Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Yesterday we described a number of ways that you can get rapport with another person and join their model of the world, as a prelude to helping them find new choices in behavior. Those are all examples of what we call pacing or mirroring. To the extent that you can match another person's behavior, both verbally and non-verbally, you will be pacing their experience. Mirroring is the essence of what most people call rapport, and there are as many dimensions to it as your sensory experience can discriminate. You can mirror the other person's predicates and syntax, body posture, breathing, voice tone and tempo, facial expression, eye blinks, etc.

There are two kinds of non-verbal pacing. One is direct mirroring. An example is when I breathe at the same rate and depth that you breathe. Even though you're not conscious of that, it will have a profound impact upon you.

Another way to do non-verbal pacing is to substitute one non-verbal channel for another. We call that "cross-over mirroring." There are two kinds of cross-over mirroring. One is to cross over in the same channel. I can use my hand movement to pace your breathing movement—the rise and fall of your chest. Even though the movement of my hand is very subtle, it still has the same effect. It's not as dramatic as direct mirroring, but it's very powerful. That is using a different aspect of the same channel: kinesthetic movement.

In the other kind of cross-over mirroring, you switch channels. For example, as I speak to you ... I watch ... your breathing ... and I gauge the ... tempo... of my voice... to the rise... and the fall... of your chest. That's a different kind of cross-over. I match the tempo of my speech to the rate of your breathing.

Once you have paced well, you can lead the other person into new behavior by changing what you are doing. The overlap pattern we mentioned yesterday is an example of that. You join the client in their representation of the world and then overlap into a different representation.

Pacing and leading is a pattern that is evident in almost everything we do. If it is done gracefully and smoothly it will work with anyone, including catatonics. Once I was in Napa State Mental Hospital in California, and a guy had been sitting there for several years on the couch in the day room. The only communication he was offering me were his body position and his breathing rate. His eyes were open, pupils dilated. So I sat facing away from him at about a forty-five degree angle in a chair nearby, and I put myself in exactly the same body position. I didn't even bother to be smooth. I put myself in the same body position, and I sat there for forty minutes breathing with him. At the end of forty minutes I had tried little variations in my breathing, and he would follow, so I knew I had rapport at that point. I could have changed my breathing slowly over a period of time and brought him out that way. Instead I interrupted it and shocked him. I shouted "Hey! Do you have a cigarette?" He jumped up off the couch and said "God! Don't do that!"

I have a friend who is a college president. He is living in a delusional reality that he's intelligent and that he has a lot of prestige and all those things. He walks around stiffly, looks gruff and smokes a pipe; he does this whole number. It's a completely delusional reality. The last time I was in a mental hospital, there was a guy there who thought he was a CIA agent, and that he was being held there by the communists. The only difference between them is that the rest of the people in the world are more apt to believe the college president than the psychotic. The college president gets paid for his delusions. In order to pace either of them I'm going to accept their reality. With the college president I'm going to say that "Since he's so intelligent and prestigious he will be able to"—and then I'll say whatever I want him to do. If I go to an academic conference and I'm there with all the people who live in the psychotic reality of academia, I am going to pace that reality. Ill present a paper, because raw experience wouldn't pace their reality. If there was any experience there, it would just go right by them.

With the psychotic who believes he's a CIA agent I'll open the door, look back, slip in and close the door quickly, and whisper "At last we got through to you! Whew! I almost got caught coming in here! Now, quick, I only have a few minutes to give you these instructions. Are you ready? We have gotten you a cover as a college professor, and we want you to apply for this job and wait until you hear from us. You can do that because you've been trained to do it as an agent, right? Do it well, so that you're not discovered and sent back here. Got it?"

When you join someone else's reality by pacing them, that gives you rapport and trust, and puts you in a position to utilize their reality in ways that change it.

Non-verbal mirroring is a powerful unconscious mechanism that every human being uses to communicate effectively. You can predict by looking at people communicating with each other in a restaurant whether they are communicating well or not by observing their postures and movements.

Most of the therapists I know who mirror do it compulsively. We did a seminar in which there was a woman who was an exquisitely good communicator who mirrored very compulsively. As she was talking with me, I began sliding off my chair, and she literally fell on the floor. If you believe that you have to have empathy, that means that you have to have the same feelings that your client does in order to function well as a therapist. Someone comes in and says "Well, I have this kind of phobic response every time I walk down the street and begin to talk to somebody; I feel like I'm going to throw up, you know. I just feel real nauseous and light-headed and I feel like I'm going to sway... ."If you have to mirror, you're going to get sick.

How many of you have ever finished a day of doing therapy or educational work and gone home and felt like you took some of the residue home with you? You know that experience. The statistics show about eight years shorter life span for people in therapy than almost any other profession.

If you work with people who are diseased or dying, you don't want to mirror that directly, unless you want a very short career. People in therapy are always talking about pain, sadness, emptiness, suffering, and enduring the tribulations of human existence. If you have to understand their experience by experiencing it, then my guess is you're going to have a really unpleasant time. The important thing is to have a choice between direct mirroring or cross-over mirroring. With someone who breathes normally, pace with your own breathing. With someone who is asthmatic, pace with your hand movement or something else.

Now let's do something with this, and all the things we talked about yesterday. Is there someone here who has a past experience that they think about from time to time, and it makes them have a feeling that they don't want? ...

OK. Linda, this is secret therapy. Your task is always to keep the content of what goes on from the people here. Because if you tell them the content, they will become involved. And if they become involved, it will be harder for them to learn.

Whenever we ask a person to come and make a change here as a demonstration, we will insist that they keep the content to themselves. Usually we'll say "I want you to pick a code word, a color, a number, a letter for what you want to change." So the person will say "I want to be able to M" or "I don't want to have to three." That has a couple of positive dimensions. If the outcome we're after is to teach people how to do what we do, then we will demand that it be content-free pure process therapy. Then the only things you have available to pay attention to are the pieces of the process. You cannot hallucinate effectively on "number three"—at least not as effectively as you can on "assertiveness" or "love" or "trust" or any of those other nominal-izations.

In addition it has an extra advantage. If you are in any context in which people know each other, many people are reluctant to work on material which they think might change their relationship with the people who are there. By doing secret therapy you avoid that difficulty because nobody knows what they are working on.

Linda, what do you recall that gives you the unpleasant feeling? Is it a set of images or a voice? OK. She already answered the question nonverbally. If you were watching her eyes, you saw them move up to her left and then down to her right. So she makes an eidetic visual image and then has a feeling about it.

Linda, when you see this image you have certain feelings which are unpleasant to you. Now I'd like you to look at the image and find out if you still get the unpleasant feeling when you look at it now. And I'd like you to do a good job of that. You can close your eyes and really take a good look at it. (Pause. As she experiences the feelings, he touches her right shoulder.) And as you can all see by her responses, Linda is telling the truth: when she sees that picture she feels bad. So there is some past experience that occurred, and things didn't turn out quite the way you would have liked them to. That's an understatement if I've heard right.

Linda: Right. That's exactly right.

So from time to time an image comes into your mind, and when you think about it, you get the same kind of feelings that you had as a result of that experience. Now, I would like you to think what resource you would have needed back then to have made a different response to that situation, a response which would have given you a much more acceptable outcome if you had made it. Wait a minute, because I want to tell you what I mean by "resource." By resource I don't mean some outside help or anything like that. What I mean by a resource is more confidence, more assertiveness, more trust, more caring—any internal resource. At this point in time, some time has elapsed; I don't know how much, but during that interval you have gained resources as a human being that you didn't have access to then. I want you to select a resource that would have enabled you to have had a wholly different experience back then. I don't want you to tell me what it is. I just want you to think of what it would be. (Pause. As she thinks of the resource, he touches her left shoulder.)

Did those of you watching notice some changes? Let's call the response she gets from the picture Y, and the new resource that she needed back there we'll call X. Now, let's demonstrate. Which of those two responses is this? (He touches her right shoulder.)... Now, you should be able to see the color changes, lip size changes, breathing changes, actual trembling in her body, that we have called Y.

Now which response is this? (He touches her left shoulder.)... Now, when I say that she needs this resource X, I have given you as much information verbally as you ever get from your clients when they tell you what they want. If a client says "I want to be more assertive; I want to be more trusting; I want to be more caring, more respectful of other people," they have given you exactly the same amount of information as saying "I need X." In a way they have given you less. Because if they say "I want to be more assertive,"you're going to take your meaning of assertive and assign it to their behavior. If they say "Well, what I need is some X," you won't run the risk of misunderstanding them. Sometimes I think it would be easier to do therapy in a foreign language that you didn't speak. That way you would not have the illusion that the words you heard had the same meaning for the person who utters them as they have for you. And believe me, that's an illusion.

Now why does response Y occur when I touch her right shoulder?... Have you noticed that that occurs? Has anyone in here noticed that? What's going on here? It's really spooko time! Linda, do you believe in free will?

Linda: Yeah.

(He touches her right shoulder.) Now who tightened the muscles around your mouth? Whose free will do you believe in? Free will is a funny phrase. It's also a nominalization. When you came up here in response to my request, you made a statement about your own free will. I said "I want somebody up here who makes pictures that they don't want to make." That is a statement that someone is making those pictures and it isn't you. It's your unconscious or your "mother," one or the other.

Now, what's going on? Did anybody make sense out of that?

Woman: When you were asking her to go deep inside of her and see that image, you put your hand on her right shoulder as she was feeling the bad feelings, so she had an association with the touch.

Do you mean to tell me that now every time I touch her on the shoulder like that, shell have that response? (He touches her right shoulder again, and response Y occurs.)

Man: It sure looks that way. I agree with you.

How could something that powerful be overlooked by modern psychology? Here you are, adult human beings. Most of you have been to college, and most of you are professional communicators. You've learned about human beings and how human beings work. How do you make sense out of this? ...

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? This is straight stimulus-response conditioning. Linda had a certain experience which was her response to an accessing question that I asked her—namely about this experience that she wants to change. As she fully recovered that experience—and I knew when she had fully recovered it by observing her responses—all I had to do was touch her. That touch is now associated with the entire experience that she recalled. It's the same process as the thing that she wants to change. How is it that when she makes that picture she has a set of feelings automatically? She sees a picture, bam!—she has the unpleasant feeling. It's the same process.

When a person is in a certain state of consciousness such as the experience Y for Linda, you can introduce a new dimension in any sensory system, such as a touch. We call this an "anchor," in this case, a kinesthetic anchor. As long as I repeat that touch with the same pressure at the same point on Linda's body, and she has no stronger competing states of consciousness when I begin, it will always re-access that experience. It's straight conditioning. It constitutes, in my opinion, one of the most powerful covert tools that you can use as a therapist or as a communicator. It will get you almost everything. About ninety percent of what goes on in therapy is changing the kinesthetic responses that people have to auditory and visual stimuli. "My husband makes me feel bad." "My wife always makes me angry."

Now let's demonstrate one—and this is only one way—to use it. What I'd like you to do, Linda, is to go back to this experience. Close your eyes, and go back to that experience. This time I want you to take this resource with you (He touches her left shoulder.) and I want you to see yourself respond in a whole new way. Go all the way through it until you're satisfied.

What she's doing now is reliving it with the new resource available— which wasn't available the first time this happened—until she is satisfied with her response in that situation. We call this process "changing personal history." You go back into your personal history with resources you did not have then, taking them with you this time. We don't know what the content of this is, and there's no need for us to. She is reliving the experience now. After this she will have two histories, the "real" one in which she didn't have the resource, and the new one in which she did have the resource. As long as these are full experiences—and we're guaranteeing that by anchoring—both will serve equally well as guides for future behavior.

Linda: (She opens her eyes and smiles broadly.) I love it!

OK, now, Linda, I would like you to go back and make the old picture again, the one that made you feel bad, and tell me what happens. Observers, what do you see, X or Y? And this is where the sensory experience really counts. You can do the therapy but knowing whether or not it worked is the most essential piece.

Man: I see a mixture of X and Y.

What happens in your experience, Linda? When you see that picture, do you feel the same way you did before? Linda: No, I do not.

Don't reveal any content; just tell us how it's different.

Linda: Uh, my fear is gone.

Now, there's another way to check your work. Anchoring can be used in a number of ways. Now, watch this. (He touches her right shoulder.) Is that the same response that touch elicited before?

Woman: Partially.

Partially. Now, if it were to be entirely reversed, I would consider that doing the client a disservice. If you are in the business of choice, you are in the business of adding choices—not subtracting them, and not substituting one rigid stimulus-response circuit for another. If you have a client who feels helpless and small each time he goes to work, and you change that so each time he goes to work he feels assertive, happy, and confident, he is no better off, in my opinion. He still has only one choice about how to respond. And if you have one choice, you're a robot. We think therapy is the business of turning robots into people. That's not an easy task. We all get robotized. Part of your job is to change that situation unconsciously, so that people actually exercise choice in their behavior, whether it's conscious or not.

What is choice? Choice, to me, is having multiple responses to the same stimulus. Do you realize that each time you read a book there are probably no new words in that book? It's the same old words in a new order? Just new sequences of the same words? No matter where you go, you're going to hear the same old words, or just new sequences of the same old words. And each time I read a fiction book, it's the same thing. Practically every word we've used today has been an old word. How can you learn anything new?

Now, we need to do one more thing that's very important. Linda has the choice sitting here in this room. You've all seen that. We want her to also have this choice in other contexts. All of you have had the following experience. You work with a client and you and the client both know that they have new choices. They leave the office and you're happy and they're happy and congruent, and two weeks later when they come back they go "Well, it didn't quite ... I don't know what happened. I knew it... and I uh..." Or worse yet they come back and present you with the exact same problem, with very little memory that you even worked on it two weeks ago!

Linda was in an altered state up here. She radically altered her consciousness to go after old experiences, to integrate them with new kinds of resources. The point is—and this was a primary insight of family therapy twenty years ago—if you simply induce changes in an altered state of consciousness known as an institution, or a therapist's office, or a group setting, it's very unlikely that most of your work will transfer the first time. You'll have to do it several times. You have to be sure that the new understandings and learnings, the new behavior, the new choices, transfer out of that altered state of consciousness into the appropriate context in the real world.

There's a very easy process that we call "bridging" or "future-pacing" that connects the new response with the appropriate context. It's another use of anchoring. You know what the new response is, and you know that the person wants it to occur in some context, so you simply ask them the following question: "What is the first thing that you would see, hear, or feel, that would allow you to know you are in the context where you want to make this new choice?"

Linda, there are other situations in your present life that are similar to the one that you saw in those pictures, right?—situations in which you respond the same way you responded to that picture, instead of the way you would like to respond. Now, what I need to know is what allows you to know that a context is similar to that one. Is it something about what you see? Is it the tone of someone's voice, the way someone sounds, the way someone is touching you? ...

Linda: It's the way someone looks.

OK, I want you to see what that looks like. And as you see that, each time you see anything similar, you will feel this. (He touches the resource anchor.) I want you to remember that you have this particular resource....

That's bridging. It takes a minute and a half or two minutes, and it guarantees that your work will transfer out into the real world. The same stimulus that in the past elicited the maladaptive stereotyped behavior, the feeling that she wants to change, now serves as a stimulus for which the resource is a response. Now she will automatically have access to the new choice in the contexts where she needs it—not just in the office, the group, the institution. This is stimulus-stimulus conditioning.

You're not going to be there to squeeze her shoulder, so you need to make some part of the actual context the trigger for her new behavior. The best thing to use as the trigger is whatever was the trigger for the unwanted behavior. If her boss' tone of voice makes her feel helpless, then make that tone of voice the trigger to access the resources of creativity, confidence, or whatever. Otherwise, if the old anchors that exist are stronger than the new ones that you've created, the old ones will override the new ones.

That is what prompted the development of family therapy. They take a schizophrenic kid and they put him in a hospital and they give him M&M's in the right order and the kid gets better and he's well and normal, happy, learning. Then they put him back in the family and he's schizophrenic again in a matter of weeks. And so they said "Ah!

Something in the family keeps the kid the same, so therefore we will treat the whole family." You don't have to treat the whole family. That's one way to do it: it's a choice. If you bring the family in, the anchors are there, and you can use them. In fact, I'll demonstrate. You can sit down now, Linda. Thank you.

I'd like two people to come up here and role-play a husband and wife…

Thank you. Larry and Susie. Now as a wife, would you give me some complaints. What does he do or not do?

Susie: He drinks too much beer. He’ll never watch football with me.

He'll never watch football with you? And how does that make you feel?

Susie: Mad. Deserted.

Deserted, so what you want is some attention from him.

Susie: Right.

And when you try to get attention from him, what—look at that, he went right up into a visual access. Boom! That's what typically happens. The wife says "I feel I want him to touch me," and the husband goes (looking up) "Well, I don't see how that's useful."Right? And then he comes into the house and says "Look, this place is a mess. I can't stand to see a cluttered house." And she says "But it feels cozy this way."

Now what I'm going to do here is use anchoring. I say "Well, I find that hard to believe, but let me check it out." So I come over here and ask the husband a few rhetorical questions, simply for the purpose of eliciting responses. I say "Larry, let me ask you a question. Are there some times when you feel like you really want to be close to her, give her some attention and some good feelings and really get close to her? Are there times like that?"

Larry: Sure, there are times. (He touches Larry's wrist.)

"Now, I know, based on my past experience as a therapist, that couples usually get in trouble with words, because people are not very good with words. They don't train adults to use words; they don't even train children. So what I'm going to recommend to you, Susie, is that you try the following: I'm going to give you a non-verbal signal to try with Larry for the next two weeks just as a way to find out whether or not he really is open to paying attention to you. What I would like you to do is this: Any time you want five or ten minutes of his undivided attention and some affection, walk up to him and hold him on the wrist like this. OK, and would you do that right now? I want to check and make sure you know what I mean."

"Now, Susie, when you do this, look at him and he will nod or shake his head depending upon whether or not he feels this is an appropriate time to spend some time with you. This way he gets a message from you which is unambiguous, because if you come up to him and say (harsh voice, punching his arm) 'Want to watch football?' he might misinterpret that." I can send this couple off and let them try it. I'll tell her "Now, you're only to use this twice a day." Of course she'll be curious and she will try it. And what's underneath the "non-verbal signal?" An anchor. So what will happen? Will he nod "yes" or shake his head "no"?

Now, the first few times when she does this, shell complete the whole pattern. But pretty soon it will streamline. She'll walk in and just start to reach for him and that will be enough. Pretty soon she'll be able to walk in and just look at him and that will elicit the same response.

Couples get into trouble because they don't know how to elicit responses from one another. The response they intend to get is completely different from the one they actually get. For instance, say I have a guy here who really wants her to come and comfort him sometimes. So he sits on the end of the bed and stares at the floor. She, of course, assumes that this means that he wants space for himself, so what does she do? She leaves the room. They end up in therapy seventeen years later and he says to me "She doesn't support me when I need support." And she says "I do, too!" He says "You've never done it in seventeen years when I really needed it." I say "How do you let her know you need it?" He says "Well, when I sit on the end of the bed, I show her." And she says "Huh! Oh, I though you wanted to be alone." That's why we say "The response that you get is the meaning of your communication." This is a way that you can get the responses that people want connected with their own behavior. Now when Susie here wants affection, she has a direct way of eliciting that part of him. After you give a couple a few anchors, they begin to do it on their own without ever knowing what happened. They suddenly start getting what they want "mysteriously." That's one way of using anchoring with couples.

Most couples have simply habituated to each other's behavior, and they cease to do anything new with each other. It's not that they are not capable of it, it's that they are so anchored into rigid patterns of interacting that they don't do anything new. Very rarely do I find any serious dysfunction between couples other than having habituated into rigid patterns.

Whenever there are rigid and repetitive patterns or responses that you want to interrupt, you can begin by anchoring something unpleasant or attention-getting, and fire that anchor whenever the pattern or response occurs.

With a couple I saw once, his whole experience in life was making constructed images of possibilities, and her function in life was responding to anything he said by making an eidetic image of something that was similar and talking about how it didn't work. So he would go "I want to make a skylight in the bedroom" and she would say "We were over at so and so's house and their skylight leaked." They never had any other kind of communication. There was nothing else!

I did therapy with these two in my living room. When I came in, I sat down and said "You know, I'm kind of a city kid and living out here in the country I've had some real surprises. Did you know that a rattlesnake came right through my living room, right here, yesterday? Right across the floor. It was the damndest thing." As I said that, I looked down at the floor just behind their chairs and slowly followed an imaginary snake with my eyes as it went across the floor.

Then the couple began to speak. Whenever they would start to argue, I would look down at the floor again and they would stop. I began to anchor their terror of snakes to having that conversation. After about an hour of doing that, they didn't have that conversation any more. It was too unpleasant, because after a while their feelings about snakes became associated with arguing. If you're going to talk to somebody and you know that there's even a possibility that you might need to interrupt them, you can set them up like that before you begin the session,

You can interrupt behaviorally like that, or you can interrupt with words "Oh wait a second! What—" Or you can look at their ankle and say "Are you allergic to bee stings?" That'll get their attention. "Stop! I just thought of something I have to remember to write down."

Anchoring is an amazing thing. You can anchor air and people will respond to it. Any good mime anchors air by his movements, defining objects and concepts in empty space. Recently I was teaching a sales course and somebody said "You always tell us to be flexible. What happens if you try a whole bunch of stuff, and someone responds to you really negatively?" I said "Well the first thing to do is move, and then point to where you were, and talk about how terrible that is,"

That's called dissociation. You can go in and try the "hard sell." When you see that they are responding negatively, you can step aside and say "Now, that kind of talk puts people off," and try something else.

Those of you who are interested in really becoming more generative, when you get tired of touching people's knees and forearms, understand that anchoring is one of the most universal and generalizable of all the things that we have ever done.

Once I was lecturing to two hundred and fifty fairly austere psychologists, being academic, talking about representational systems and books, and drawing equations. In the middle of my academic lecture I just walked up to the edge of the stage, looked up for a moment, and said "That's weird" and then continued. A little later I looked up and did it again: "Well, that's really weird." I did that a couple more times during my talk, and most of the people in the first four or five rows became fixated, staring at this spot on the ceiling. Then I moved over to the side, and talked right through to them. I could get arm levitation and other unconscious responses.

If people would notice that what they are doing is not working and do something new, then being in a couple would be a really interesting experience. Actually they need to do something even before that. They need to realize what outcome they want, and then notice whether or not they are getting it.

One thing that we have done with couples is to take away their ability to talk to each other. "You can’t talk to each other any more until I tell you to. If I catch you talking to each other, I'll give you warts." They have to generate new behavior, and they begin to become interesting to each other, if nothing else. Even if they keep the same patterns of behavior, at least they generate some new content. They have to learn new ways to elicit the responses that they want. He wants her to iron a shirt for him, so he comes in and walks up to her and gestures with his hands. So she goes out and gets a piece of bread and butters it for him and brings it back in, right? Now, in the past, when he'd say "Will you iron my shirt?" and she did something else, he would criticize her. "You never do what I want," and so on. Now when he gets the piece of bread, he can't criticize because he can't talk. In order for him to get what he wants, he's got to change his own behavior. So he tries again. He hands her the shirt... and she puts it on. He's got to keep coming up with new behaviors until he finds one that works. Then I can use that as an example. I can say "Look, even if you do it with words, if what you do doesn't work, try altering your own behavior.

As they learn to vary their behavior, they will be establishing new anchors. Only about half of them will be useful, but that still gives them a lot of new possibilities in their relationship.

The nice thing about family therapy is that people bring their anchors with them. If you have a child who is responding in a troublesome way, you can observe what he is responding to, because all the primary hypnotic relationships are there. When children have symptomatic behavior, their symptomatic behavior is always a response to something. Anyone's symptomatic behavior is a response to something, and the question is, what! If you can change what they are responding to, it's often much easier than changing their behavior. You don't always have to know what it is, but it's often very easy to tell. You have a "hyperactive" kid with his parents and for the first five minutes of the session he's not hyperactive. Then the father looks at the mother and says "What are you going to do about this kid?" When the kid immediately starts jumping around, it gives you a mild indication of what he's responding to. But you won't notice that if you're inside making pictures and talking to yourself about which drugs you are going to give him.

Man: What if you have a suicidal kid? How do you look for the stimulus for that? Always depressed, always sitting there—

Well, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, depression will fall into the pattern we already talked about. I wouldn't try family therapy, not until I'd taken care of the suicide part of it. I would try a question like "What resource would you need as a human being to know that you could go on living and have lots of happiness?" and then do what we did with Linda, the "change history" pattern.

Our presupposition is that any human being who comes and says "Help! I need help" has already tried with all their conscious resources, and failed utterly. However, we also presuppose that somewhere in their personal history they have had some set of experiences which can serve as a resource for helping them get exactly what they want in this particular situation. We believe that people have the resources that they need, but they have them unconsciously, and they are not organized in the appropriate context. It's not that a guy can't be confident and assertive at work, it's that he isn't. He may be perfectly confident and assertive on the golf course. All we need to do is to take that resource and put it where he needs it. He has the resource that he needs to be confident and assertive in his business on the golf course, but he has never made that transfer, that connection. Those are dissociated parts of himself. Anchoring, and the integration that occurs with anchoring, will give you a tool to collapse dissociations, so that the person has access to the resource in the context that they need it.

Man: Are there situations where that's not true and the therapist needs to give the person a—

No, I don't know of any.

I'd like to mention something that is relevant for your own learning. There's a phenomenon in the field of psychotherapy which does not seem to occur in some of the other fields that I have worked in. When I teach somebody how to do something and demonstrate that it works, they usually ask me where it won't work or what you do about something else. So when I demonstrate how you can work with people who are bothered by images from their past, you ask "When won't it work?"

Now, the interesting thing about that pattern of behavior is that if what I've demonstrated is something that you'd like to be able to do, you might as well spend your time learning it. There are lots and lots of things that we cannot do. If you can program yourself to look for things that will be useful for you and learn those, instead of trying to find out where what we are presenting to you falls apart, you'll find out where it falls apart, I guarantee you. If you use it congruently you will find lots of places that it won't work. And when it doesn't work, I suggest you do something else.

Now to answer your question. The limiting case is a person who has had very, very little real world experience. We had a client who had been locked up for twelve years in his parents' house and had only left the house to see a psychiatrist three times a week, and had been on tranquilizers from age twelve to twenty-two. He didn't have much personal history. However, he had twelve years of television experience, and that constituted enough of a resource that we were able to begin to generate what he needed.

Let me reinterpret the question. If you ask a client "How would you like to be?" and they congruently say "I don't know what I want. I really don't. I don't know what resource I would have needed back then," what do you do? You can ask them to guess. Or you can say "Well, if you knew, what would it be?" "Well, if you don't know, lie to me. Make it up." "Do you know anyone who knows how to do this?" "How would you feel if you did know? What would you look like? What would your voice sound like?" As soon as you get a response, you can anchor it. You can literally construct personal resources.

For most of the people who come to you, and for all of you sitting here, your personal history is a set of limitations on your experience and behavior in the present. Anchoring, and the construction of new possibilities using anchoring, can literally convert your personal history from a set of limitations to a set of resources.

Another way to answer the question is that if a person hasn't had the direct experience they need as a resource, they have some representation of what it could be, even though it may be other people's behavior. That is, there is a representation within them which they label "other people's behavior" that they don't allow themselves to have. However, it is a representation that's in them. If you can access it fully, you can anchor it. You can do it directly or covertly. "Well, I can't see the images that you are looking at right now, your representation of this friend of yours who knows how to do this, so would you pretend to be that friend to give me an idea of what we are working toward?" "Display that behavior for me so that I can get an idea about how Joe would act." "Show me how you wouldn't act. "Then anchor it as they do it. That's now a piece of behavior that is as real as any other behavior.

Or you can make them do it. When people tell you "Well, gee, I could never be like that," it's not necessarily true. We had a woman that came in and told us that it was impossible for her to say what she wanted and to assert herself. She couldn't get people's attention. And she was an assertiveness trainer, too, which is interesting. She couldn't go to a regular therapist because it would ruin her reputation. So we told her to wait a second, we were going to go discuss it, and we went out in the living room and read magazines for about two and a half hours until she came flying angrily out of the office "If you don't get back in here, blah blah blah." If you are flexible enough in your behavior, you can elicit what you want right there on the spot. We made the assumption, the presupposition, that this woman knew how to get somebody's attention if a proper context were supplied. We supplied the proper context; she made the move. We just anchored it, and then transferred it to other contexts where she wanted it.

There's a huge advantage to doing it this way. We don't have to decide before we start working with somebody how many parts they have and what the parts do. I think the Michigan TA model is up to nine specific parts: critical parent, natural child, adult, little professor, etc. At theoretical conventions they argue about how many parts a person should have. That's how the TA trainers and therapists instruct themselves about how to organize another person's experience. None of my clients have a "parent," "child" and "adult," except the ones that come from a TA therapist. And then they actually have them.

With anchoring, you don't have to decide before you begin the session what the legitimate categories of human experience or communication are going to be. You can simply accept whatever comes up without understanding the meaning of any of it. I don't know what X and Y were for Linda, but I know that I can operate at the process level, without ever knowing the content, and assist her in changing. You don't have to decide beforehand how many parts you are going to allow that person to have. You don't have to demand that your clients be flexible enough to reorganize their experience into your categories. You simply accept whatever is offered, anchor it, and utilize it.

Woman: Do you always anchor the negative feeling? Because that's already in her repertoire.

We don't always do anything. It's often useful to anchor the response a person doesn't want, and there are several ways to use it. You've all had the experience of beginning to work with a client on a particular problem—especially children, because children are so fluid in their consciousness—and suddenly you discover you are doing something else. The initial anchor that I established stabilized the thing we were going to work on, so we can always go back to it. If I had wanted to go back and find out where it came from in Linda's personal history, that anchor would have given me an excellent way to do it.

In gestalt therapy if a client is troubled by a feeling, the therapist will say "Intensify the feeling, stay with the feeling, exaggerate it! Go back through time... and what do you see now?" The therapist is stabilizing one part of the person's experience, namely the kinesthetic component, the feelings that person has. And they are saying "Keep those constant, and then let them lead you back in your own personal history to a full, all-system representation of what we are working on." By using an anchor you can always get back to the same set of kinesthetic responses that you began with, and thereby easily stabilize what you are working on. That's one use.

Another use that I demonstrated is testing. After we had done the integration work, after she had the resource and relived the experience with the resource so that she changed her personal history, I gave her a few moments, and then I reached over and triggered the original anchor. The response I got was an integrated response, thereby informing me non-verbally that the process had worked. I recommend that you never let the client know you are checking your work that day. It gives you a covert, non-verbal way of checking to make sure that your integrations have worked before the person leaves your office. Given our historical development in humanistic psychology, most of you want verbal, explicit, conscious kinds of feedback. That is the least useful kind of feedback you can get from your client.

Now I'd like you to realize that there is nothing that your client will do that you won't anchor. As long as you are going to anchor it, you might as well know what the anchor is. If the client comes in and says "I'm really depressed" and you just go "umhm," that's as adequate an anchor as touching them on the arm. And since you will be doing that, you might as well know which anchor is which. We recommend to people in the beginning that they practice using kinesthetic anchors for a period of a month. As they do that, they will discover that they are anchoring anyway, constantly, in all representational systems. Most of the time people use anchors in a way that slows down the process of change, because they don't know what they are anchoring or how they are anchoring.

There is another important point. When you say "Do you always anchor the negative thing?" there was nothing "negative" about it. "Negative" is a judgement about experience. It is not experience itself; it's a judgement specifically made by the person's conscious mind. The experience that Linda had which was unpleasant now serves for her, as well as for everyone else in this room, as a foundation for your learning in the future if you use it that way. If you grew up for the first twenty years of your life without a single unpleasant experience, you would be dull and unable to cope with anything. It's important that you understand that all experiences can serve as a foundation for learning, and it's not that they are positive or negative, wanted or unwanted, good or bad.

As a matter of fact, it's not even that they are. Pick any experience that you believe happened to you, and I will guarantee you that on close examination it didn't. The original personal history that Linda relived, re-experienced today as she went through the experience, is as much a myth as the new experience she went through with the resource. The one we made up is as real as the one she "actually had." Neither one of them actually occurred. If you want a demonstration of this, wait two or three months, remember about having been here for three days and then look at that videotape that they are making now. You will discover there is very little relationship between it and your memories of "what happened here." Since your personal history is a myth anyway, use it as a resource instead of a set of limitations. One way to do that is with anchoring.

Those of you who have done TA "redecision" work as a client: remember all those vivid scenes and experiences that you so well recollected from when you were two years and eight months old?

Woman: Well, mine really happened.

Nothing ever really happened. The only thing that happened is that you made a set of perceptions about events. The relationship between your experience and what actually occurred is tenuous at best. But they really are your perceptions. Doing a redecision about an experience that never occurred is just as valuable as—perhaps more valuable than—doing a redecision about one that did occur, especially if it's less painful, and especially if it opens more choices. I could very easily install memories in you that related to real world experiences that never occurred and could not be documented in any way—that were just bizarre hallucinations out of my fantasy. Made-up memories can change you just as well as the arbitrary perceptions that you made up at the time about "real world events." That happens a lot in therapy.

You can also convince your parents. You can go back and check up with your parents and convince them of things that never actually occurred. I tried that, and it worked. My mother now believes she did things to me when I was a child that never happened. And I know they never happened. But I convinced her of it. I told her I went to a therapy group and I made these changes which were really important to me, and it was all based on this experience when I was little. As I named the experience, she had to search through her history and find something that approximated it. And of course we had enough experience together that she could find something that was close enough that it fit that category.

It's the same as if I sit here and say "Right now, as you sit there, you may not be fully aware of it, but soon you will become aware of a sensation in one of your hands." Now, if you don't, you are probably dead. You are bound to have some sensation in one of your hands, and since I called your attention to it, you'll have to become aware of any sensation. Most of the things that people do as therapies are so general that people can go through their history and find the appropriate experiences.

You can do marvelous "psychic" reading that way. You take an object that belongs to someone and hold it in your hand. That allows you to see them really well with your peripheral vision. You speak in the first person so that they will identify directly and respond more, and say something like "Well, I'm a person who... who is having some kind of trouble that has to do with an inheritance." And then you watch the person whose object it is and that person goes "An inheritance!" Right? And then he goes "Ummmmmmmm" through all his memories, right? And somewhere in his life there was something that had to do with some inheritance and he goes "You're right! Uncle George! I remember now!"

Peripheral vision is the source of most of the visual information I find useful. The periphery of your eye is physiologically built to detect movement far better than the foveal portion of your eye. It's just the way it's constructed. Right now I'm looking in your direction: if there were a trajectory, my eyes would be on you. That just happens to put everyone else in my peripheral vision, which is a situation that is effective for me. As I'm talking, I'm watching the people in the room with my peripheral vision to detect large responses, sudden movements, changes in breathing, etc.

For those of you who would like to learn to do this, there is a little exercise that is quite easy. If I were helping Jane here to learn to have confidence in her peripheral vision, the first thing I would have her do is to walk up to me and stand looking away from me at about a forty-five degree angle. Now without changing the focus of your eyes, Jane, either form a mental image of where you think my hands are, or put your hands in a position that closely corresponds. Now look to verify whether you are correct or not. And now look back over there again, and do it again. Once she can do this at forty-five degrees, then I'll move to ninety. You are already getting all the information you need in your peripheral vision. But nobody has ever told you to trust that information and use it as a basis for your responses. Essentially what you are doing with this exercise is teaching yourself to have confidence in the judgements that you're probably already making by getting information through your peripheral vision. This exercise is a stabilized situation. That's the most difficult. Movements are much easier to detect. If you can get position information, the movement stuff will be easy.

This is particularly important in conference work, or in family therapy. I don't pay attention to the person who is actively communicating verbally; I'll watch anyone else. Anyone else will give me more information than that person, because I'm interested in what responses s/he is eliciting from other members of the family or the conference. That gives me lots of choices, for instance, about knowing when they are about to be interrupted. I can either reinforce the interruption, make it myself, or interrupt the interruptor to allow the person to finish. Peripheral vision gives you much more information, and that's a basis for choices.

Your personal history serves as a foundation for all your capabilities and all your limitations. Since you only have one personal history, you have only one set of possibilities and one set of limitations. And we really believe that each of you deserves more than one personal history to draw upon. The more personal histories you have, the more choices you'll have available to you.

A long time ago we had been trying to find expedient ways of helping people to lose weight. Most of the vehicles that were available at that time didn't seem to work, and we discovered that there were some real differences between the way people have weight problems. One of the major things we discovered is there were a lot of people who had always been fat. There were other people who had gotten fat, but there were a lot of them who had always been fat. When they got skinny, they freaked out because they didn't know how to interact with the world as a skinny person. If you've always been fat, you were never chosen first to be on a sports team. You were never asked to dance in high school. You never ran fast. You have no experience of certain kinds of athletic and physical movements.

So instead of trying to get people to adjust, we would simply go back and create a whole new childhood and have them grow up being a skinny person. We learned this from Milton Erickson. Erickson had a client whose mother had died when she was twelve years old, and who had been raised by a series of governesses. She wanted to get married and have children, but she knew herself well enough to know that she did not have the requisite background to respond to children in the ways that she wanted to be able to respond to them. Erickson hypnotized her and age-regressed her into her past and appeared periodically as the "February Man." The February Man appeared repeatedly throughout her personal history, and presented her with all the experiences that she needed. We simply extended this further. We decided that there was no need to just appear as the February Man, Why not March, April and May? We started creating entire personal histories for people, in which they would have experiences which would serve as the resources for the kinds of behaviors that they wanted to have. And then we extended it from weight problems to all kinds of other behaviors.

We did it once with a woman who had grown up being asthmatic. At this time, she had three or four children who wanted to have pets. She had gone to a very fine allergist who insisted that she wasn't allergic to animals as far as he could tell. If he tested her without telling her what the skin patches were, she didn't come out being allergic to animals. However, if you put an animal in her presence, or told her that one had been in the room recently, she had a very strong allergic reaction. So we simply gave her a childhood of growing up without being asthmatic. And an amazing thing happened: not only did she lose her allergic response to animals, but also to the things she had been found to be allergic to by the skin-patch testing.

Woman: How long does that take, ordinarily, and do you use hypnosis for that?

Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There's a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn't use such terms, since they don't refer to anything.

We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That's the function of every conversation. Let's say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they're trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called "words."

Do we have any official hypnotists here? How many of the rest of you know that you are unofficial hypnotists? We've got one. And the rest of you don't know it yet. I think that it is important to study official hypnosis if you are going to be a professional communicator. It has some of the most interesting phenomena about people available in it. One of the most fascinating things you will discover once you are fully competent in using the ritualistic notions of traditional hypnosis, is that you'll never have to do it again. A training program in hypnosis is not for your clients. It's for you, because you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people's everyday "waking activity." You will also discover that most of the techniques in different types of psychotherapy are nothing more than hypnotic phenomena. When you look at an empty chair and start talking to your mother, that's a "deep trance phenomenon" called "positive auditory and visual hallucination." It's one of the deep trance phenomena that defines somnambulism. Amnesia is another pattern you see everywhere…. What were we talking about?

I remember one time about two months after I entered the field and started studying it, I was sitting in a room full of adults in suits and ties. And a man there was having them talk to empty chairs. One of them said "I feel foolish"and I burst into laughter. They all looked at me as if I was crazy. They were talking to people who weren't there, and telling me that hypnosis is bad!

One of the things that will help people to learn about being good therapists is to be able to look at what they do and listen to it and realize how absurd most of what is going on in therapy is. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it still is definitely the major theater of the absurd at this time. And when I say absurd, I want you to separate the notion of absurdity from the notion of usefulness, because they are two entirely different issues. Given the particular cultural/economic situation in the United States, therapy happens to be an activity which I think is quite useful.

To answer the other half of your question, we don't ordinarily create new personal histories for people anymore. We have spent three hours doing it. And we have done it fifteen minutes a week for six weeks, and we trained somebody to do time distortion once, and did it in about four minutes. We programmed another person to do it each night as they dreamed. We literally installed, in a somnambulistic trance, a dream generator, that would generate the requisite personal history, and have her recall this in the waking state the next day, each day. As far as I know, she still has the ability to create daily a personal history for anything she wants. When we used to do change work with individuals, a session for us could last anywhere from thirty seconds to seven or eight hours.

We have a different situation than you do. We are modelers. Our job is to test all the patterns we have, so that when we do a workshop, we can offer you patterns that we have already verified are effective with all the presenting problems that we guess you are going to have to cope with.

We trained a group of people who work at a mental health clinic. The director took lots and lots of training with us and they do this kind of work in the clinic. They are supported by the state; they don't make their living from client money. They now average six visits per client and they have almost no returns. Their work lasts.

One of the interesting things is that the guy who directs the clinic also has a part-time private practice. In his private practice he is apt to see a client twelve or fifteen times instead of six times. And it never dawned on him what caused that. The same patterns that you can use to change somebody quickly and unconsciously can be used to hook them and keep them as patients. That's a strange thing about therapy: The more effective you are, the less money you make. Because your clients get what they want and leave and don't pay you anymore.

Woman: I have a patient who can't stand to be touched, because of a rape experience. How should I anchor her?

You can anchor in any system. But I would recommend that you do touch her, because that's a statement about her limitations. You can begin by accessing some really pleasant experience in her and anchoring that, and then expanding your anchor a little bit at a time until she can enjoy being touched. Otherwise she's going to respond like that for the rest of her life. If you respect her limitations, I think you are doing her a huge disservice. That's the very person that you want to be able to be touched without having to recall being raped. And of course your sequencing is important. You start with a positive frame. For example, you can start by talking with her, before therapy begins, about a vacation or something else pleasant, and when you get the response, anchor it. Or you can check to make sure that at least some time in her life she had a pleasant sexual experience, and anchor that.

Man: Do you have to anchor as obviously as you have been demonstrating?

We are being very obvious and exaggerated in our movements as we are anchoring here because we want you to observe the process and learn as the changes occur. If we had brought Linda up here and anchored her auditorily, with voice tonalities, you'd have no idea what we did. The more covert you are, the better off you will be in your private practice. You can be very covert in the way you touch. You can use tones of voice. You can use words like "parent," "child," and "adult," or postures, gestures, expressions. You can't not anchor, but most people aren't systematic.

Anchors are everywhere. Have you ever been in a classroom where there's a blackboard and somebody went up to the blackboard and went—(He pantomimes scraping his fingernails down the blackboard. Most people wince or groan.) What are you doing? You're crazy! There's no blackboard. How's that for an anchor?

We first noticed anchoring as we watched other people do therapy. The client comes in and says "Yeah, man, I've been just down in the dumps for seven years, and ..." The therapist leans over and puts his hand on the client's shoulder and says "I'm going to put the full force of my skills behind the changes that we will work toward together in this session." And then the therapist does some really good work. The client changes, and feels really good. Then the therapist says "That really pleases me" and as he does he leans forward and puts his hand on the client's shoulder again. Whammo, that anchor accesses the depression again.

I've seen a therapist take away a phobia and give it back nine times in a single session, without having the faintest idea what she was doing. At the end of the session she said "Well, we'll have to work more on this next time."

Do yourself a favor. Hide yourself where you can see your clients make the transition from the street to your office. What happens is a miracle. They are walking down the street, smiling, feeling good. As they enter the building, they start accessing all the garbage that they are going to talk about, because the building is an anchor. You can't not anchor. It's only a question of whether you do it in a useful way or not.

We know an old Transylvanian therapist who solved the problem by having two offices. He has one office in which you come in and you tell him all your troubles. And then he says nothing to you; he just stands up and takes you into the next room and does change work. And then pretty soon he just takes you into the other room and you change; you don't have to go through the personal history which has all the pain and suffering.

When couples have been together for a while they usually end up not touching each other much. Do you know how they do that? Let me show you. Come up here, Char. This is a good way to alienate your loved ones. You're in a really bad mood, really depressed. And I'm your loving husband, so I come up and I go "Hey, it's going to be all right," and put my arm around your shoulders. Then all I have to do is wait until you're in a good mood and really happy, and come up and say "Hey, you want to go out?" and put my arm around you again. Boom! Instead of touching each other when they are happy and making all kinds of great anchors, couples usually anchor each other into unpleasant states.

All of you who have done work with couples or families know you can be sitting there and everything is going along nicely and suddenly one of them explodes. If you didn't happen to notice the little sound, or the movement, or the body sway away from the other person, it's baffling. What happened? Nobody knows. The anchors that people are responding to in "maladaptive behavior" are usually outside of their awareness.

There's a great exercise you can do. Get together with a family or a couple, wait until one of those explosions happens, and detect what you think was the cue that initiated the explosion. Then adopt it in your behavior, and find out if you can get them to explode again. If you can get them to explode, you know you've identified exactly the key point in their interaction. Let's say it's a raised eyebrow. Then all you have to do is anchor a pleasant response kinesthetically, and then fire off that anchor and raise your eyebrow at the same time. In the future when someone raises their eyebrow, it won't have that effect any more.

You can also use anchoring in the context of an organization or a corporation. They are just like families, basically. If you know ahead of time that a group of people is going to get together and they've been meeting for years, they're going to disagree in patterned ways. One of the things you can do is to meet with each of them individually beforehand, and establish a covert non-verbal anchor to change the most salient irritating parts of their non-verbal communication.

Some people have voice tones that when you hear them you just feel bad and disagreeable, no matter what they say. Nobody could continue to talk that way if they had auditory feedback loops. If they could hear themselves, they would talk differently. I guess it's a protective device.

Bullfrogs do that. A bullfrog makes such a huge sound, it would deafen itself if it heard itself, because its ear is so close to the source of that loud noise. The nerve impulses for the sound, and the nerve impulses from the muscles that make the sound, arrive at the brain 180 degrees out of phase and cancel each other. So the bullfrog never hears itself. And it seems like a lot of people I meet operate the same way.

Another thing that often happens in a corporate situation is this: Somebody becomes so excited about a point they want to make that he begins to really push and gesture. Suddenly the person on the other side sees the pointing finger and the intense look on his face and that triggers an anchored response in them. Away they go. Their response is partially to this human being in this time and place, and a whole lot to other times and places—anchored by the excited face and the pointing finger. Human beings operate in what we call a "mixed state" most of the time. If I ask you to look around and find someone in this group who reminds you of someone else, I will guarantee that your responses to that person will be a mixture of responses to them here and now, and old responses to whoever it is they remind you of—unless you are very, very careful and clean in your responses to that person. You are all sensitive to that process; it's called a "contaminated" response in TA, and it's a common way that people respond.

Woman: Does it make any difference whether you touch the right or left side of the body when you anchor kinesthetically?

There are fine distinctions—there's a lot of artistry. But for the purposes of doing therapy, you don't need to know about them. If you want to be a magician, it's a different game. If you want to create artificial credit cards that aren't there, and things like that, there are certain useful kinds of distinctions. But for the purpose of doing therapy, kinesthetic anchors are adequate, and either side of the body will be as good.

Sometimes it helps to be able to anchor tonally. Virginia Satir anchors tonally. She has a certain tone of voice she uses whenever she does change work. She talks in a regular tonality for six hours, and then suddenly she changes her tonality. When she uses that tonality, boom! that's it. The people change. Erickson has a special tonality he uses when he wants people to go into trance.

A lot of people in trance have their eyes closed. What does Erickson do for anchoring at that point, since he's in a wheel chair and he can't reach around and do kinesthetics? Close your eyes for a moment. I'm going to talk, and as I talk I'm going to move my head back and forth. I want you to notice whether you can detect the spatial dislocation of my voice, even from this distance. If you can, fine. If you can't, you detected it unconsciously I'll guarantee you, because that's one of the major anchoring systems that Erickson uses with people who have their eyes closed in trance.

All of those will work. The choice you make about what system you anchor in will determine the kind of response you get. If you want to involve the person's consciousness, anchor in all systems. If you want to be covert and go around a resistant conscious mind, anchor in any system that is not represented in consciousness. If the person's predicates and their eye movement patterns give you the information that they are primarily kinesthetic, don't anchor in that system unless you, want their conscious resources involved. If you anchor that same person tonally, they will have no conscious representation of it.

Anchoring Exercise

We are going to ask you to begin with kinesthetic anchors. They seem to be the easiest to learn, and the most useful. You'll generalize naturally from those. You can anchor in any system. Pair up again, A and B. You are both going to operate in both positions.

A, your job is to do the following: Face B, and place your right hand lightly on B's left knee. Then ask an accessing question: "Do you remember the last time that you had a really good sexual experience?" Wait for an appropriate response. You've got to be able to detect a response before you can anchor it. As you begin to see changes, you begin to apply pressure with your hand. You observe the changes in the parameters of muscle tone, skin color, breathing, lip size, etc. As you detect them, let those actually drive the pressure in your hand. When the changes level out, then you just lift your hand off. Then you will have a perfectly timed anchor. Don't anchor initially until you can see a difference in your partner's response.

Your ability to see a difference depends on how forceful you are in amplifying what you are getting. If you do things like this: (low, slow voice) "Have you ever been really excited?" or (high, quick voice) "Have you ever been really sad?" that won't work as well as if you congruently say excitedly "Look, have you ever been really excited?" The more expressively you access, the more expressively they will respond.

Then you place your left hand on their right knee, and ask them "What in your experience is the opposite of that?" They will access whatever is the opposite, for them. As the changes occur, again you increase the pressure as you see the changes until they plateau, and then lift your hand off.

Then you have two anchors. What we want you to do is to use one, and notice the changes. Pause, and then use the other one, and notice the changes. It works even better if you distract your partner's consciousness with something neutral, like "Do you remember seeing the lights as we came into the building?" as you use that anchor. See if you can regularly get the same response when you use your anchors.

When you are satisfied that you have two anchors that work, and you can see the difference between them, then we want you to hold both at the same time, for about 30-60 seconds, and watch an amazing event, called “integration." Watch your partner's face. You will first see half of the face with one of those responses and the other half with the other, and then they will integrate. Anchors are not buttons; you have to hold them until you see the full response. Once the integration begins, you don't have to hold any more.

The purpose of this exercise is not to do therapy with your partner. The purpose is simply for you to verify with your own sensory apparatus that anchors exist, and that you are capable of anchoring. All you are doing is learning to anchor. This afternoon well teach you how to use it to do therapy. Go ahead.

* * * * *

There was one question that came up repeatedly during the exercise. Bill said "Well, I was imagining a time with my wife that was extremely sensually pleasurable there on the one knee. And on the other knee, I was remembering a time when she didn't seem to be willing to be with me, or the demands of keeping the house, etc. didn't allow us time to sit down together, and I got angry." Bill's partner was able to get the two distinctly, and to go back and reaccess them; the anchoring worked fine. He collapsed the two anchors and the integration occurred. And their question is "What will happen now when he sees his wife?" The answer to this is really important insofar as our understanding of our work goes. What will happen now is that when he sees his wife, he will have the choice of those purely sensual, pleasant feelings in the past, or the feelings of anger from the past, or—and this is very important— any combination of the two.

Those were two antagonistic, dissociated feeling states in the past. When you anchor each one, you also anchor the antagonistic physiology, muscle patterns, breathing, etc. Then when you stimulate both at the same time, the physiological patterns which are antagonistic literally interrupt each other—you could see that in the person's face, in their breathing, and so on. In the process they become integrated so that the person can come up with any combination of those feelings which were previously dissociated, and respond appropriately in context. The presupposition behind our behavior in this area is that given a set of choices, a person will always make the best choice that they have available in the context. I think it's entirely appropriate for anyone to have the ability both to be fully sensual with another person as well as to be angry, and all the mixes in between. By integrating in this way, using anchoring as an integrative device to break down the dissociations, we make sure that you have a full range of response in that area.

One of the lies we told you was that the anchoring exercise you did is not therapy. "You are just going to anchor this here and that there and then you are going to collapse the two and integrate them." I want you to think about that. What you did with the knee anchors and the integration is formally identical to gestalt two-chair work. Gestalt people use chairs as anchors and when you switch from one chair to the other, your feelings actually change. If you were on the outside as the therapist, you would actually see facial, postural and color changes as the person moved from one chair to the other. Those chairs are anchors. The problem is that it's hard to get integration. How do you push the chairs together? So you have to make people go back and forth really fast.

Now we'd like you all to pair up again and do the "changing personal history" pattern that we did this morning with Linda. I'll review it briefly:

First, what response does your partner have now that s/he wants to change? Anchor that to stabilize the situation, and to give you access to it.

Now, how would you like to behave, or what resource would you need, to behave in a way that's more congruent with your present resources? When you originally went through this experience, you didn't have all the resources you now have. Which resource would you take back to change your personal history? When have you had an experience of that resource? Anchor the response.

Then put the two together. Hold both anchors as your partner goes back and relives the past with the new resource, changing and creating new old history, until s/he is satisfied. Here your sensory experience is important. Check for congruency. Did you like the way it turned out? If not, do it again. What other resource do you need? Sometimes you have to give people a couple of resources. Or sometimes people think that all they needed is a certain resource and they take it and go back and it turns out to be a dud. The conscious mind has a limited understanding of what's needed back there. The only way you're going to find out is by having them go back to re-experience parts of their personal history.

After they are satisfied that they have a new resource that worked back there, you need to bridge, or future-pace. What experiences in your present life are sufficiently similar to that old one to trigger the unwanted response? What is the first thing you see, hear, or feel that

I lets you identify this kind of situation? Then anchor the new resource to those contextual cues. OK. Go ahead.

* * * * *

There are many, many useful ways of organizing the whole process called psychotherapy. One of the ways that is quite simple, and therefore elegant, is to treat every psychological limitation like a phobia. A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation. A person who has a phobia made a decision, unconsciously, under stress, sometime earlier in their life in the face of overwhelming stimuli. They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning. Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life, they make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement. You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes, you are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.

The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the responses are so consistent. If a person says "I can't be assertive around my boss," they are essentially saying "Somewhere in my personal history I have an experience or a set of experiences of being assertive. I cannot get to that resource in the context of my boss." When a person responds with a phobic response to a snake, that's a similar situation. I know that at other times in their experience, in their personal history, they have been able to be quite calm and courageous. However, in the context of a snake, they can't get to that resource.

Up to this time in the development of psychology and psychiatry and counseling, people haven't tried to organize information to go directly after things. Freud set up a rule "You must go into history," so we've decided if you can understand how something developed historically, you can work with it. I think you only need to do that once or twice, though. Given that you understand, historically, how people are capable of creating phobias, you don't need a historical understanding of each and every phobia, as long as you understand that there are similar processes at work. The way in which people get phobias is fascinating. However, once you understand something about the structure you can go ahead and change it, because all phobias are going to work in the same way. People have strategies which produce phobic responses. Who here has a phobia?

Woman: I've got one about driving a car across a bridge and falling in the car into the water.

If you were observing her, everything that you need to know about changing her has already happened. Would you like to get rid of it? Is it something that restricts your behavior?

Woman: Oh, I'd love to get rid of it!

Are you sure?

Woman: Of course. Yeah, I'm sure. I just wasn't sure I wanted to share it, but I've already shared it!

But you didn't need to share it! You could have kept it a secret. We don't need any content. In fact, we prefer not to have any. Is there someone else here with a phobia who would be unwilling to talk about it? Any time we ask for volunteers, you keep the content to yourself. None of you knew what Linda was thinking about this morning. That's the format we'll always use for demonstrations, so feel free to demonstrate. One way for us to respect your integrity as human beings, whether it's in private practice or in a group demonstration like this, is for you to keep the content to yourself. We don't need it. We operate with process anyway. Content is irrelevant, and besides that, it's often depressing. We don't want to hear it. And when you tell people the content of your problem, you look like a fool. It's a good thing we interrupted you before you told them what the content was, right? OK. What's your name?

Woman: Tammy.

Tammy. Very good. (He contorts his body and several different intense expressions pass across his face.) Any weird non-verbal analogue is good, especially if you get clients who have been in therapy before. You need to do something to throw them off balance— anything to break up their patterns. Because otherwise they will come in and tell you the same thing they told everyone else. They will come in and tell you a prerecorded message. We once heard a tape recording of a client with the therapist before us, and in the whole first session with us she said exactly the same thing; the same words in the same order. We were fascinated to find out how much she could reproduce. It was almost identical until we intervened in the process. I jumped up and started roaring about God. "God said 'You will change!'" The easiest way to do therapy is to enter the client's reality. This woman was extremely religious, and the easiest way to assist her in making a change was to make myself an intermediary between God and her. That's what all priests do, isn't it? It was acceptable to her. All I did was feed back information that she had given to me from her unconscious—which were the instructions she needed.

Now, Tammy, let's pretend that we don't know that this is about bridges. Would you give me a code word for the phobic response that you have had for some years?

Tammy: Pink.

Pink. She's phobic of pink. Now you have as much information as when she says "I'm afraid of driving across bridges." You still have no idea what the response is, where it came from, or what the dimensions are internally and externally. Secret therapy and code words vividly point out the illusion of understanding another person when they use words that do not refer to sensory-based descriptions.

Now, before we begin, let me ask you something, Tammy. Would you think of a situation in which you expressed yourself with what you regard as a fine representation of your full capabilities as an adult human being, as a mature woman. Sometime in the past few years—it may have been a stressful situation or maybe just a happy occasion— you behaved in a way that you found particularly satisfying. I want you to take your time and find such a situation, and let me know when you have it. Do you understand the request? (She nods.)...

OK. First of all, I hope you all noticed a distinct change in her face, in her breathing, etc. Those of you who were watching her could see that Tammy constructed a visual image. She searched visually and she went up and to her right. She is a normally organized right-hander, cerebrally. She didn't see the situation from inside of it. She saw herself in the situation. As such, her kinesthetic response was not as strong as it would be if she did the following.

Would you make that image of yourself again, and when you see it clearly, I want you to step inside the image so that you are actually back in that situation that represents for you an example of your full capacity as a woman. When you can actually feel in your body again the feelings of competence and strength that you associate with that situation, just reach over with your left hand and hold my hand….

OK. I have no idea what her specific experience is. I do know, however, from the remarkable, dramatic change that Tammy just offered me non-verbally, that she succeeded in carrying out my instructions. And I agree with her. That looks really good. That fits my hallucinations about what competence, etc. is. Tammy, do you happen to know what the original experience was that this phobia is connected to?

Tammy: No, I don't.

OK, that's typical. It's typical that the person only knows that in certain kinds of situations they have a very powerful kinesthetic response—in fact in your case I would describe it as an overwhelming response. That response is so overwhelming that in the past when you have been in these situations you literally exercise no choice. You have found it to restrict your behavior in the past, right?

Tammy: Oh, yes—in my dream world, too.

Most phobic people do not know what their original trauma was, and, indeed, it is not even necessary to know that. I'm going to do it as if it were necessary, but it's just part of the mythology.

Tammy has succeeded for years in making the same response over and over and over again. She has demonstrated adequately that she knows how to do that. A phobia can be thought of as nothing more than a one-trial learning that was never updated. And it worked, by the way. I will often turn right to the person and say this: I want to reassure the part of you that has been making you phobic all these years that I respect what it has done, and I regard that as a valid response. You're here. You survived. If there hadn't been a part to make that effective response to keep you out of certain situations, you might not be here. My desire is not to take away the choice of being phobic but to update it so that you can also make other responses which are more congruent with your full resources as a fully grown woman. We're going to use that same capacity to do one-trial learning to help you learn to do something else.

In a moment I'm going to ask you to do some time-traveling. As you go back I want you to increase pressure here on my hand at any point that you need to be reminded of your competence as a fully grown, mature woman. This is your connection with the present time and all the powerful adult resources that you have as a fully grown person. Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm.)

That's all you need to do to anchor the phobic response. Or you can ask a different question: What is the last time that you had an intense response like that?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm again.)

I got the same response that she gave a moment ago when I said "Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?"—the same facial expression, the same breathing. That's now anchored on her arm. This anchor constitutes a stabilizing factor to help us go back and sort through her personal experience to find the original experience. It's not necessary to do it this way; this is one way to do phobias.

Your holding hands with me constitutes your connection to all the strength and resources you have as an adult woman. There were experiences in your past, namely those connected with this phobia, which we're going to go back and relive, but in a way that involves no discomfort at all, a way that involves total comfort. And I call to your mind the notion of dissociation that we talked about yesterday. We told you during the exercise you did yesterday afternoon to be sure you step inside the picture so that you recover the full kinesthetics. The opposite holds true here. For years Tammy has been exposed to certain kinds of real life situations and responded with a lot of emotion, a lot of kinesthetic feelings over and over again. To have her go back and relive that experience again and have those feelings again will simply reinforce it. That's ridiculous. And most people's unconscious minds say "Bullshit! We aren't going back there; that hurts!" and they are called "resistant clients," right? Respect that resistance as a statement that says "Look, make some new arrangements so we don't have to go through the pain again."

The specific arrangements might go like this: I'd like you to close your eyes, Tammy. You can vary the pressure in your hand any time you need more strength. You can draw it directly from here, and that's also a way for me to know where you are. In a moment I'm going to reach over and touch you here on your arm. That's going to help you remember a little bit of the feelings of pinking. I don't want you to go through the feelings again. I want you to take these feelings—only as much of them as you need—and drift back until there comes before your eyes a scene in which you see yourself over there at a younger age in a situation which has some connection with how you first learned to respond that way.

At some point while you see those images which are connected intimately with these feelings of pinking, I'm going to say "What do you see now?" I would like you to stabilize the image at that point. Likely it will be an image of yourself at a younger age, dressed in some particular way, in some colors, in some context. I don't know what any of that will be and at the moment you don't either, because you don't know where this came from. As soon as I ask you to stop the image, I want you to form a snapshot and just hold it stable. I don't want you to run any movies yet, because we need to make one more arrangement to make you even more comfortable before you run the movie.

Remember that you can modulate how much of these feelings (He touches the phobia anchor on her arm.) you are going to use to drift back until you see a clear focused visual image connected with these feelings, that represents where this original learning took place. That's right, you draw on all the strength you need here, as you drift back through time, even further, take your time ... even more. There's no rush. Be perfectly comfortable. Now look at that image. And simply nod your head when you clearly see an image of yourself at a younger age....

Tammy: I see myself at a younger age but I'm not in any situation. I'm just—

That's fine. Can you see what color shoes you are wearing?

Tammy: Black.

OK. Now I want you slowly to look at the surface that's right under the shoes. From there let your eyes slowly notice what is around you as you stand there in those little black shoes. Remembering to breathe, remembering to use these feelings of strength and competence. You've demonstrated adequately that you know about those old feelings. Now I want you to demonstrate that you can have these feelings of strength as you watch that image. Remembering to breathe; oxygen is essential for this whole process. That's right. When you have the still image, just nod….

OK. Now, I would like you to hold that image constant, just a snapshot. Relax your right hand—not your left. Your left can be as tight as you need it to be in order to get access to these feelings of strength that you need. And you are breathing nicely now. Continue your breathing.

Now, I would like you slowly to float up and out of your body so that you can actually see yourself sitting here holding hands with me, ridiculous as that may sound. Take all the time you need. And when you have succeeded in floating out of your body so that you can see yourself from above or the side or the front or the back, just nod that you have succeeded. Excellent.

Now, staying in that third position, I want you to look past yourself sitting here holding my hand and feeling the feelings of strength and adult resourcefulness. This time, with feelings of strength and comfort, I want you to watch and listen carefully to everything that happened to young Tammy way back there, so that you can make new understandings and learnings about what occurred, and therefore have new choices. You are to do this, watching from the third position, having the feelings of resourcefullness and strength connected with my hand here. Knowing that you did live through that and you won’t have to again, let that younger part of you feel the old feelings over there as she goes through that old experience for the last time. When you’ve seen and heard it all, adequate for your making new understandings, simply nod your head and stay there. You can begin the movie now…. (She nods.)

All right, now very, very slowly I want you to float down from the third position and step back in and reunite with your body, sitting here with feelings of resourcefulness and strength….

And now I want you to do something very powerful and important for yourself. Younger Tammy did something very powerful for you; she went through those feelings again for you, and she let you watch and listen with comfort and strength to stimuli which in the past have triggered overwhelming responses. This time you were able to see and hear those without pinking. I want you to walk over to young Tammy in your mind's eye. I want you to reach out and use all of the adult female resources you have, to comfort her and reassure her that she will never have to go through that again. Thank her for living through the old feelings for the last time for you. Explain to her that you can guarantee that she lived through it because you are from her future.

And when you see on her face and in her posture and in her breathing that she is reassured that you will be there to take care of her from now on, I want you to really reach out, take her by the shoulders and pull her close and actually feel her enter your body. Pull her inside. She is a part of you, and she's a very energetic part. That energy is freed now from that phobic response. I would like your unconscious mind to select some particular pleasurable activity that some of that energy can now be used for, for yourself here in the present and in the future. Because energy is energy and you deserve it. Just sit there and relax and enjoy those feelings. Let them spread through your whole body. Take your time. You've got plenty going on inside. I'm going to talk to the group.

Do you understand the anchors? First, she holds hands with me. This is a "bail-out" anchor, a resource anchor that will always get her out of trouble and says "Here, you're grounded right here." It's also a really exquisite biofeedback mechanism. By temperature and pressure and moisture changes in her hand, I get an incredible amount of information about her complex internal experience. An anchor here on her arm stabilizes the phobic feelings to use as a lead to go back and find some visual experience that will serve as a metaphor for her entire set of experiences called "the phobic response."

Once she sees herself at an earlier age over there, using the feelings to lead her back to something she had never known about consciously before, then I dissociate her a second step—I ask her to float up out of her body. You could see the changes in posture and color and breathing and so forth which indicated which position she was operating from.

Once the two-step dissociation has been established, I have her watch and listen with comfort to the old experience. She saw and heard things today which have never been available to her before.

Tammy: That's true.

She was so overwhelmed in the past by the kinesthetic phobic response that she couldn't see and hear what was going on. Consciousness is limited. As she watches and listens to herself at a younger age, the competent feelings of comfort and resourcefulness are being associated with the auditory and visual stimuli from the past.

And when she's gone through the whole thing, then we reintegrate. Every model of therapy, every psychotheology, is built on dissociation and sorting to help people reorganize. Whether you call it "parent-child-adult," "topdog-underdog," using chairs or words doesn't matter as long as you label and sort a person's behavior, dissociating parts of them, one from the other. You have the responsibility as a professional communicator to put your clients back together before the session is over. One easy way to make sure the dissociations that you create are re-integrated before the end of the session is to simply reverse the process by which you create the dissociation.

In this particular case, the dissociation is (1) see yourself over there at a younger age, (2) float up and out of your body. For the integration, (1) float back down and rejoin yourself here—and you could see the tremendous change in her that indicated that she had succeeded in doing that, (2) then walk over in your mind's eye, reach out, comfort and reassure the younger Tammy, thank her for going through this so that you could learn, pull her into you, re-integrate her and feel the feelings of energy.

What we're doing here is structured regression. Primal Therapy claims to get complete regression back to infancy. If that were true, then Primal Therapy would achieve change only insofar as it doesn't work! If Primal Therapy really got complete regression, it would be doing exactly what Tammy has been doing with the phobic response up until today. Complete regression simply means that you relive the experience in all systems. If you do that, you reinforce it.

A partial, structured, regression of the type Tammy and I were working with here allows you the freedom to go back and connect new kinds of resources with the auditory and visual stimuli which in the past have elicited old, uncomfortable, kinesthetic responses. It's impossible for her to go through this experience and still maintain that old response because she's done one-trial learning again. Now she doesn't have to be phobic. I haven't taken that choice away. There may be some context in which being phobic in response to something may be useful. I'm not playing God. I presuppose that people make the best choice in context. My job is to make sure that resources which have been dissociated from a certain context become available in that context. I leave it to the unique human being, with all the various needs they have that I don't even know anything about, to make an adequate selection somewhere along the continuum between resourcefulness and terror. And she will. Those resources have been dissociated in the past, but they are now integrated and they are now both responses to the same stimuli.

Man: You are making certain assumptions about integration and a lot of things that have happened.

Right. Is there any particular assumption you'd like to challenge?

Man: Um, all of them.

Good. Pick one.

Man: That she feels any different now than she did before.

OK. Let me give you a way of testing. (He turns to Tammy.) Let me ask you a question. (He touches the phobia anchor. She turns to him and smiles: "Umhm?") That's fine; you answered it. Does that make sense to you, sir? Do you remember that the last time I touched her there she had a phobic response? I had anchored the phobic reaction there, and then I demonstrated that I had control of her phobia. When I reached over and touched her arm she became phobic. Now I reach over and touch her and what does she do? She looks at me as if to say "What do you want?" That is a far more elegant demonstration than any verbal feedback I could get. I'm not saying don't use verbal conscious feedback, but understand that when you ask for that, you are tapping into the least informative part of the person: their conscious mind.

Let me give you another way of testing. Tammy, I'd like you to try something for me. This is just a scientific experiment. Are there any bridges here in town? I would like you to close your eyes and fantasize driving across a bridge, and I want you to do it in a special way. I want you to do it from the point of view of being in a car—not watching yourself—so that you see what you would see if you were actually driving across the bridge. What happens when you do that? ...

Tammy: (She raises her eyebrows, looks slightly puzzled.) I drove across the bridge.

"I drove across the bridge." What could be a more elegant response? If she had told me "I was so happy driving across the bridge," I'd say "What? Wait, it's just an ordinary bridge."

Tammy: But always before when I drove across a bridge, I immediately began to program myself "What am I going to do when the car goes off the side?"

And what did she say this time? "I just drove across the bridge." When you associate the strength and confidence with those auditory and visual stimuli, driving across a bridge becomes just another human activity, the same as the experience that the rest of you have had driving across bridges your whole life. This is also a way of testing our work to find out if it is adequately future-paced. We know what she looked like when she had a phobic response. If the same phobic response comes up, we know somehow the integration didn't happen. We'll find out what happened and re-do it. Her response was "Oh, driving across the bridge." Earlier, with Linda, we were talking about achoring the new response to a cue from the environment. Here we're testing and we're bridging or future-pacing at the same time.

Woman: Can you do this with yourself?

Yes, with two qualifications. Tomorrow we're going to teach a pattern called "reframing" which teaches you how to establish an internal communication system with some sophistication and subtlety. If you have such an internal communication system, you can always check internally to make sure that all parts of you are congruent. If you get a "go-ahead," of course you can do it by yourself. If there's some hesitation, reframing gives you a way of getting congruence, internal agreement.

Another precaution is that you get a really good anchor for a powerful, positive "blast-out" experience, so that if you begin to collapse back into the old unpleasant feelings, you can bring yourself out. Feeling more unpleasantness will not help you in this at all. I had a powerful anchor. Make sure you have one for yourself. I would recommend that you do it with somebody else if you have a very intense phobic response. It isn't that difficult, and it obviously doesn't take that long. Find somebody else, if only to operate the bail-out anchor if you begin to go back into the unpleasantness. You can go slightly into the phobic response and say to your friend "Look at what I look like now, and what I'm breathing like now. If you see that again, squeeze my hand." That would be adequate. You can run the rest of it yourself.

Woman: Can you do this with children?

Children don't seem to have that many phobias. For those who do, this will work fine. Whatever you do with kids, I recommend that you sneak up on it. A friend of mine had a nine-year-old kid who was a lousy speller. I said "Look at this list of ten spelling words." The kid looked at it, and I said "Now close your eyes and tell me what they are—not how to spell them." He had some difficulty doing that; he didn't have well-developed visualization. However, I said "Remember the Wookie in Star Wars? Do you remember when the Wookie opened his mouth and showed his teeth like this?" And he went "Oh, yeah!" and then he was visualizing immediately. I had him print the words out in the Wookie's mouth. There's always some experience somewhere in a person's personal history that has the requisite qualities you need. If you combine that experience with the task that you are trying to do— and especially with children, make a game out of it—there is no problem. "What do you think the Wookie would see if he were watching you go through that thing with your dad?" That's another way of getting the dissociation.

Children are really fast. As an adult you are a lot slower than a child. You are less fluid in your states of consciousness. The primary tool that we offer people who work with children is to use anchoring as a way of stabilizing what you are trying to work on, to slow the kid down enough so that you can cope. Because kids are really fast.

Woman: Why two steps of dissociation?

You don't need it. That's just a guarantee; it's insurance that she doesn't collapse back into the old feelings. If we had only dissociated her one step, if she collapsed she would collapse right back into the old experience, and it would be very difficult to get her back out. By doing it in two steps, if she begins to collapse, she will collapse into the first step and it's easier to get back out. You can tell whether she is up above or back down here by the changes in posture and skin color and breathing, etc. Knowing that, if I see her collapse from two to one, I give a squeeze here, or I say "Now let her feel the old feelings over there.

You watch from up here." Those are ways of insuring that she doesn't just re-experience the bad feelings.

Woman: You asked Tammy to take the feeling and find a picture of herself at a younger age. What if she can't find one?

That's a statement about the therapist, not the client. It should be taken as a comment about what the therapist is doing, indicating that the therapist should change his behavior and do it differently.

Let me answer your question in this way. I don't believe that Tammy actually had the experience that she watched herself go through. She may or may not have; I don't know. But it is irrelevant. Once a very well-known therapist was visiting with us, and we received an emergency referral, a suicidal woman. The psychiatrist had given up, saying "Here, would you please take this woman over? I'm out of choices." Since this famous therapist was staying with us, we thought it would be an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate some of the uses of hypnosis Erickson had taught us. Because for that therapist, at that point in his evolution, hypnosis was a dirty word. He thought it was "manipulative." And we told him "There are ways in which Ericksonian hypnosis is far less manipulative than any insight, conscious-mind therapy we have ever run across. Let us demonstrate with this woman."

So we began to work with this woman. The visiting therapist was sitting there watching and listening. About ten minutes into the session, he got a revelation. It was obvious. I said "Do you have something you want us to do?" I had never had a chance to watch this therapist work live before. He took over and started going "Blood... stairway... childhood, younger brother... mother cries... screams." He developed this incredible fantasy, which he then essentially "sold" to this woman. At first the woman would go "Gee, I don't remember anything like that." Finally the woman went "Uuuuhhhh! That's it! I must have done it!" very much like a family reconstruction, if you've ever been through one of those with Virginia Satir. Suddenly the woman made all these internal connections, and the visiting therapist did all this therapy about this past experience and the woman changed dramatically. Her behavior changed dramatically, and she stayed changed, too. She was a continuing client of ours.

Now, when she came back in two weeks, we couldn't resist. We induced a somnambulistic trance, and established an anchor for amnesia so that we could erase anything we did during that session— because she was doing fine and we didn't want to interfere. We just wanted to check and find out what had happened. We asked her unconscious mind if in fact the experience described by the therapist during the session—or anything approximating it—had ever occurred. The answer was unequivocally "No." However, that is no different than what just happened here. If the experience that Tammy generated has all the elements of whatever the original experience or set of experiences was, it will serve as a metaphor which will be as effective as an actual, factual, historical representation. And from my sensory experience I can guarantee that it was effective.

Woman: What I still don't understand is what you do if the client is stuck because she has an expectation of getting a picture of a childhood incident, and now she's sitting there doing this and she can't get a picture.

OK, that's the same choice point as the congruent "I don't know" that we talked about earlier. Ask her to guess, make it up, lie, fantasize; it doesn't matter.

Actually, age regression is a very easy phenomenon. We said "Go back through time." She had very little conscious idea what we meant by that, but she responded quite easily to it.

Man: What specifically were you seeing on her face?

The same response that she originally demonstrated when we asked her about the feelings of the phobia. I watched her age regress until I saw a very intense example of it. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. There was whiteness around the eyes and the side of the face. There was some kind of scrunching of her chin. There was an increase in moisture on her skin, especially on the bridge of her nose. When that became intensified, I said "Now look at an image, that image there."

If you tell people to go back through time and they frown, that's also a cue. And you might try something tricky like saying "Well, go forward in time." "Go through time, jump back in time." "Go around time." Anything. It doesn't matter. The specific words you use are wholly irrelevant as long as you get the response you want.

Another way to think about it is that everybody with a phobia knows the feelings of the phobia. They have a fragment of the experience, so they can get the rest by overlap. How do you find your car keys when you want to go to the store and you don't know where they are?

Woman: I start feeling around through my pockets.

Man: I go through the house and look.

Man: I search my mind, going back to try to visualize where they are.

Woman: I shake my purse so I can hear them.

OK. If all else fails, you can go back to the front door and walk in again. Now, if you think about the responses we just got, those include the three main representational systems. If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all by overlap. She had the feelings here. The feelings, once anchored, stabilized her state of consciousness. Everything that she accessed as she closed her eyes and went back in her personal history had that set of feelings in common, guaranteeing that whatever picture she selected would be in the class called phobic experiences.

I used the same principle to help her have a complete focused visual

image of herself at a younger age. At first she had only a picture of herself, but no context. I ask her what color shoes she is Wearing. I presuppose that she can see her feet and her shoes, and that she can see

colors. She accepts the presupposition; she says "Black." Since she can see the shoes, then obviously "logically," she can see what they are on top of, the surface she's standing on. I request that. When she gets the surface, it blends into walls and into trees, or whatever the rest of the image was. It's a very easy overlap, or intersection, technique that allows me to assist her in recovering the image by constructing portions of it, a little at a time.

Man: What’s the difference between this techniques and systematic desensitization?

About six months. That's the major difference, which is a very expensive difference. My understanding is that it's straight conditioning. We have simply associated a new set of feelings, namely competence and strength, with the auditory and visual stimuli.

There is another very important difference. We are picking a specific set of feelings and assorting it, instead of just trying to wipe out the set that is there. The people that I've observed desensitization are usually trying to eliminate a certain kind of behavior rather than replacing it with something which is a positive response. They are the kind of people who answer "Not bad" when you ask "How are you feeling?"

We claim that every piece of behavior has a positive function. It's the

best choice a person has in context. It was far better for Tammy to be

phobic about bridges than it was to have no program at all. If you do systematic desensitization, and you don't replace the "negative" behavioral pattern with something positive, it takes a long time because the person will fight. It's their only defense. That's why it takes six months, because a person has to randomly put something else in its place.

Man: There is a replacement, though, with relaxation.

Sometimes it's done that way, but relaxation is not the resource that everyone is going to need in a phobic situation. If you're driving across a bridge, you don't want to become relaxed suddenly. If somebody is in a situation in which they need to cope and you give them feelings of relaxation, they may not cope! There may be real, genuine dangers in that situation, so one of two things will happen: either the symptom will come back later because it's protective, or the person will get hurt. We got a very strong anchor for confidence and for the resources that she has as an adult woman. We used that; we did not use relaxation. She was very alert during this process. Desensitization was an important step, in that people were able to cure phobias with it. I think that it just needs to be dressed up a little bit. Instead of using relaxation and associating it with everything, try associating other things besides relaxation. There are much more powerful resources in people.

There is nothing that we have offered you so far, nor is there anything we will offer you during the rest of this seminar or in an advanced workshop, that isn't already in someone's behavior somewhere. What we've done as modelers is to figure out what the essential elements are, and what is unnecessary. Every therapy has dissociation. Every therapy has the kinds of sorting techniques we're using here, whether it's chairs or knee anchors or words. What is useful to have in every therapy is some way of doing all that: some way of sorting, some way of dissociating, some way of integrating. The names you use are wholly irrelevant, and most psychotheologies are also irrelevant. There's really nothing that different between what we did and what gestalt people do by taking people back through time. TA people do a process called "redecision." They are all very, very similar.

We looked at all those different processes and tried to find out what the essential elements were, and what was extra and unnecessary. Then we streamlined it to try to find something that works systematically. I don't think there's anything wrong with desensitization, except that sometimes it doesn't work. That's because there are a lot of things that are extra, and some things that are essential are not always there. Some people who do desensitization also add the necessary resources unconsciously. But when they teach somebody else to do it, they don't teach that, because it's not in their consciousness. Our function as modelers is to sort those things out.

The other thing is that I don't know what kind of desensitization you are referring to specifically. Some use meters and machines. I am a far more sophisticated biofeedback mechanism than any set of machines. I use really sophisticated sensory apparatus and internal responses as a way of amplifying or diminishing certain parts of the response that I am receiving. That's part of what makes one-trial learning possible in the kind of work we've been doing here with anchoring.

Man: What if a client is unable to use visual imagery?

It is not essential that people visualize to be able to do the phobia process, because the same formal pattern can be done auditorily or kinesthetically. The pattern of this technique does not require visualization. We wanted to use all systems as a demonstration. We don't need to do it with all systems. You could also first take a little time to teach the person how to visualize, using overlap.

Woman: Could you do this process without touching?

Sure, you can use a tonal anchor or a visual anchor. You can do it without touching. However, I would recommend that you do it with touching. Kinesthetics is an irresistible anchoring system. When somebody is touched, they feel it. When you make a visual sign at someone, they may look away or close their eyes.

Man: So the bail-out anchor could be a certain tone of voice?

Yes. Tonal anchors in this society are the most powerful because most Americans do not hear consciously. The number of people in this country who hear is almost nil, slightly more than the number of card-carrying musicians.

In England it's considered important to make class distinctions. In order to make class distinctions, you have to be able to hear different accents and tonalities. So English people are more acute at hearing tonal changes. Anyone who is bilingual or polyglot, and who has learned a tonal language, will have a good sensitivity to those kinds of changes.

Most people in the U.S. do not actually hear the sequence of words and the intonation pattern of what they, or other people, say. They are only aware of the pictures, feelings and internal dialogue that they have in response to what they hear. Very few people are able to repeat back, in the same intonation, what you say to them. We hear people literally. We do not add anything or subtract anything from what they say. That is a rare human experience, and for a long time we didn't realize that; we thought everybody heard words.

The real beginning of all this work started when we began taking people's words as a literal description of their experience, not just a metaphor. We started communicating back as if they were literally the way they had described themselves, and we found out that was the case. When someone says "When I focus on those ideas they feel right, but I tell myself it wouldn't work," that is a literal description of their internal experience.

Now we would like you to pick a partner, preferably somebody you have not had much contact with. It's easier to operate at the process level with strangers because their behavior is less apt to be an anchor for some behavior in you. We assume that you are all going to get changes with one another, given your usual patterns of communication. Try something new. The whole point of going through the exercise is to be exposed to new material and to do it, to discover how well it fits with your own personal style as a communicator. Until you engage all your sensory channels in playing with this material, you won't have it. Understanding fully is to be able to comprehend it in all representational systems, including behavior.

We'd like you to practice the two-step visual/kinesthetic dissociation process that we did with Tammy here. You don't need a full-blown phobia. You can use this process with any unpleasant response, to become familiar with the pattern. This, or the "change history" process will work for nearly any presenting problem that I know of. Anchoring will get you almost everything. When you're done, use bridging or future-pacing to be sure that the new response will be triggered by the context where it's needed. Go ahead.

* * * * *

OK. How did it go? What questions do you have?

Woman: I noticed I was getting distracted because my partner was using many words that didn't match the experience I had internally.

What you need is a very subtle maneuver: You say "Shut up!" or you kick your partner!

One of the things that all of you can learn from this is that it's very easy to learn to talk in a way that matches your client's experience. The way to do that is described in our book, Patterns I. It describes the patterns of language that sound specific, but are actually simply process instructions with zero content.

For example, here's an exercise you can all do. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax.

Sometime within the last five years, each of you has had a very strong experience in which you learned something of great value for yourself as a human being. You may or may not have a conscious appreciation of exactly which episode in your life history this is. I would like you to allow that experience to come up into your consciousness. Sit there for a moment, with feelings of comfort and strength, knowing you're actually here, now. With those feelings of comfort and strength, let yourself see and hear again what it was that happened to you back there. There are additional things to be learned from that experience. I would like you to allow yourself the treat of seeing and hearing yourself go through that again so as to make new understandings and learnings which are embedded in that experience in your past history….

And when you've seen and heard something that you believe to be of value for yourself, I would like you to pick a specific situation that you know will occur within the next couple of weeks. Notice—again by watching and listening with feelings of strength and comfort — how you can apply that new learning and that new understanding to this new situation that is going to arise in the next couple of weeks. In so doing you are making elegant use of your own personal history, and you are transferring understandings and learnings from one part of your personal history, so as to increase your choices as a creative human being in the present. Take all the time you need, and when you finish, drift back and rejoin us….

Some of you may have a clear, solid, resonant understanding of what you've succeeded in doing; some of you may simply have a sense of well-being, a feeling of having done something without actually understanding in detail explicitly what it was that you were able to do by making use of a particularly powerful experience from your past in a new way....

Now I'd like you to begin to drift back slowly, understanding that if you've completed the process to the best of your conscious understanding, fine.... If you haven't yet finished, you've set into motion a process which can be completed comfortably outside of your awareness as you return your attention slowly here to this room….

Now, what did I actually say? I didn't say anything! Zero. There was no content to that verbalization. "To do something of importance for yourself... certain learnings... unconscious understanding from that specific experience in your past." None of those have any content. Those are pure process instructions. And if you have the sensory experience, you can see the process happening as you do it. That is where your timing is very important.

Let me give you a very different experience. I'd like you to close your eyes and visualize a rope... which is green. How many of you already had a different colored rope? If I give you instructions that have any content whatsoever, as I just did, I am very, very apt to violate your internal experience. I will no longer be pacing you adequately.

A skill that all communicators need is the ability to give process instructions: instructions that have no content whatsoever. That's the sense in which I mentioned earlier that Ericksonian hypnosis is the least manipulative of all the forms of psychotherapy I've ever been exposed to. In any communication with content there's no way for you to not introduce your own beliefs and value systems by presupposition. However, if you restrict yourself to process work, to content-free verbalizations with your clients, you are guaranteeing that you are respecting their integrity. If you do secret therapy there's no way that you can interfere with their beliefs or value system because you don't know what they are. You don't have any idea what they are doing, and there's no need for you to, either.

Woman: Why do you have to integrate the negative anchor, instead of just ignoring it altogether?

Lots of people go to hypnotists to stop smoking. The hypnotist hypnotizes them and says "From this point on, cigarettes will taste terrible." And he wakes them up and sends them away, right? They don't smoke any more because it tastes terrible. However, that leaves them with a whole set of dissociated motor patterns. It's the same with alcoholics. Alcoholics Anonymous says "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." That's a statement to me that their program fails to integrate motor programs which can still be triggered at a later date by the presence of alcohol. So all it takes is one drink and they have to continue—binge drinking—or one cigarette later on and boom! that person is a smoker again.

Dissociated motor patterns can always be triggered unless you integrate them. If you dissociate and sort someone, make sure you put them back together. Don't leave those dissociated motor patterns lying around. That's one of your professional responsibilities. People have enough dissociations on their own already. They don't need more.

Man: Have you ever worked with multiple personalities?

Multiple personality is a little bit complicated, because it depends upon who messed the person up in the first place. You really need to know the model of the therapist that wrecked the person to begin with. I have never personally met a multiple personality that wasn't made by a therapist. That doesn't mean they don't exist, it's just that I've never met one. My guess is that there might be a few out there somewhere, but I'll tell you there aren't as many as therapists keep creating and bringing to me.

We became interested in multiple personalities years ago, and wrote to a man who had written a big paper about it. He invited us to come and meet one named Helen. She had about twenty personalities, but the cover name for everyone was Helen. And the fascinating thing was that all of her multiple personalities were more interesting than she was.

Her therapist had a very elaborate model of her personalities. She had an organization part: a part that was very organized and did secretarial work and all kinds of stuff like that. So I said "Well, get that one for me." The therapist had this great non-verbal analogue: he stood up and shouted "JOYCE! COME OUT, JOYCE! "and he hit her on the forehead, Bwamm! and she went through all these changes. Brrnnnggnhhh! It was right out of the movies; it was really spooky. This guy does exorcisms on the helicopter pad at a Catholic college, and he's considered to be a respectable psychiatrist by people who think we are weird! In some ways he's very effective because he is so expressive, but I don't think he understands the full ramifications of what he is doing. He has anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two multiple personalities in his practice at any time, and he can't understand why the rest of the therapeutic community doesn't recognize the epidemic of multiple personalities that he has discovered!

So the organization part of this woman came out, and I introduced myself. Then I said "Most of these parts have amnesia for what goes on in this person's life. Being the organization part, I figure you would have kept pretty good track of it all." "Oh, yes, of course I kept good track of it." I said "Well, how did you end up with so many personalities?" And she said to me "It's as if there were a whole bunch of different parts and there was a round peg that went through the middle. And when I met Dr. So-and-so, he took the peg and pulled it out." That is almost verbatim what she said to me, and this is a woman who does not have a high school education.

She didn't think that this was bad, by the way. Her description was that he pulled the peg out so that they all became more apparent as separate personalities, and now they were going to go back through and make them all into one again. The tragic thing is that when he succeeded in integrating her, she had total amnesia for her entire life, and was a drip as far as I could tell. She had these great parts. She had a sexy part that was just rrrnnnhhh! Another part told jokes and was really corny. Another part was very shy and coy. But when he "cured" her, she had amnesia for her entire life and she had none of the resources of any of those parts. She was just dull.

Now I don't think that you can wipe out parts. So I kept mentioning the names of the parts that I liked, and I got really great unconscious responses from her. They were still there, but they weren't fully available to her.

To do a good job with a multiple personality, I think you need to know the model of the therapist that created it. Some therapists' model of multiple personality is that you have all these parts and an unconscious that runs the program. That's one model, a very common one. The way you'd integrate that one is totally different than you would some other model. This guy's model was that there were three parts here and they had their own unconscious, and then there were two parts over here and they had an unconscious, and then there was an unconscious for these two unconsciouses, and so on. It was really stacked in levels. When you integrated, you would always have to integrate at the same logical level. My guess is that he didn't do that, and that is how he got so much amnesia.

You can use what we call the "visual squash" with multiple personalities. The visual squash is a visual method of integration using visual anchors. You hold out your hands and see yourself as one part here on your left, and as another part here on your right, and you watch them and listen to them. Then you slowly pull the two images together, and visually watch them merge together and then notice how that image is different. If you like it, then you do the same thing again kinesthetically, and squash the two images together with your hands. Then you pull the integrated image into your body.

We just stumbled across this. At first it sounded kind of weird, until we studied a little bit about neurology. It's a good metaphor for what goes on in the metaphor called "neurology." And if you don't think neurology is a metaphor, you are naive, I want to tell you! But anyway, their metaphor and our metaphor were very similar. And if you try it, it's very dramatic. It's a very powerful method.

I once cured a multiple personality with only that. I went through all the levels one by one and squashed all the personalities together.

I once had a therapist call me on the telephone from the Midwest. He said he'd read my book and there was nothing in it about multiple personalities, and he didn't even believe in them, but one had just come into his office and what should he do? I went through the instructions on the phone with him for forty minutes and cured his patient over the telephone. "OK, now tell her to hold out both hands. Tell her to visualize Jane in her right hand and visualize Mary in her left hand. Just take two of them and collapse them together into one image. And then tell her to pull it into her body and integrate it. Then tell her to get the integrated image that she just had, and put it together with another one." So you do them one at a time.

Most people don't really ask multiple personalities any questions. But I really questioned the ones that I've been around, to find out how they functioned. The experience of being multiple for one may be very different than it is for another.

One of the women that I worked with described every single one of her parts as part of the same process. She was really, really visual; she had a picture of them all. There was a couch backstage, in the back of her mind, and all these women sat back there on the couch doing their nails and chatting. Every once in a while, one of them would hop up and walk through the curtains. When it walked through, it would step into her body. Some of them knew about what the other ones did, because they would go and peek out through the curtains. I hypnotized her and went backstage with her and did the visual squash technique and put them all together.

That visual squash method is a very powerful way of integrating sequential incongruities by making them simultaneous in a dissociated state. If you have a sequential incongruity, you can never represent both parts simultaneously in any system other than the visual, as far as I can tell. It takes a very complex auditory representation to have two voices going on at the same time—as opposed to alternating—and people can't pull it off kinesthetically. But you can take sequential incongruities and make them simultaneous by visual/kinesthetic dissociation, and then integrate them by pulling the hands together, and then get the integration in the other two systems.

I don't understand the significance of moving the arms when you do the visual squash, but if you do it without the arms it doesn't work. And I have no idea why. I've tried it both ways; if people don't actually hold out their hands in front of them like this and pull the images together, it doesn't work. People don't have to hold out their hands to get cured of phobias, but apparently with multiple personalities they have to. That doesn't make any sense to me logically, but it happens to be the case. If I were to make a generalization, I would make the reverse one. But I have found out that's the case in experience.

We are a lot more willing to experiment against our intuitions than most people. When most people have a strong intuition, they'll follow it. A lot of times when we have a strong intuition, we'll violate it to find out what will happen—especially when we have clients that we have ongoing contact with, and can be sure of being able to deal with the consequences. That kind of experimentation has resulted in many useful patterns and discoveries.

One woman had been a homosexual for years, and had fallen in love with a man. She was really stuck in this dilemma. A very strong part of her now wanted to become heterosexual. There was another part of her that was afraid it was going to have to die. She was going through the visual squash with these two parts. She was trying to pull her hands together, and she was wailing "I can't do it! I can't do it! I can't do it like that!" Richard and I were standing on either side of her. We looked at each other, and then we each grabbed one hand and pushed them together suddenly. The changes that occurred in that woman were fantastic!

You can create change without being elegant; I think people do it all the time. However, the ramifications of doing something like that are not predictable, and predictability is something that we have always tried to develop. We just went blammo, pow! and rammed it in. She did change; she got what she wanted, and it's lasted a long time; I'm sure of that because I still know that woman. However, I don't know what the side effects were. She isn't totally wonderful in many areas of her life, and I don't know how much of that is a consequence of what we did. She's certainly better off than she was. And at the time we really wanted to know what would happen.

When you start including more sophisticated ingredients in your work and tinkering with them carefully, then you get better, more elegant changes. You can also predict what will happen much more precisely. Sometimes you get much more pervasive change, too, which I think is very important. If you can do just one little tiny thing and get the outcome that you want, it will also generalize and get all the other outcomes that are really needed but haven't been mentioned. The less you do in the more appropriate place, the more generalization to other contents and contexts will occur naturally. That's one reason why we stress elegance so much: "Be precise, if you're doing therapy."

If you're just doing utilization skills it's a very different game. Business people are usually only interested in utilizing strategies. If you are doing sales training, then all you need to know is what strategies you want your salespeople to have, and how to install them. If the trainer for an organization is a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, then he says "OK, we're going to have this person be a salesperson and they're going to do this, and in order to do that, you have to have these three strategies." Then he can stick them in and block them off so that nothing else gets in their way. Those strategies don't have to generalize anywhere else in the person's life. It's not necessary for that business outcome. It might be desirable, but it's not necessary.

If somebody's personal life is really interrupting their business functioning, you can put a barrier around it to keep those strategies separate. There are a lot of different kinds of outcomes you're going to have as a business person, but they're fairly limited.

As a lawyer, for example, you're mostly just utilizing strategies; you're not concerned with installing anything. You're only concerned with using a strategy to get a specific outcome: to make a witness look like a jerk, or to get your client to trust you, or something like that.

I once did some work with a lawyer who is a trustworthy person, but nobody trusts him. His non-verbal analogues are terrible; they make everyone suspicious. His problem was that he couldn't get clients to confide in him so that he could represent them well. And half the time he was court-appointed, which made it even worse. What he really needed was a complete overhaul in his analogue system. Rather than do that, I taught him a little ritual. He sits down with his client and says "Look, if I'm going to be your lawyer, it's essential that you trust me. And so the question that's really important is how do you decide if you trust somebody?" He asks "Have you ever really trusted anybody in your life?" and he sets up an anchor when the client accesses that feeling of trust. Then he asks "How did you make that decision?" Then all he has to do is to listen to a general description of their strategy: "Well, I saw this, and I heard him say this, and I felt this." Then he presents information back in that format: "Well, as I sit here, I want you to see blah blah blah, and then I say to yourself blahdeblah blah, and I don't know if you can feel this," and fires off the anchor that he made when the person had the trusting feelings. I taught him that ritual and it was good enough.

But there is a real difference between that outcome and the outcome that you're working toward as a therapist. Therapy is a much more technical business in the sense of changing things. As a therapist you don't need to be nearly as flexible in terms of utilization as somebody who's a lawyer. A lawyer must be a master of the art of utilization. You need to be able to do many different things in terms of eliciting responses. You have to get twelve people to respond the same way. Think about that. Imagine that you had twelve clients, and you had to get them all to agree when you weren't in the room! That's going to take skill.

One thing you can do is to identify the one or two individuals, or several, on the jury who might, by virtue of their own strategies, persuade the others to go along. And of course that is what family therapy is all about. Everything is going to interact in a system. I don't care who you put together for what length of time, the systems are going to start clicking. I try to figure out who in the family elicits responses the most often. Because if I can get that one person to do my work for me, it will be really easy. Very often it's someone who doesn't speak much. Son here says something. He has external behavior. And when he does, you get an intense internal response from the mother. Although her external behavior is subtle, some little cue, everybody responds to it. When the father does something with external behavior, this kid responds, but not much else happens. And if the daughter does something, maybe we get a response here and maybe there.

I want to know who everybody else in the family responds to a lot. I also want to know if any one single person in that family can always get that person to respond. Let's say every single time the son does anything with external behavior, the mother responds. If I can predict something about how that happens, I can make one little change in the son, and then the mother will respond and get everybody else in the family to respond for me. I always spend fifty percent or more of whatever time is allotted to me gathering information, and testing it to make sure that I'm right. I’ll feed in an innocuous thing here, and predict what will happen over there. I keep running the system over and over and over again until I'm absolutely sure that if I make a change with this kid, it's going to change the mother's behavior in a way that will change all the other people in the family. That will set up a new stable system. Otherwise you usually get an unbalanced system, or they change in the office but they go home and go back to normal. I want something that's really going to carry over and be very, very permanent.

If I can set up a stable system by making only one change, it will be very pervasive with a family system. I think the main mistake of all family therapists is that they do too much in a session. If you're working with an individual, you can do a thousand things and get away with it, unless they go home to a family. One of the first things I always ask people when they come in is "What is your living situation?" because I want to know how many anchors I have to deal with at home. If they live with one other person, it's not so bad. You've just got to be careful that there's no secondary gain: that they don't get rewarded for whatever behavior it is they want to change.

Man: How much dependency on you is created by your methods?

One of the things we strive for in our work is to make sure that we use transference and countertransference powerfully to get rapport, and then to make sure that we don't use it after that. We don't need it after that. And since they don't get to sit there and tell us their problems, we don't become their best companion. There are real risks in doing content therapy because you may become someone's closest friend. Then they end up paying money to hang out with you because no one else is willing to sit around and listen to them drivel about unpleasant things in their life. We don't get much dependency. For one thing, we have a tool that we teach our clients to use with themselves, called reframing, which we are going to teach you tomorrow.

If you ask the people who were up here for demonstration purposes, my guess is they would assign very little responsibility to us for the changes that occurred in them—much less than they would in traditional content-oriented therapy. That's one of the advantages of secret therapy. It doesn't create that kind of dependency relationship.

At the same time, people who work with us usually have a sense of trust; they know that we know what we are doing. Or they may be totally infuriated with us, but they are still getting the changes they want. And of course we work very quickly, and that reduces the possibility of dependency.

In our actual private practice, which is severely reduced now because we're moving into other areas of modeling, we tell stories. A person will come in and I don't want them to tell me anything. I just tell them stories. The use of metaphor is a whole set of advanced patterns which is associated with what we've done so far. You can learn about those in David Gordon's excellent book, Therapeutic Metaphors. I prefer metaphor artistically. I don't have to listen to client's woes, and I get to tell very entertaining stories. Clients are usually bewildered or infuriated by paying me money to listen to stories. But the changes they want occur anyway—no thanks to me, of course, which is fine. That's another way to make sure there is no dependency. You do things so covertly that they don't have the faintest idea what you are doing, and the changes they want occur anyway.

Is there anybody here who has been to see Milton Erickson? He told you stories, right? Did you find that six months, eight months, or a year later you were going through changes that were somehow associated with those stories that he was telling?

Man: Yes.

That's the typical report. Six months later people suddenly notice they've changed and they don't have any idea how that happened, and I then they get a memory of Milton talking about the farm up in Wisconsin or something. When you were with Erickson did you have the experience of being slightly disoriented, fascinated and entranced by the man's language?

Man: I was bored.

Milton uses boredom as one of his major weapons. If Milton were here, one thing he might do is bore you to tears. So you'd all drift off into daydreams and then he has you. I get bored too quickly myself to use that as a tactic. Milton, sitting in a wheelchair and being seventy-six years old, doesn't mind spending a lot of time doing that. And he does it exquisitely.

We have, during these days together, succeeded brilliantly in completely overwhelming your conscious resources. This was a deliberate move on our part, understanding as we do that most learning and change takes place at the unconscious level. We have appealed explicitly to each of both of you, that your unconscious minds would make a useful representation necessary for your education, so that in the weeks and days and months ahead you can be delightfully surprised by new patterns occurring in your behavior.

And we suggest to your unconscious mind that you make use of the natural processes of sleep and dreaming, to review any experiences that have occurred during these two days, and sort out those things that your unconscious believes will be useful for you to know, making a useful representation at the unconscious level, meanwhile allowing you to sleep deeply and soundly, so that in the days and weeks and months to come, you can discover yourself doing things that you didn't know you learned about here, so as to constantly increase, at the unconscious level, your repertoire in responding to people who come to you for assistance…. And you didn't even know they were there. Not at all.

The last time that I went to see Milton Erickson, he said something to me. And as I was sitting there in front of him, it didn't make sense. Most of his covert metaphors have made... eons of sense to me. But he said something to me which would have taken me a while to figure out. Milton said to me "You don't consider yourself a therapist, but you are a therapist." And I said "Well, not really." He said "Well, let's pretend ... that you're a therapist who works with people. The most important thing ... when you're pretending this ... is to understand... that you are really not ….You are just pretending.... And if you pretend really well, the people that you work with will pretend to make changes. And they will forget that they are pretending... for the rest of their lives. But don't you be fooled by it." And then he looked at me and he said:

"Goodbye."