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

without paralysis, she would have to do all the housework. Mary: So then what did you do?

I changed the husband. We engaged him in «assisting with his wife's rehabilitation program.» I arranged for a limited improvement in her paralysis when I took her home. We told the husband «In order for the rehabilitation program to work, it is going to require perseverance on your part. She can do certain things now, but you should definitely not allow her to do other things, because we would run the risk of a relapse. And of course this program may take years.»

To try to get this woman to cope with her husband was too big a piece to do easily. I want you to think of outcomes in terms of chunking. The question I ask is «What's the biggest piece I can do quickly and expediently?» Is that going to be one simple reanchoring, or is it going to be a more complex piece? I start with the smallest piece I can do easily and build on that.

Man: So you make a minimal change in the system, get feedback, and make another minimal change—increasing the chunk size as you go, if you can do that.

Yes. I had one other woman like that who had radical hysterical symptoms. Both were out of the same mold. One had numb feet and the other had a paralyzed leg, and both had Italian husbands. I'm sure not every Italian husband is like that, but these were both Italians from the «old country» and neither was married to an Italian woman. These men both had very strong cultural belief systems which were not congruent with their wives' beliefs, or with American culture.

Let me give you another example of sequential incongruity with which I used a very different approach. I don't always collapse anchors first and then go for a completely integrated outcome. There are other ways to deal with sequential incongruity. A psychiatrist friend of mine had a secretary who was as classic a manic–depressive as you could have. You could even predict the day of the year when she would flip. You got six months of the «up» part where everything was wonderful. She lost weight; she got really attractive and vibrant, and got all the work done. And then, on July 31st, suddenly the other part came out. She gained weight and got depressed and incompetent and so on. This had been going on for twelve years when I met the psychiatrist. He was too fascinated to fire her, even though six months of each year she was totally incompetent. He always knew that at a certain time of year, the whole thing would switch around, and she would take care of all the things that she hadn't done in the previous six months.

The fascinating thing is that when I worked with her, no matter which part of her I worked with, or what I changed, or what she learned to do—even tasks like learning to type on a typewriter that had the keys in a different configuration—when the parts flipped over, none of it transferred. She was almost like two people, although she wasn't a complete multiple personality. In each of her states she had some memory of the other state: she remembered where she lived, and most of what had happened in the other state. But learnings and personal changes never transferred back and forth. So, of course, the one that was «up» would go out and make changes and accomplish things, and the one that was «down» would go hide. One of them kept becoming more and more confident and capable, and the other one more and more depressed and incompetent.

When you have people like this, one of the things that you have to do somehow—no matter what else you do—is to integrate those two parts. But in order to integrate them, you've got to get them together in the same time–place coordinates. That's not very easy, because the one that's not in your office can be very hard to get to. You could anchor one, and wait six months and then anchor the other. And if you had really good anchors, you might be able to pull them together.

One approach that has worked really well for me is «pseudo–orientation in time.» That is a hypnotic phenomenon in which you hypnotize the client and you project her into the future in increments. Then you have her arouse from the trance believing, for instance, that this is not her second visit but her sixteenth. It's now three months later, so you can ask her about the past. Pseudo–orientation in time is a neat way to get a client to teach you about therapy. You hypnotize her and tell her you have cured her, and in a moment you are going to arouse her from the trance. It is now August, and she is returning for her last visit, and she has agreed to document some of how all these changes took place.

Then you bring her out of the trance and say «Hi! How have you been?» «Oh, I've been wonderful.» Then you say «I have such a bad memory. Will you recall for me exactly what you consider the most essential thing that I did which changed you?» Your client will then tell you really great things to do! A lot of the techniques that we teach people in workshops have come from doing pseudo–orientation in time.

It takes either a fairly good hypnotic subject or rigorous hypnotic training to be able to do this. It's a complicated trance phenomenon. Of course, once you've become used to doing it, it's not complicated anymore.

Another thing I do is to set up a signal for the different states. I try to detect where the polarities lie. If they are temporal, then I set up signals for the different time zones. Some of them are contextual: some people have sequential polarities depending upon whether they are at work or at home, for example. Some people switch between vacation and everyday life. If it has to do with a drug substance, then of course I set up an anchor that induces the substance state.

When I have good anchors for both parts, I can literally carry on conversations with each one sequentially. With the manic–depressive woman I talked about earlier, I had anchors for a July visit, and for a December visit. I set up anchors not only covertly, but also directly hypnotically: «When I touch you on the knee, it will be July» so that I could literally go back and forth between the two parts and work with both of them. So when I did reframing, I'd induce one state and I'd say «Now, you go and ask the part …» and then I'd induce the other state and do the same thing. It was like doing reframing with two people at the same time.

I used to run groups where I would bring in ten or fifteen people and just start going around the room, using the six–step reframing model. The first week I would always do it with content, and then the next week when they came back, I could do it purely formally. I would have them pick something that they could talk about the first few times to make sure they could tell the difference between an intention and a behavior and that sort of thing, and I would go around the room and troubleshoot as they all went through the steps at the same time.

Man: But the two parts of the manic–depressive woman are in the same person. How do you reframe them to the same conclusion?

If you have sequential incongruity—somebody diets like crazy and then gains weight like crazy—that's actually only an incongruity at the level of content. At the formal level, the two parts are the same. Both are obsessions, and both of them show a loss of control. One is saying «I'll starve myself; the other is saying «I'm going to eat everything in sight.» At the content level, they are opposite, but at the formal level, they are exactly the same. Those people don't diet intelligently. They don't build up to a maintenance program slowly. It's always either crash diets or «pigging out.» If you offered them anorexia, they'd take it! The solution has to take the part that overeats and give it some other way of getting what it wants so that it goes back to eating in moderation. And the part that diets like crazy also has to be reframed, because otherwise when you reframe the eating part, the diet part will go «Ahhhh! Now is my chance!» and go crazy, and then you will get a backlash in the other direction.