five of you blah blah.» Time is never a real limitation because you can always say «All right, we're going to pause now. We'll meet here again at eight o'clock tomorrow.» The only real limitation is how many parts you the programmer can keep track of. I'm pretty good at keeping track of a large number of things going on at the same time; I've had a lot of practice doing that. You will have to find out how many you can remember. If you start going «Oh, yeah, it wasn't that one, … it was ah … the other one … ah … ah … " then you are probably going to confuse the person.

Man: I had a client who used to give names to the parts. She had the sex goddess, and she had the lady in white gloves who had a congenital malformation—her legs were permanently crossed—and several others that she could identify and talk about and have talk to me.

Yeah, some of them have names, and if they don't, you can always give them names. There are many things you can do to help keep track of them. But you also have to keep track of who said what, and who's talking now. With some people, all the parts have the same voice tonality, while other people's parts all have different voices. It's purely a matter of how many you can keep track of well.

Man: How can I use reframing for self–growth?

The first reframe I would make is to use any other predicate but «growth.» There are certain dangers in describing evolving as a person as «growth.» People in the human potential movement who are really into «growing» have a tendency to get warts and tumors and other things. As a hypnotist you can understand how that happens with organ language.

You can always just do conscious reframing with yourself. But one of the best ways to do it is to build an unconscious part, what we call a «meta–part," whose job it is each night to review the day just as you are dropping off to sleep, to select two important things to reframe out of your behavior, and to do the reframing each night just after you have dropped off to sleep. We used to do this with everybody in our early groups, and the kinds of changes that people made were fantastic.

Woman: You don't even program the two things? You leave that to the unconscious?

Yes. We put the person into a profound trance and taught her unconscious mind—or some unconscious part—the reframing model. We'd say «OK, unconscious, what we're going to do today is build this part and it's going to do reframing. I want you, the unconscious, to select something that you didn't particularly like about her conscious mind's behavior today. First identify it, and then… .» We'd go through all the six steps very systematically. We wouldn't just say «Do it»; we would go through each of the six steps carefully. The person's conscious mind is gone; she is just in a trance, responding. You can do it with finger signals or any other yes/no signal, or you can do it verbally if your client happens to be a good verbal unconscious communicator. I'd go through it once systematically, and then have her unconscious pick something else and try it, and notify me if it gets stuck. I'd literally educate her unconscious in the six–step model until it could do it a couple of times without any problem. Then I'd say «Look, each night just after she's dropped off to sleep, identify and reframe two things that you think are important, given the experiences of the day.»

A month later I went back and checked with everybody's unconscious to find out what kind of things they'd done. Those people were changing like crazy. One student's unconscious reported to me that every night he would see himself in front of a blackboard, and he would make a list of all the things that didn't occur the way he wanted them to that day, and then all his parts would describe the possibilities of each one, and they'd have a vote and select two, and then the unconscious would go ahead and reframe those two things. Then his parts would review past reframes, and read the minutes from the last meeting—he was a very organized guy.

It seemed to work very well for about three months with each person, and then each would need another shot of it. People changed so much that the process didn't fire off automatically after about three months.

Woman: Why did you have to teach the unconscious the six steps? If you've been reframing others, the unconscious knows it even more than the conscious, doesn't it?

The important thing is to make sure that the unconscious does it explicitly and methodically. Saying that «the unconscious knows it» is assuming more than I'm willing to assume. Some people's unconscious minds don't know it, and some people's unconscious minds do. But I'm not willing to take that chance. I want to build a part whose job is to jump out every night and say «It's reframing time!» You can always consciously reframe with yourself; however, it's much more convenient to have your unconscious do it after you go to sleep. Let your parts do it. It's hard to install this in yourself; it's better to have somebody else zone you into a trance and do it for you.

Bill: There is a question that keeps bugging me about what kind of signals to use when I'm reframing. Some say to use only signals with definite unconscious yes/no responses. Other people talk about just going inside and asking an open–ended question and seeing what comes up. Yesterday afternoon you were having me go through a negotiation reframe without taking time to set up specific signals—

Oh, I had yes/no signals, though. You were responding in ways that I could notice.

Bill: OK, you had the yes/no signals. But in our own experience of reframing ourselves I thought the only thing we could use as a signal was an unconscious response that we were aware of. The response I got was in my favored representational system—that little old internal voice that I always get—which I have learned not to trust in myself or in my clients. How can we trust the signal we get from ourselves, or from our clients, when it is in the most favored representational system?