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

Our topic here is hypnosis. We could immediately launch into an argument about whether there is such a thing, and what it might be if there were. However, since you already paid your money and came here for a seminar in hypnosis, I won't bring up that particular argument.

I hope that in the three days we spend here together, you will come to understand the sense in which that might be a fruitful argument. I hope you will discover that you already know a great deal about hypnosis under other names, or under no name at all. You can discover that certain experiences many of you have had are really excellent examples of altered states of consciousness. In the course of these three days, I will call upon both of each of you to enjoy and learn from what takes place here.

I assume that each of you is here with at least two objectives in mind. One is to discover how hypnotic patterning might be useful and effective for you in whatever area you are in, whether it's psychotherapy, management, education, nursing, sales, or something else. I assume that you want to discover what new choices hypnotic patterning offers that you might add to your present repertoire to become even more effective in doing what you do. In addition, I am sure that many of you are interested in making a number of personal changes as a part of your experience here.

I invite you to participate with both those objectives fully in mind. In dealing with this material, we will be doing demonstrations, we will discuss what is going on, and we will ask you to do exercises under our supervision after we've explained what we would like you to do.

Hypnotic patterning is the same as any skill that can be learned. In order to be learned, it has to be practiced. I assume that most of you here drive automobiles. If you don't drive automobiles, you can find some comparable perceptual–motor skill that you have mastered, whether it's riding a bicycle, roller skating, or playing some athletic sport. If you remember the first occasion on which you attempted to master the complex skill of driving a car, there were many things that you had to keep track of. Your hands were doing several things. At least one of them was on the wheel, presumably, and the other one was working the gear shift, if the car you were learning to drive had one. At the same time you were taxed with the task of being able to pay attention to what your feet were doing. There were three things they might do down there, and some of those things had to happen in coordination. You may remember putting the brake on and failing to put the clutch in at the same time, and the disastrous results of that. You had to pay attention to all of this, in addition to having some consciousness of what was going on outside of the car itself.

As with any complex perceptual–motor skill, what's required is that the task be organized into small pieces or chunks, so that you can practice each small chunk individually until you've mastered it. Once you have succeeded in practicing each chunk to the point that it becomes an automatic, effective, unconscious skill, you are free to attend to new possibilities: other components of the task. You can then practice these new chunks until they also achieve that same status of an unconscious, effective, perceptual–motor pattern that you do not have to give any conscious attention to.

The easiest way to become skilled at hypnosis is to practice small chunks one at a time, in the same way that you learned many tasks such as driving a car. I assume that the ultimate test of your skill in hypnosis is whether you can walk in and begin to interact with someone in such a way as to induce the specific kind of hypnotic outcome that they request—without having to strategize at the conscious level. Three days is not long enough, in my opinion, to achieve the kind of graceful, systematic, unconscious functioning that is required of a really fine hypnotist. However, our task in these three days will be to organize the overall task of hypnosis into chunks, and ask you to practice the various pieces. Our job will be to balance the amount of time we have you practice specific skills with the time we spend making sure we complete a coherent whole that will give you an overall strategy for hypnosis. I trust that you, and particularly your unconscious mind, will continue to practice such skills after this seminar. I also hope that you will continue to add alternative ways of achieving the same outcomes to the repertoire you will be acquiring here.

What we do for a living is an obscure thing called modeling. When we model, we try to build descriptions of how to do something. As modelers we are interested in two things: one is asking really good questions about what needs to be known, and the other is making descriptions of what seems to work. It's something akin to writing a cookbook.

During the next three days, we'd like to teach you a model for doing hypnosis. It is not the truth. It is not an answer, It is not real. If you think you know what's "really" going on and want to argue with me about what's really going on, I'm not going to be able to argue with you because I don't know. There are some things that I do know about; I understand how hypnosis is done. Why it works, I don't know. I do know that hypnosis works in the same way that you learn and remember and everything else. It works in the same way that you understand language.

Although hypnosis is not different from anything else, in the configuration we're going to teach it to you, it's a very powerful tool. And I would like you to think of it as a tool that accomplishes something specific. It's an.amplifier. No matter what you do, whether you're selling cars, doing psychotherapy, or working with juries, you can do it and elicit more intense responses from people. Hypnosis will allow you to do whatever you do and have.a greater impact with it. By itself it won't do anything.

I also want to point out that hypnosis is not a panacea. I have been using hypnosis for seven years, and I still sometimes wake up tired in the morning. Since I'm not a person who ordinarily drinks coffee, if I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, my body vibrates. If I fall down, I still get bruised. If I have a toothache and I remove the pain with hypnosis, I still have to go to a dentist to do something about the tooth. I consider these to be limitations not in hypnosis as a tool, but primarily in myself. Right now, hypnosis and communication arts in general are in their infancy as disciplines.

The process of learning to do hypnosis is somewhat unusual,because unlike most things you learn, you already know how to do it. The problem is noticing it. So rather than going through a long and detailed description this morning, I am going to ask you to do something and then afterwards take a look at it.

Exercise I

I'm going to ask you to get into groups of three people. I want one of you, person A, to think of something that fits the following description; a situation in which you become deeply involved, with a limited focus of attention. For some people that's jogging; for others it's reading a book. It might be writing, watching television, going to the movies, driving your car on a long trip—anything which fits that description.

If you're A, I want you to tell the other two in your group, B and C, what the experience is. Give them only the name of the experience: jogging, sailing—just a word. If you give them too much detail, it makes it too easy for them. Just give them a word, sit back and close your eyes, and pretend that you're in hypnosis—it's all pretend anyway. I want the other two people to describe what they believe would have to be there in sensory terms if you were having that experience. The magic words are "have to" because if someone is jogging and you say the bright sun is shining down on your body, that doesn't have to be there. People can jog at night, or on a cloudy day. However, they do have to have some skin temperature. So you're going to have to be artfully vague. I want B and C to take turns saying two sentences or phrases each. One will say "You can feel the temperature of the air on your body, and the place where your foot touches the ground." The other one might say "You notice the beating of your heart. You can feel the temperature of your skin." Those are experiences that have to be there.

I'm not going to give you any more description than that to begin with. I want you each to take a turn, and I want you to observe the person who has his eyes closed, and notice how he responds to what you say. When you are the person sitting there with your eyes closed, I want you to notice which things allow you to get into the experience more, and which things make it more difficult. I'm going to leave it at that and have you use your own experience as a teacher. Let's start. Take about five minutes each.

* * * * *

I didn't want to talk to you too much in the beginning because whenever I begin to teach a hypnosis course it's a little bit difficult for me to keep from demonstrating at large. I asked you to notice what kinds of things seemed to allow you to go back to the state of consciousness that you were in when you actually had the experience you mentioned, and which things seemed to make it harder for you. Which things seemed to jar you, and which seemed to lead you more into being relaxed? Which things seemed to be disjointed, and which allowed you to forget where you were a little bit?

Woman: Anything that had to with my body put me in deeper, and anything that had to do with my mind, like what I thought about it or my reactions to it, took me out a little.

I want to know exactly what the other person actually did. Give me some examples.

Woman: OK. I was playing the piano. When the person said "You can feel the contact of your fingers on the keys," it made me go deeper. If he said something like "You think the music is you," then I came out.

Man: It was easier for me when the tempo of his voice was the same rate as my breathing.

What kinds of things made it harder?

Man: Urn, when something he said was incongruous with what I had been thinking. I saw myself in an indoor skating rink, and it threw me when somebody suggested something outdoors.

Yeah, you're in an indoor skating rink and somebody says "You look up and notice how beautiful the sky is."

Woman: My partner said to me "You can hear and feel your breathing." That really jarred me, because I couldn't do them both at the same time. I thought "No, just a minute. I can't do that."

OK, what kind of things made it easier?

Woman: When she just said one thing to do at a time, like "You can hear your breathing."

Man: I was swimming underwater when someone said "You can feel the splash of your hand hitting the water." I thought "No, I'm underwater. I can't."

Woman: We were talking about music, and at some point he said something about being in tune with the world, and it just really took me in deeper.

What made it harder?

Woman: He didn't do anything that made it harder. OK, he can go home now.

Woman: there was one thing. If one person had slowed down the speed of his voice, and then the other one speeded up, that brought me back up.

So one of the people would go (slowly) "and you'll feel … very … relaxed" and the other one would say (quickly) "and more and more and more relaxed."

Man: I noticed that my partners used nothing but feeling terms. At first that made it very easy, because I was just using one sensory system, but after a while I heard myself saying "I want to see something." I wasn't seeing anything.

So it was really the absence of something. After a while the instructions became what is known as redundant.

Man: One thing really distracted me and pulled me out after I was in the experience: the phrase "as all other experiences fade." When he said that, suddenly—bang! — I was back.

You had to find out what the other experiences were so they could fade. What made it easier?

Man: Sensory things: feeling the guitar, feeling my fingers moving, looking at the music.

Woman: The omission of something very obvious made it more difficult for me. I was painting a picture and my partners never talked about the feel of the brush in my hand,

How did that make it more difficult for you? How did it cross your mind that they weren't talking about it?

Woman: I kept feeling that there's an incompleteness here; I've got to fill it in. They were talking about mixing paint and looking at the view and how beautifully the picture was progressing.

And that's not what you were doing?

Well, I had to get from mixing the paint to having a brush in my hand and painting before I could stand back and look at the picture. OK. So it wasn't a natural transition for you. It was kind of like "You're standing on the beach, and you feel the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach and notice how far you've swum."

'Now what I hope you come to understand in the next three days is that many of the answers to questions about what leads somebody into an altered state have just been described. The difficulty that people have going into hypnosis is not a genetic one. It's not that some people just can't. In fact, everyone does it all the time. The difficulty is that no one really notices. Hypnosis is a very natural process, and hypnosis is only a word that describes the tools that you use to systematically take someone into an altered state of consciousness. People go into altered states all the time. Perhaps at lunch you can get in an elevator and ride up to the top of this hotel with some people whom you don't know, and watch what happens to them. People don't get into an elevator and act the way they do normally. They kind of go "on hold" and watch the floors go by. In fact, if the door opens before they're ready to get out, very often they'll wake up and start out. How many of you have walked out of an elevator on the wrong floor? There's a universality to that experience. Finding things that are universal in people's experience is the key to both inducing hypnosis and using it for whatever you want to accomplish.

Another important thing is making a natural sequence. If somebody says to you "Well, 1 was driving down the road, and I was on my way to Texas, and I was looking out the window and seeing the other cars go by, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I said to myself 'It's raining so hard!'" that last phrase will jar you out of listening. Usually that's the point at which somebody will ask a question or begin to argue or disagree. Natural transitions lead people into an altered state without jarring them.

There are ways to induce an altered state by jarring someone as well. Both ways of using communication can induce altered states. People often use what is called the confusion technique as an induction procedure. When you use the confusion technique, you do not build in meaningful transitions. You induce a state of mild confusion in people, and then you begin to build natural transitions from that point. We'll get to that later.

If you listen to the kinds of things that jarred people, usually they were things that weren't sensory–based, or things that weren't universal to the experience. If you're playing the piano, you are going to have contact between the keys and your fingers, but you are not necessarily going to feel that "the music is you." For example, if you were playing "Chopsticks" would you feel like a chopstick? It wouldn't necessarily work that way.

Exercise 2

Soon I'm going to ask you to do the same thing again, only this time I want you to restrict yourself to descriptions of what must be there in sensory experience and to be non–specific. If you say "You can hear the splash of the water" and the person is underwater, it won't work. But you can say "You can hear the sounds that the water makes" because there will be some sounds.

This time I'd like you to add one other important piece: I'd like you to have a steady voice tempo and use the other person's breathing as the speed… and rate … and the pace … of the speech … that you generate. Matching someone's breathing with anything in your behavior—whether it's your own breathing rate, the tempo of your speech, or anything else—has a very powerful impact. Try it and find out what impact it has. I want you to use the same experience and keep the same groups. Take two minutes apiece and don't talk about it. It should take eight to ten minutes at most for everybody in your group to do it. Notice if it feels different this time.

* * * * *

I'd like to ask you if you noticed any difference in your own experience, even with just that small amount of instruction. Was it different at all for you? Some of you are nodding. Is there anyone here for whom it was not different at all? … One person. Even with just that little bit of instruction, that little bit of change, the experience changed for everyone but one person in this room. That difference to me is a profound one, because the instructions I gave you are just a tiny bit of what's available.

Hypnosis itself, asfaras I'm concerned, is simply using yourself as a biofeedback mechanism. You were doing that when you matched the other person's breathing rate with your voice tempo. Your behavior became an ongoing feedback mechanism for his behavior–Whether you're going to use altered states for inducing personal change, for some medical purpose, for the purpose of relaxing, or as a form of meditation, the things that allow you to be able to respond to another human being by going into an altered state are not genetically predetermined. They're simply the mechanisms of communication.

If I tell you that I want you to think about this (speaking rapidly) "very–slowly–and–carefully," the incongruity between what I say and how I say it gives you two contradictory instructions. But if 1 tell you I want you to stop … and consider … very … slowly , . . just exactly … what the change … in your own experience … was … then … the tempo … the rate of my speech … the movements of my body (he has been swaying to the rhythm of his speech) don't interfere with the words that I'm saying. In fact they embellish them and amplify their impact.

I heard somebody here say the word "up" as he lowered his voice. That's an incongruity. Those two things don't match. It's like talking about being really excited in a monotone. Hypnotists do this sometimes. There's an old notion that you're supposed to talk in a monotone when you do hypnosis. It is actually much more effective to sound thrilled if you are taking someone back into a thrilling experience. Being in trance doesn't mean that you have to be dead. A lot of people tell me "Well, I don't think I was in a trance because I could still hear things and feel things." If you can't see things and hear things, that's death; that's a different state. In hypnosis, what you hear and see and feel is actually amplified for the most part.

I believe that people in a state of hypnosis have much more control over themselves than they think they do. Hypnosis is not a process of taking control of people. It's a process of giving them control of themselves by providing feedback that they wouldn't ordinarily have.

I know that each of you in here is capable of going into any trance state—even though Science has "proved" that's not true. And given how researchers have proved it, they're right. If you use the same hypnotic induction with a group of people, only some of them will go into a trance. That's the way traditional hypnotists work. However, we're not going to study traditional hypnosis. We're going to study what's called Ericksonian hypnosis, after Milton H. Erickson. Ericksonian hypnosis means developing the skills of a hypnotist so well that you can put someone into a trance in a conversation in which the word hypnosis is never mentioned.

I learned a long time ago that it isn't so much what you say as how you say it. When you try to convince somebody consciously by overpowering him, it elicits from him the response of resisting you. There are some people who don't resist being overpowered, and who go into a trance. However, neither resistance nor cooperation is a demonstration of anything except the ability of people to respond. Everybody who is living can respond. The questions are: how and to what? Your job when you do hypnosis is to notice what people respond to naturally.

People come into my office and say "People have tried to hypnotize me for years and it has never worked." They sit down and say "go ahead and try to hypnotize me." And I say "I can't hypnotize you." They say "Well, go ahead and try." I say "I can't do it. There's nothing I can do; if I decided to force you to keep your eyes open, that would make you keep your eyes open, I'll try. Keep your eyes wide open. Stay totally alert. Everything you do will make you stay right here and right now." Then they resist me right into trance. The principle I was using was simply noticing the response of the person in front of me, and providing him with a context that he could respond to appropriately in a way that was natural for him. Most people are not that radically resistant. Every once in a while you find one. If you realize what he's doing and alter your behavior, it can be really easy.

A stage hypnotist usually pulls twenty people up from the audience and gives them a series of commands. Then he throws out all the good that's not an indication of skill; that's a statistical approach to doing hypnosis. I want to teach you to see how someone is responding so that you can vary your behavior to provide a context in which he can respond appropriately. If you can do that, anyone can go into an altered state in which you can teach him whatever you want him to learn.

One thing I've noticed is that people are more apt to respond easily when they're in a state that hypnotists call rapport. Rapport seems to be built on matching behaviors. Disagreeing with people won't establish rapport. Talking faster than people can listen won't build rapport. Talking about feelings when people are making visual images won't build rapport. But if you gauge the tempo of your voice to the rate of their breathing, if you blink at the same rate that they blink, if you nod at the same rate that they're nodding, if you rock at the same rate that they're rocking, and if you say things which must in fact be the case, or things that you notice are the case, you will build rapport. If you say "You can be aware of the temperature of your hand, the sounds in the room, the movement of your body as you breathe" your words will match the person's experience, because all of those things are there. We call this kind of matching "pacing."

A universal experience in this country is driving down the freeway and noticing that somebody next to you is driving at the same rate. If you speed up, they speed up with you, and if you slow down, they slow down with you. When you begin to match somebody, you build an unconscious biofeedback loop, and there's a tendency for the other person to do whatever it is that you do, or whatever it is that you talk about. If you gauge the tempo, the rate, and the rhythm of your speech to someone's breathing and then very slowly begin to slow down that rate, their breathing will slow down too. If all of a sudden … you pause, so will they. So if you begin by matching someone's behavior, either verbally or nonverbally, it puts you in the position of being able to vary what you do and to have them follow.

The next time you do this exercise, I want you to begin by matching the person's present experience. Last time you described what would have to be there in some previous experience the person had. This time you'll begin by describing what has to be there in the person's experience now. So if I'm doing it with Charlie, 1 would say something like "And you are listening to the sound of my voice … and you can feel the warmth where your left hand is resting on your thigh… ."

There's an artistry to choosing these statements. "Until I say this sentence, you will be unaware of the temperature and feeling in your left ear" and suddenly you are aware of that. If I say to Ann "You can be aware of the feeling of warmth where your hand touches your chin" she was probably not aware of that before I made the statement. But when I said it, she could immediately verify that my verbalization was in fact an accurate representation of her experience. I come to gain credibility, and I also begin to amplify things that are true, but were unconscious in her before I mentioned them.

If I continue with kinesthetic statements and then say "And you can be aware of the sound of people shuffling paper in the room" she will again shift consciousness in order to determine whether my verbalization is accurate for her experience. I'm feeding back things that are a part of her experience, but are normally outside of awareness for her. So I'm building rapport, and at the same time I'm already altering her consciousness by that maneuver.

Today we're only going to explore the principles for inducing altred states. What you do to utilize an altered state after you get it is a separate topic, which we'll get to tomorrow.

For a long time hypnotists have worried about how "deep" you were. They used depth as an indication of what you could and could not do. AsfarasI can tell, depth is not a meaningful way to think about trance; in some altered states some hypnotic phenomena are possible, while others are not. But hypnotic phenomena per se are not that valuable. Being able to have positive or negative hallucinations is not something which is really that valuable in and of itself. Hallucinations can be used as tools to accomplish other ends, but they are not themselves that valuable. .

I have discovered that you can even teach people to do hypnotic phenomena—positive hallucinations, negative hallucinations, pain control, and so on—in the waking state. There is somebody in this room right now who can do these things in the waking state. Is there anybody here who can still see an imaginary friend or animal that you had as a child? Anybody? You can raise your hand, we won't arrest you. (Someone raises his hand.) OK, you can hallucinate in the waking state. That's a hallucination. I hope you realize that. If you don't, we have a psychiatrist waiting outside with an electric shock treatment machine.

There are many of you who can do negative hallucination; that is, you can look at somebody and not see them. Many of you have looked down at a table to try to find something on it, and you looked all over the place and didn't see it. Yet all that time it was lying right out in the open. That is not different from what people do in deep trances. Children negatively hallucinate their parents speaking to them all the time! How many of you can smell a rose when there isn't one? How many of you can take a deep breath and smell a rose right now? On a hypnotic chart that means you're three quarters of the way into the deepest trance you can be in! This either means that you've never been in the waking state, or that the people who make the charts don't know what they're talking about.

It's not a question of depth; if one of you in here were to experience the conscious state of the person sitting next to you for a moment, it would make LSD look trivial. Trance is only taking your conscious experience and altering it to something else.

In California the legislature is passing a law which says only licensed hypnotists can induce altered states. The ramifications of that particular law are going to be very interesting, because when people make love, they certainly induce altered states in one another. At least I hope making love is not the same as mowing the lawn! I'd like to know how they're going to enforce that law. Everybody's going to have to go out and become a licensed hypnotist so that they can get married.

Now back to your task. In addition to matching people's experience with your statements to get rapport, you need to be able to do something with the rapport you'll have. The key to this is being able to make transitions. You need to have a graceful way of guiding someone from his present state into a trance state—going from describing his present state to describing the state you want him to go to. Using transitional words allows you to do this smoothly. Transitional words such as "as" or "when" are words which imply that there is some meaningful relationship between two utterances. "As you sit there, it's possible for you to realize that I'm about to tell you something." There's no relationship between your sitting there and realizing something. However, it sounds meaningful, and it's the tone of voice and the transition "as" that imply meaning.

Beginning with sensory–based information allows you to make transitions and elicit responses that induce altered states. The sensory base for transitions needs to be something that the person with whom you are working can find. It doesn't need to be something he already has in awareness, but something that he can find. If I sit here and look down at Stan and say "Stan, you can feel the texture of your moustache and as you slide your finger, you can notice that you smiled and stopped. You can even feel your elbow with your other hand and sense the rise and fall of your own chest as you breathe. And you may not know it yet, but you're about to become aware of the temperature of your right foot."

Joe: I still don't understand what you mean by the term transition.

If I say to you "You asked a question while you were sitting in a chair" I am making a transition. I'm using the word "while" to define that two things are related. "You asked this" question because you want to know something that's important." Now most things aren't necessarily related, but using the word "because" gives them a relationship. i If I say "As you sit in that chair you are breathing in and out" it relates those two things by time. They are not necessarily related, but I relate them in time by saying "as."

I'm talking about relating the sentences by using transitional words. If I say to somebody "You're sitting in this chair. You are blinking your eyes. You are waiting," that doesn't have anywhere near the flowing quality of "You are sitting in the chair and you are blinking your eyes and you are wondering what the point of all of this is." Words like "and," "as," "while," "because," and "when" all build a relationship between parts of a sentence. The particular relationship is one of time That relationship allows people to move from one idea to another without disjunction. It's the same thing as saying "You're standing on the beach feeling the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach as you take another stroke in the water." Even though the ideas aren't related, they become more related simply by adding those connecting words. You can take ideas that don't fit together and fit them together by gracefully using those kinds of words. When people listen to language, part of what allows them to flow from one idea to the other are these particular kinds of words. And you are here because you want to learn to be able to do a certain phenomenon called hypnosis. And as you go through the next three days, I'm going to teach you a lot of things that allow it to work easier. Why it works I don't know. But as you begin to try some of these things, you will find in your own experience that they have an impact. Even as I'm talking to you now, I'm using the same kinds of words and that's part of what makes it more meaningful.

Joe: Is the "even as" that you just used, another example of a transition?

Yes.

Joe: OK, then I understand what you're saying. You're saying figure out words that will allow bridging between the different sentences you're making.

Yes. I could say "As you sit in that chair, you can feel the warmth of your hand on your arm and you can feel the notebook on your legs. If you listen, you can even hear your own heart beating and you don't really know … exactly … what you're going to learn in the next three days but you can realize that there are a whole lot of new ideas and experiences and understandings that could be useful."

Now those things don't necessarily connect together logically. The fact that your hand is touching your arm and your notebook is on your leg does not mean that you're going to learn things. However, it sounds meaningful and serves a purpose. The purpose is not one of deception, but one of transition.

A lot of people have the idea that hypnosis is a contest, but to think of hypnosis as a contest is really a waste of time. The question is "How can I structure my communication to make it easiest for someone to accomplish what he wants to?" If somebody comes in wanting to go into a trance to make therapeutic changes, or if I'm using hypnosis for some medical purpose, or control of pain, or to remember things, I want it to be as easy as possible for me to accomplish these things. I want the same thing for the people I communicate with. And as I communicate with people, I use words like "as" to connect ideas together so that they don't have to jump from one idea to another.

Man. Are you saying that you try to link up the suggestion with something in the person's immediate concrete experience to make the suggestion more credible?

Absolutely. You can, in fact, feel your hand on your leg and you can feel your notebook. So I can link something about learning to that. Not only does it become more credible, but it is no longer a jump. I used to think that what made transitional words powerful was only that they made a statement more credible. In addition to that, the fact that people don't have to jump simply makes it much easier for them to actually engage in the process.

When I was working with people doing things like pain control, I used to build upon things that they could verify. "You can feel the pain in your arm, and it hurts you very badly, but you can also feel the beating of your heart, the movement of your toes, and you can feel the sound in your ears as your heart beats. You can feel your glasses on your nose, and it's possible for you to begin to feel that other hand, and that other hand can become very intense in its feelings. You can notice each finger, and in fact, you can take all the feelings in one hand and put them in another."

I used to think that it was the logic of that kind of statement that made it convincing. That so–called logic is part of what makes these statements effective, but more than being logical and convincing, these statements are a set of instructions about what's plausible. That plausibility becomes easier for people to respond to when they stay in a constant, uninterrupted state of consciousness. You see, hypnosis makes it possible for somebody to control his heart rate. But usually when people begin to try to do something like control their heart rate, they start talking to themselves, and then they start thinking about their Aunt Susie, and then they say "I wonder if this will work." Those jumps between ideas represent changes in consciousness—not radical ones but subtle ones.

Building transitions maintains a relationship between statements so that rather than jumping from one state of consciousness to another, you move through them smoothly. And as you move more gracefully from one state of consciousness to another, it's easier to accomplish tasks, especially ones that have to do with your involuntary systems like heart rate and blood pressure. It's not a mechanism of conviction; it's a mechanism that makes it easier.

One of my main criteria for the validity of something is not only whether or not it works, but also how easily it works. I don't believe therapy should be hard on the client or the therapist. When something is hard, it's an indication of what we don't know. Hypnosis should not be difficult or unnatural. It should be the most natural thing in the world. Whenever people have to force themselves and try, that is an indication that the technology you're using is not sophisticated enough. That doesn't make it bad, but it is an indication that there's much more to know. Does that make sense?

Man: I really wasn't following the last sentence.

Thank you, You did that beautifully. What I am saying doesn't really make sense; however, it works. I elicit a very different response if I stop using phrases like "as" or "when" or "while" and suddenly use a disjunctive sentence like "Does that make sense?" You start to go back through what I said, and it's difficult to make the transition to the last sentence because there wasn't one. Now while I'm describing this to you, if you consider your experience of what's occurring right at the moment that I'm talking to you, you're moving from one idea to the other. The grace with which you're moving from one idea to the other is what we're talking about. And if I want to know if you consciously understand that—which is a different thing than experiencing it or being able to do it—I'm going to have to be able to make a smooth transition to your conscious understanding. As you sit here considering that, does that make more sense to you?

Man: It seems that you're talking about using a number of bridges; for example the thing about making your style like the patient's, or adopting maybe the mannerisms—

No, I didn't say mannerisms. You might want to mirror body posture, but if the person scratches himself, it's not necessary for you to scratch yourself. If you adopt a person's mannerisms overtly, it has a tendency to intrude into consciousness, and the one thing you don't want to do as a hypnotist is to intrude into that person's consciousness. You want to find more subtle mechanisms: for example, breathing at the same rate. That's not something a person is apt to become conscious of. But unconsciously he will be aware of it and he'll respond.

Man: OK. Those things are another way of making a link between the ideas that you're trying to put across. I don't know quite how to articulate what I'm thinking: that somehow you're going to be more persuasive if there's a similarity in various subtle means.

Yes, and I do something else that makes it much easier to be successful as a hypnotist. I don't think of it as persuasion. Many people who do hypnosis and write about it talk about it as "persuasion," being "one–up," being in "meta–position," or being "in control." They sometimes refer to themselves as "operators," which I always thought was an interesting thing for hypnotists to call themselves. People who do that also write about "resistance," because thinking of hypnosis as control and getting resistance go hand in hand. One way of describing what I'm suggesting is that it is more persuasive. The other way of describing it is that it is more natural. It's more natural for you to respond to things that fit together than to things that don't.

Try something. Close your eyes for a minute. Most of you here have been standing near a grove of trees at some time in your life. And as you stood there and looked up at those trees, you could see the leaves and the branches, and you could smell the air that surrounded the trees. You could feel the weather, the temperature of the air; you might even begin to hear a breeze, and as you hear that breeze you might notice the branches and the leaves responding with movement. You might turn to your left and see a large rhinoceros charging at you.

If that doesn't disjoint your reality, nothing will. In terms of inducing an altered state, disjointing can have a value and a function. But its function is not one of gently gliding someone somewhere.

Disjointed communication is a very powerful tool in family therapy. People come in and say things like "I wish my wife would just leave me alone" and I say "OK, lock her in a closet."

"Well, that's not what I want."

"OK, what do you want?"

"I just want her to stop telling me she wants things." "Do you want her to write you letters?"

Those are not natural transitions, and they elicit different kinds of responses. They are very useful in the context of family therapy when things have got to go quickly, and you often have to work around the limitations of the conscious mind by battering it back and forth.

You can use the absence of transitions to elicit very, very powerful responses. Here we're talking about smooth inductions into altered states. You can also pump people into altered states very quickly by communicating without transitions that are logical, meaningful, and smooth. We'll get to that later on. That's a more radical method, and I don't want to teach you both at the same time. I want to teach you one and then the other. It's always easier to understand when things are sorted into pieces.

In my teaching I've noticed something I'll mention to you. It's a funny thing about learning and the way people make generalizations. If you tell people "You know, I really think that Kansas City is a nice town" they'll say "What's the matter with Dallas?" This isn't idiosyncratic to psychological and communication arts; it's a very pervasive thing. In my teaching around the country if I tell people "This is something that will work" somehow or other they get the idea that something else won't work. And I'm not saying not using transitions won't work. I'm saying using transitions is helpful. It amplifies what you're doing and makes it better. The opposite can work just as well. but you have to use it differently.

In the context of hypnosis, you do not go fast by going quickly. You go fast by going slowly. You simply put your subject's conscious mind in abeyance. Or you can describe it as switching what is in consciousness by leading him into an altered state of consciousness. It's not that he loses his conscious mind and he can't see or hear or think; it's that the same paradigm that operates his conscious mind is not at work. It's still there, it hasn't disappeared, but when you shift him to an altered state, you can logically and systematically and rigorously build new learning. The first step is to learn to get a person into an altered state by using gentle transitions.

Man: I've seen the utility of transitions, especially when you're dealing with relatively unrelated concepts. Is it necessary when they're related—say in relaxation, when you're dealing with words like "feelings of tranquility, peaceful, feeling quiet, feeling very good"? Is it necessary to keep tying transitions onto those types of phrases?

Well, "necessary" is a funny word. Necessary always relates to the outcome. It's certainly not necessary; the question is "What is it that you want to accomplish?"

Man: What becomes the measuring device for knowing how often it's most beneficial to use those transitions?

Your eyes. As you begin to do this you're going to notice that people look different in altered states than they do when they're in their normal waking trances; and as you begin to notice that, you begin to notice when you do things which create discontinuity in their experiences. Very good vision is necessary in order to use hypnosis, because most of the time people are not providing you with as much feedback as they would normally. They're not talking much, and they're not behaving as obviously. In one sense this makes it easier, because there's not as much to confuse you, but it also requires that you have more visual acuity. If you don't have that, you'll end up doing what many hypnotists do—relying completely on finger signals to get yes/no answers to your questions. That isn't necessary. It's a good thing to know about in case you're not getting the feedback you want, or to use while you develop your sensitivity. However, if you have good vision, you can get any feedback you want without having to build in a feedback mechanism artificially. People respond externally, in ways that you can see, to what's going on in them internally.

If people have the internal experience of being disjointed when you say "quiet," "relaxed," or "comfortable" because they don't feel that way, you will see nonverbal responses which will indicate that. And if you see those kinds of things, it makes sense to mention them. "Someone says 'Why don't you relax?' and you try to relax, but it's difficult and you can't, and you say to yourself 'If only I could.' 1 could tell you 'Be comfortable' but it's hard to be comfortable deliberately. But it's very easy to think about a raindrop resting on a leaf." Even though those two things aren't related, people will relax a lot more thinking about a raindrop than they will trying to relax.

One of the things that impressed me more than anything else about Milton Erickson was that he did not use hypnosis as a direct tool. If he wanted someone to be colorblind, he didn't say "Become colorblind." He'd say "Have you ever read a book? What does it mean to have a book read (red)? It doesn't mean anything at all. Somebody told me one time that there was a 'blue Monday.' I said to myself 'a blue Monday. That doesn't mean a thing. These things go together somehow, but they don't have any meaning.' They don't mean anything to me. They don't need to mean anything to you."

The difference between Erickson and the other hypnotists that I've watched and listened to and studied with, is that Erickson didn't have any resistant clients. Either he selected his patients really well, or he did something important that other people weren't doing. Milton watched how people responded, and he gave them what was appropriate for them. Using transitions is one thing that is appropriate with anyone . who is a native speaker of English, because transitions are part of the basic structure of English; they are part of how our language is built. And as you do hypnosis, if you use transitions, they will help you.

I saw Milton do an official trance induction once, which was a very rare phenomenon, believe me. Most of the time people went in and started talking to him about intellectual things … and suddenly the time had passed. But once he officially induced a trance. He had a person sit down, and he said "And as you sit there I want you to stare at a spot on the wall, and as you stare at that spot you can realize that you're doing the same thing now that you did when you very first went to school and learned the task of writing numbers and the letters of the alphabet. You're learning … learning about something that you really don't know about. And even though you haven't realized it, already your breathing has changed (his voice tempo slows down), and you're becoming more comfortable and more relaxed." Those transitions helped to build continuity. Now what going to school and learning about numbers and letters of the alphabet have to do with becoming more relaxed is tenuous at best.

However, the meaning of any communication—not just in hypnosis but in life—is not what you think it means; it's the response it elicits. If you try to compliment somebody and he's insulted, the meaning of your communication is an insult. If you say he's insulted because he didn't understand you, that's a justification for your inability to communicate. The communication itself was still an insult. You can either justify things and explain them, or you can learn from them. My preference is to learn from them. So if I communicate and someone takes it as an insult, next time I change the way I communicate. And if in the future I want to insult that person, I know exactly how to do it!

While transitions are not the whole ball game, they are a useful tool. There's no set formula in hypnosis. The only thing that you can count on is that when you communicate with people, they will respond. If you provide them with enough different communications, you can find what they will respond to appropriately.

What I've told you so far is just the beginning. I also want you to pay attention to your tempo. Tempo is very, very powerful. A rather traditional hypnotist named Ernest Hilgard proved after forty years of research that there's no relationship between a person's ability to alter his state of consciousness and the hypnotist's voice tempo. He has statistical proof of this. But if you pay attention to your own experience as I am talking to you right now and when … I change my tempo … to another tempo … which is distinctly … different … and slower … it has a noticeable impact. As long as it has a noticeable impact, I don't care what "science" says.

Now, I said in the beginning that I'm a modeler. A modeler only builds descriptions. The descriptions are only ways of getting you to pay attention to things. Right now these descriptions are designed to get you to pay attention to your voice tone and tempo. The first hypnotist I ever met was sitting down trying to put someone in a trance when I walked in the room. He was going to teach me how to do hypnosis, and he was talking in an unpleasant high nasal voice saying "I want you to feel very relaxed." Even recognized that I couldn't feel relaxed with a whining person talking to me. But he "knew" that all you needed to do was have one tone of voice, because it says in all the books that you're supposed to use a monotone. He "knew" that it doesn't matter what tone you use, as long as it's the same one.

Now, talking in a monotone is only a way of avoiding being incon–gruent, as far as I can tell. If you use the same tone of voice all the time then you probably won't be incongruent. If you are incongruent, no one will notice it, because there's no variation in your voice. However, the variation in your voice can also be a vehicle that will add to what you're doing.

Man: I noticed that when you were giving suggestions, you sometimes used words that imply control; words like "you will feel" or "you are feeling" versus "this is something that may happen." Do you differentiate between when you choose controlling versus non–controlling words?

Yes. The guideline I use is this: I don't want anyone that I do hypnosis with to ever fail at anything. If I'm making a suggestion about something that can be verified easily, I will probably use words such as "could" or "might" — what we call "modal operators of possibility." "Your arm may begin to rise… ." That way, if what I've asked for ' doesn't occur, the person won't have "failed." If I'm making a suggestion about something that is completely unverifiable, I'm more likely to use words that imply causation: "This makes you sink deeper into trance" or "That causes you to become more relaxed." Since the suggestion is unverifiable, he won't be able to conclude that he's failed. . If I've used five or six modal operators of possibility, and the person responds to them all, at that point I'm probably safe switching to words that imply causation. However, if my next suggestion is very critical, I may continue to use modal operators of possibility. The basic guideline is to make sure no one fails at anything.

Many hypnotists push people to the limits of what they can do by giving them what are called susceptibility tests. These hypnotists put their clients in an altered state and attempt to do a series of graded hypnotic tasks, and the clients accomplish some and fail at others. What usually happens is that somehow or other both the hypnotists and the clients get the idea that there are things they can't do.

When I was teaching at the university and was running hypnosis courses in the evening, a lot of people would come to those courses and say "Well, I've been in lots of trances, and I can only go to a certain level." I don't know where this idea about levels came from. Somehow or other the quality of your hypnotic trance is measured in height— self–esteem goes up, but in hypnosis you go down. It takes a really altered state for some people to see a positive hallucination. Other people see positive hallucinations all the time; they call it thinking. If I'm a hypnotist and I push someone into a position, it sets him up for failure. If I say "You will open your eyes and see a six–foot French poodle" and he opens his eyes and there's no French poodle, he may think he can't have positive hallucinations. If he takes that instruction as a comment about himself rather than about that particular hypnotist, he will probably believe that he can't do it.

Typically, clients will come in and say "Well, gee, I've always wanted to be able to have a positive hallucination, but I can't." I know that everybody is capable of it and has probably already done it a number of times. When they tell me they can't, it's an indication that something has convinced them that it's outside the range of their capabilities, which will only make it that much harder for me to be able to do it. I have to sneak around their beliefs in order to get them to have that experience. Alternatively, I can simply accept this belief and say "Well, you know, it's a genetic limitation, but it isn't a necessary phenomenon to be able to accomplish things, unless you're a civil engineer."

That's what civil engineers do for a living, you know. They go out and look at valleys that have nothing in them and hallucinate freeways and dams, and then they measure them. They just have to have certain hallucinations and not others. Seeing a freeway where there isn't one is "natural," it's called "work." If they see little blue men walking up and down the freeway, then they're in trouble.

Since I don't want people to fail and make generalizations which are not true, I proceed very, very slowly in producing verifiable effects like the classic hypnotic phenomena. I haven't known many people who have a great need to have arm levitation or negative hallucinations. Most people have those all the time and don't know it. Those phenomena don't have any value in and of themselves.

What I'm concerned about is that I lead people through experiences that convince them they can get whatever changes they want for themselves. Whether they want to be able to control pain when they go to the dentist, to change their sleeping habits, or to make very pervasive psychological changes, I want to help them get those results, because hypnosis. can be a very powerful tool to expedite psychotherapeutic change.

Many people ask "What can you use hypnosis for?" The question is not " What can you do with hypnosis specifically?" but "How can you use hypnosis to do whatever you want to do?" Hypnosis is not a cure; it's a set of tools. If you have a set of mechanic's wrenches, that doesn't mean you can fix the car. You still have to use the wrenches in a particular way to fix it. This is the most misunderstood aspect of hypnosis; it's treated as a thing. Hypnosis is not a thing; it's a set of procedures that can be used to alter someone's state of consciousness. The question about which state of consciousness you use to work with a particular problem is really a different issue. It's an important issue, and it's one we're going to deal with later. But the first thing to learn is how to move somebody quickly and gracefully from one state of consciousness to another.

Exercise 3

I want you to take another ten minutes and do the same exercise that you did before in the same group of three. This time add the refinements that we have been talking about. Some time has passed since I described them, so I want to go back through them in detail. This time, rather than first describing the experience to the person, have him sit back and close his eyes, and begin by describing elements of his present experience. I want you to use three statements that are pacing statements—descriptions of verifiable experience. "You're sitting in a chair… . You can feel where your body touches the chair… . You can feel how your arms are crossed … where your foot touches the floor … the temperature of your face … the movement of your fingers… . You can hear the sounds in the room of other people moving… . You can feel the temperature of the air… . You can hear the sound of my voice. . , .

All of those statements can be verified. I want you to say three sentences that can be verified, and then I want you to attach something which is not readily verifiable. You can attach any statement that is a . description of where you want them to go: "… and you're becoming more relaxed." ", . . as you continue to get more comfortable." "… and you don't know what I'm going to say next." So you make three pacing statements, use a transitional word, and add one statement that leads them in the direction you want them to go. "You are breathing, … There are sounds in the room… , You can hear people moving … and you wonder, really wonder, exactly what you're doing." Make the transitions sound as natural as possible. One of you will be the subject, and the other two will take turns saying a set of pacing and leading statements. After each of you has done two sets, I want you to begin to include descriptions of the same experience you used the first two times you did the exercise in your pacing and leading statements. "… while you take time and go back and think about when you were jogging." Notice how it's different this time.

Again, it will help if you pace nonverbally: breathe at the same rate as the person you're talking to, or use the tempo of your voice to match his breathing. And it's essential that what you say is congruent with how you say it.

When your subject appears to be into the experience as deeply or deeper than he was before, I want you to start violating these principles, one at a time. Suddenly make your voice tempo totally different. Notice whether or not that has an impact. Then go back to what you were doing before, and then change your tone. Then try not using transitions. "You're sitting there. You're comfortable. You're relaxed. You don't know what's going to happen." Notice what happens when you do that. Try adding things that are not relevant, "You can feel your fingers on the keys … and you know that there's a kitchen somewhere in this building." "You can feel your feet against the floor … and you feel the enthusiasm and interest of politicians in Washington."

Concentrate first on using all the elements that we have discussed. When you have established a good solid state, vary just one little piece and notice what happens. Then go back to using all the elements and then vary another little piece. Notice what happens to the person's face, to her breathing, to her skin color, to her lower lip size, to the movement of her eyelids. People don't talk much in trance, so you're going to have to get your feedback in other ways. If you check it out afterwards, it will be too late. You have to be able to check it out while it's going on at each moment, and the best tool to do that with is going to be your vision.

Take three or four minutes each to do this. Go ahead.

*****

Did you notice that doing the exercise this way amplified the process even more? What I have been trying to show you this morning by grading these things—by having you just do it, then giving you a little more instruction, and then having you do it again—is that I'd like you to think of hypnosis as a process of amplification. If you think of hypnosis as a way of persuading, in the end you won't be able to do nearly as much with it. If you think of it as a way of controlling, you won't be able to do nearly as much. We picked one situation in a person's experience in which she responded in a particular way, and as you used these particular techniques, you could amplify that response.

Woman: What about getting arm levitation and things like that? Is that amplification?

Hypnotists are very clever in going after responses that they know are going to happen anyway. Arm levitation is one of the things many hypnotists go for. And one of the first instructions to lead to arm lighter." Try taking a really deep breath, and notice what happens to your hands… . Your hands have a little light feeling, because when you breathe in and your chest goes up, that pulls your hands up. So if you give your instruction for light hands when the person breathes in, it will be true.

Good hypnotists pick things like that which they know will happen. However, they're not all conscious of how they're doing it. There's an old induction method you see in the movies where the hypnotist swings a watch back and forth. The hypnotist says "The watch is going back and forth slowly, and you're looking at the watch, and you see it as time passes before you. As you watch that watch go back and forth, your eyes are going to begin to grow tired." Of course they're going to grow tired! If you stare at anything long enough, your eyes will get tired.

Around the turn of the century people used to do hypnosis by having the subject look up at something. The subject would be sitting down and the hypnotist would stand up in front of her, hold up two fingers, and say "OK, I want you to stare at these two fingers, and as you look at those fingers, I want you to watch them intensely… . And as your eyes begin to feel tired, your eyelids are going to grow heavy and you'll know that you're beginning to go into a hypnotic trance." If you stare at anything that's above you long enough, your eyes are going to grow tired. "And as your eyes begin to grow tired, you begin to notice changes in the focus of your vision." If you stare at anything long enough, your focus will change. "And your eyelids are going to begin to grow heavy. You're going to feel the need to close them." Of course you will. Everyone does all the time. It's called blinking.

If I then tell you "And when your eyes close, they're going to stay shut" the odds are pretty high that they will. I've taken three pieces of verifiable experience, and I've connected them with one which is not verifiable, I've done it with a natural transition and with a flow that matches everything in your experience. I've built a step–by–step process that leads to an outcome. I'm saying "You are having this experience, and that leads to this experience, which leads to this experience" and these three are all verifiable. Your eyes are going to grow tired; your eyelids are going to want to close; your focus is going to change. You don't know consciously that those things are a natural part of experience, but as I describe them, one naturally leads to the next. Then when I add on something which is not a natural part of your experience, you are already following step by step, so you just go on to the next one. It's not that you're convinced. You never even thought about whether it was true or false. You're just following along. Using transitions like that allows you to follow along easily.

If you think of hypnosis as if it's a state of controlling someone or persuading someone, the loser is going to be you. You will limit the number of people you will be effective with. You'll also lose in your own personal life, because you're going to start worrying about who's in control of you. My experience is that people are much more respectful of themselves in hypnotic altered states than they are in the waking state. I can give someone a suggestion which is negative and harmful in the waking state, and she will be much more apt to carry it out than if she is in a trance. If you think about the things that people have told you to do which were unpleasant, but which you did anyway, you were probably in the waking state at the time you did them. In trances it's very difficult to get somebody to do something which does not lead toward something meaningful and positive. People seem to be more discerning in altered states. It's a lot easier to trick or take advantage of someone in the waking state than in any other state of consciousness I know of.

I believe that hypnosis is really biofeedback. However, a biofeedback machine does not tell you to slow your pulse down. It only tells you where it is now. You have to aim toward the outcome of your pulse being slower, or your blood pressure being different. The machine only provides the feedback. As a hypnotist you can do both. You can provide people with communications that match what's going on, just like a biofeedback machine. You can then start adding other things step by step that lead them to somewhere else, and they will be able to go along naturally and comfortably. You can create a situation in which all they have to do is respond—the one thing people do all the time, and the thing they do best.

It is a lot easier to make personal changes in an altered state than it is in the waking state. The fact that you don't have the choices that you want is a function of the state of consciousness that you're in. Your normal waking state, by definition, is a description of the capabilities and the limitations that you have. If you are in a state in which you are limited, and you try to make changes in those limitations with your normal state of consciousness, it's a "catch–22" situation. Those–limita–tions will constrain the way you try to deal with the limitations, and you're going to have a lot of difficulty. If you go into an altered state, you will not have the same limitations that you usually do. You will have limitations, but they will be different ones. If you go back and forth between altered states, you can change yourself so much that your waking state won't resemble what it was before.

How many of you in here are clinicians? How many of you at some time have changed so much that you never went back to who you were? … And how many of you have never done that? … I was hoping one of you would raise your hand so I could say "How dare you be a clinician!" An agent of change unable to change—that would be the ultimate hypocrisy. To me, hypnosis is only a way of expediting change. All we're working on here is learning to make natural transitions from one state to another.

Man: I keep wondering how you can tell when someone goes into a trance. You asked us to notice the changes, and I saw some, but how do I know if that means she's going into a trance?

OK. What kinds of changes did you all see when you did the inductions? I asked you to pay attention to what resulted in change. What changes did you notice?

Woman: Her face muscles seemed to relax, and her face got flatter.

That is characteristic. In trance there is a flattening or a flaccidity of the muscles in the face, and there is a symmetry which is uncharacteristic of the waking state. I've found that first there is an intensification of facial asymmetry as the person begins to enter a trance. You know you've got a fairly deep trance when you get symmetry again—a symmetry that is more balanced than the typical symmetry in the waking state. As a person comes back out of a trance, you can determine where they are in the process of coming back to the normal state of consciousness. They go from extreme symmetry in their face through a relatively asymmetrical state to whatever their normal symmetry is. What else did you see?

Man: There were little twitches of the fingers or other parts of the body.

Any unconscious movements—jerky, involuntary kinds of shudder movements—are really good indicators of a developing trance state.

Woman: The breathing really changed.

I'm glad you said it that way. People's breathing patterns vary considerably in their normal state, and when they go into an altered state, whatever breathing pattern is characteristic for them will change. If you have a very visually–oriented client who breathes shallowly and high in the chest in a normal state of consciousness, she'll often shift to breathing deeply from lower in her stomach. If you've got a very kinesthetically–oriented person who typically, breathes slowly from her stomach, she'll shift to some other breathing pattern. Breathing patterns are linked to sensory modes, and they will change as a person alters consciousness.

Woman: If you see a person who typically has an asymmetrical face, does that mean that there is a lot of polarity, or a lot of difference between his conscious and unconscious?

1 wouldn't draw that conclusion. If you see an exaggerated amount of facial asymmetry, you know something unusual is going on. I conclude that there's some imbalance: either chemical, or behavioral, or both. I wouldn't label this a difference between conscious and unconscious.

Man: I noticed that as people went deeper, their hands got warm and flushed.

Especially as you get into the deeper stages of trance, there will be muscle relaxation and an increased flow of blood in the extremities.

Man: What's the relationship between the eyes rolling completely backwards and altered states?

None that I know of. If the eyes roll all the way up in the head, that's a good indicator of a fairly deep trance. However, lots of people go into a profound trance with their eyes open, so it's not necessarily an indication of an altered state.

Man: What does it mean when you get eye movement?

There are two kinds of movement. One is an eyelid flutter, and the other one is seeing the eyeball moving behind the eyelid, but the lid itself is not fluttering. The latter is called "rapid eye movement" and is an indicator of visualization.

OK. There are these general signs of entering trance, and in addition there will be many other changes that you can observe which will be unique to the person you are working with. These changes will simply be indications that the person is shifting states of consciousness. When you ask what a trance state looks like, the question is "which state?" and "for whom?" If you observe the person's muscle tonus, skin color, and breathing pattern before you do an induction, you know what their normal state looks like. As you do the induction, when you observe changes in those parameters, you know that the person's state is altering.

In addition to watching for general signs of changes in someone's state of consciousness, you need to watch for signs of being in or out of rapport. The person will either make responses that are congruent or that are incongruent with what you are asking for, and this will be a good indication of the degree of rapport. Of course, as you lose rapport, the person will begin to return to their waking state.

Summary

A. Trance can be thought of as the amplification of responses and experience. If you describe an experience, talking about what has to be there, you will help the person amplify his/her response.

B. Matching builds rapport and is the basis for leading someone into an altered state. You can match any part of the person's behavioral output. It's particularly useful to match something like breathing rate which is always occurring, but is something the person isn't likely to be conscious of. If you match breathing rate with your speech tempo, you can simply slow down the rate of your speech and the other person's breathing will become slower. Another way to match is to verbalize what is present in the person's ongoing experience. "You are smiling as you look at me, you can hear my voice as I talk… ."

C. Smooth transitions make it possible for the person to easily go into an altered state. Connecting words like "as" "while" and "and" make your transitions graceful.

D. General signs of trance: first facial asymmetry, then more than usual facial symmetry. General muscle relaxation, small involuntary muscle movements, flushing, changes in breathing pattern.