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

Introduction

This afternoon, I want to spend some time teaching you reframing: an approach that you can use with hypnosis to deal with almost any difficulty. I also want to teach you how to arrange explicit "yes" and "no¹¹ signals, because if you know how to do that, you can go through any procedure in a trance and get accurate feedback as you do it. But first I want to give you some background.

How many of you have ever had a client with hysterical paralysis or something like that? Many people think it's uncommon, but it's not. It's an interesting problem. When I first encountered hysterical paralysis, I was fascinated by it. I had read that Milton Erickson had taken hysterical paralysis and moved it from one part of the body to another, and I had always wanted to do that.

When I finally got a client with hysterical paralysis, I decided to try something similar to what Erickson had done. I hypnotized her and moved her paralysis from one arm to the other. She walked out being able to use her left arm, which she hadn't been able to move for three years. However, her good right arm was now completely paralyzed. I was delighted, and had her come back the next day.

She was somewhat perturbed at me, because changing her paralysis made it obvious to her that her paralysis had a hysterical quality to it. Before that—no matter what the doctors had told her—she knew that the paralysis wasn't really in her mind. The doctors kept saying "It's in your mind" and she knew it was in her arm. But when it changed to the other arm, it was hard to believe that it was only in her arm.

The next day 1 moved the paralysis from her arm to her leg. She had to limp out, but both of her arms worked perfectly. She began to get even more perturbed at me. Moving her paralysis around accomplished something very important. She had a belief, and I gave her counterexamples. She believed that her difficulty was not in her mind. But when you go into the office of somebody who is working with your mind and not your arm, and you walk out one day with your paralysis in the other arm, and the next day not in an arm but in a leg, that has a tendency to make you question whether or not you have a physiological problem. Not only did this serve as a counterexample to her old belief, but it began to teach her that the paralysis itself could be moved.

I assumed that the paralysis had some function in her life, so rather than take it away entirely, I moved it again. She ended up walking out with paralyzed fingernails, which she complained about bitterly! How would you feel if your fingernails were paralyzed? What if you started out with just a paralyzed arm, and ended up with the fingernails on every single finger of your hands paralyzed!

When Erickson wrote about the case in which he moved someone's hysterical paralysis, he alluded to the main criticism of hypnosis as a treatment procedure: that hypnosis only treats the symptom and not the "basic need," so a hypnotic "cure" will only result in some other symptom appearing.

This notion of needs evolved out of the work of Freud. He believed that people had certain needs. In those days they accepted "needs" as a well–formed description of something that happened inside someone's mind. Once someone had a need, there was nothing that could be done about it. It was only a question of how the need would express itself.

Let's say you had a need to get attention. If that need wasn't being fulfilled, you might break out in hives or something like that to get attention. The attention would be the "secondary gain" that you would get from having hives. If you had a need for people to be more supportive of you and take care of you, you might get a paralyzed arm.

Back in Freud's day there was another guy named Mesmer, and Mesmer used to do things that intrigued Freud. Mesmer would take somebody with hysterical paralysis and make the paralysis go away, but later on the person would end up having some other kind of problem.

Freud got the idea that if you cured someone's paralyzed arm, the symptom would of necessity express itself in another way. Her paralyzed arm might go away, but her face would break out in hives. He even gave this a name: "conversion." It's also called "symptom substitution."

Hypnosis has often been accused of only resulting in symptom substitution. Critics have claimed that while hypnosis may remove one symptom, the client will of necessity get another symptom in its place. When I entered the field of psychology, I was interested in testing this criticism of hypnosis.

I became very curious about hypnosis because just about everyone in the field of psychology told me "Don't learn about hypnosis. It only treats the symptom." I learned a long time ago that anything in life that is avoided strenuously is probably worthwhile, so this aroused my interest. While there are exceptions, I've noticed that people tend to avoid things that are very powerful.

People said "Don't learn hypnosis, because it only treats the symptom" and my first response was "Well, I'd like to be able to treat the symptom. If I can't do anything else, that might be worthwhile." They said "No, no. If you only treat the symptom and you cure it, it will pop out somewhere else."

Since I am a mathematician, the idea of getting something to pop out somewhere else was so much like an equation that it was attractive. I thought "Oh, I'd like to be able to do that! "So I started learning about hypnosis, and experimenting to find out what happened when you took away symptoms. I tried taking a few volunteers who had some problems, hypnotizing them, and removing symptoms carte blanche, without doing anything else. I wanted to find out where the symptom came out, to find out if there was some systematic pattern in how the conversion took place. Any good mathematician is going to ask the question "How does the symptom know where to come out next?" Nothing is random. If atomic particles aren't random, it takes a lot of audacity to think that symptoms can violate the laws of physics.

I began to notice that there were certain patterns to how symptoms came out. The new symptoms seemed to accomplish the same purpose that the old ones had accomplished. When I removed someone's symptom with hypnosis, she got another symptom that resulted in getting the same goodies.

The other thing that I noticed —which I hate to inform the world of psychology of—is that the symptom didn't always come back. In fact, people were better off when it did come back. If the only way someone could get attention was with her paralyzed arm, and I hypnotized her and took that symptom away, then she simply did not get attention. That seems to me less useful than having a conversion.

When I watched therapists work, I started noticing that very often they succeeded in "fixing" someone by making the person more limited! That may be a difficult idea to understand at first. However, if somebody is not in touch with her feelings—for example, if she is closed off to the world as a way of protecting herself against a lot of the hurt and suffering that one can feel in life —and you take that away from her, she ends up getting slaughtered emotionally. That doesn't strike me as being a useful outcome.

I know a man who had that happen. The clinician who worked with him thought his ideology was more important than his client's experience. The therapist believed it was good for people to feel everything intensely, so he set about teaching his client to respond intensely without asking the question "When he does feel things intensely, how is he going to deal with that?" That clinician didn't consider that the mechanisms which have protected his client from feeling things intensely must be there for a purpose.

The difference between conscious reasoning and unconscious response is that responses seem to have purpose and not meaning. It's very hard for people to understand the difference between those two, because they usually try to figure it out consciously. And, of course, consciously you are trying to discern the meaning of the difference between meaning and purpose. That is a really good way to confuse yourself. And as some of you begin to engage in that process, I want to speak to the rest of you.

Purpose is simply a function. If something has a function, it accomplishes something. What it accomplishes is not necessarily worthwhile. However, it is habitual. It accomplishes something that at some time in the history of that organism had a worthwhile meaning to it. Most of you who are clinicians have noticed that people engage in behaviors which would be useful and appropriate for someone who is five years old, but not for an adult. However, once the program for the behavior was set up, they continued to use it.

For example, there are some adults who cry and whine to get their way. They don't realize whining isn't going to help them any more. When you whined as a child, if you had the right parent, you got things you wanted. But when you go out into the world as an adult, it only works with a few people. So you whine about the fact that it doesn't work, and get even less of what you want.

When I learned about hypnosis, I decided I'd find out if you could just make something go away without ramifications. I hypnotized eight smokers, and just took away their smoking habit. There were no detectable ramifications at all with four of them. If ramifications aren't detectable, that's satisfactory to me. If there is some underlying "pressing need" that never surfaces, that's all right with me. If the Freudian analyst says it will hang on forever, that's OK, too. If it works, I don't care if it leaves some "pressing need" as long as it never has an impact on the person's life.

However, with the other four people whom I worked with, conversions did take place. I checked up on all of them periodically, because I wanted to find out if anything had occurred that was unusual, strange, inordinately pleasurable, or an interference in their lives. 1 also had them come in and sit around in my office, because I wanted to observe whether there were any radical changes in their behavior that they didn't report.

Another man who had been a smoker had a very interesting and unusual response. When this man called me to report, he said the following: "Everything is going beautifully. I haven't even wanted a cigarette. Everything has been really cool. I haven't had any other problems whatsoever. By the way, do you do any marriage counseling?"

Now, I noticed a certain incongruity in his communication, so I told him to get his wife and come over to my office immediately. When they arrived, I seated them in the waiting room and left the room. At that time my wating room had a videotape unit set up in it so that I could watch people. I discovered that 1 could learn much more about people in the waiting room in five minutes than I could in my office in an hour. So I used to spy on people a lot. I had it set up so that no matter where a person moved in that room, 1 could hear and see them.

This couple sat in there and waited and waited, and I waited and waited. I kept watching them until I noticed something interesting. They were both engaging in such meaningful activities as reading magazines and staring out the window. There wasn't a lot to do. He was pacing around, and she kept looking at him and trying to talk to him. At one point he sat down next to her, and she opened her purse and pulled out a cigarette. She lit the cigarette and then stopped and stared at him. She took a drag off of the cigarette and looked at him again. He glanced at her smoking, got up, and moved away from her. She continually tried to engage him in conversation, but he would just give her short answers and go back to his magazine.

At that point I went out into the waiting room, lit a cigarette, handed it to the man, told him to smoke it, and left the room. He took the cigarette, and although he didn't want to smoke it, he kept it in his hand. He didn't smoke the cigarette, but he began to talk to his wife.

It had occurred to me that there was a strong possibility that over the years they had developed a signal system using cigarettes, I later used a little hypnotic investigation and verified that my hunch was correct. In their day–to–day routine they both engaged in lots of activities until one of them paused and lit a cigarette. Then the other would do the same thing, and they would pay attention to each other. They hadn't done that in the last two weeks, since I took away his smoking. They had ignored each other completely because that signal system was gone. That's a good example of something which is not meaningful in itself, but which has a purpose.

Another man came to see me because of ringing and pain in his ear. It had started with a small earache some time earlier; then he went deaf in that ear and also had chronic pain in the ear. He'd had five operations, and now there were no nerves left in that ear/Doctors had taken everything out, yet his ear still rang, and he still had the same pain he'd had before the operations. The doctors knew there was nothing left in his ear to hurt or make noise, so they decided that it must be psychological. Their timing was not something I would be proud of, but at least they didn't keep operating. They have to be complimented for that. At least they didn't say "Well, maybe it's the other ear!" Or "Let's go for the left cerebral hemisphere!"

When this man came to me, he said "I've got to get the pain to stop. All I want to do is learn self–hypnosis to control the pain, because now I have to take so many drugs to control the pain that I can't function. I can't do anything at home. I can't work. And if I don't take the drugs, the pain is so tremendous I can't do anything. I'm trapped. I'm going broke. I'm going to lose my home. It's just terrible."

He wanted me to use hypnosis, and in a way I did. I used a particular model inside of hypnosis—a model we call "refraining" which is designed to do deliberate symptom substitution. Refraining takes one symptom and turns it into another one. It sounded to me as if this ear problem gave him a ticket out of having to work and do other unpleasant things. It wasn't a very pleasant ticket, but he didn't like his work, either. He was an architect and he didn't really enjoy it, and ended up doing most of the bookkeeping and other unpleasant jobs. So I switched the symptom from being pain and ringing in his ear— although I left the ringing initially—to hysterical paralysis. I instructed his unconscious mind that both his arms would become paralyzed only when it was appropriate for this symptom to be available, because I wanted to know how accurate my guess was.

He really became quite functional. Then his wife would say things like "I want you to take out the garbage and mow the lawn, because there are so many things that we're behind on" and suddenly his arms would become paralyzed. He would go "Oh, damn! I can't do it now." His business partners would ask him to engage in the most unpleasant of activities in their business–doing bookkeeping and things like that—and the paralysis would mysteriously emerge.

Once while I was trying to learn about symptom substitution, a lady who had numb feet came to me. Her feet were numb all the time. They were so numb that she couldn't balance herself, and she even had to have people help her walk. She had been in therapy for some time. Before she first went to therapy, her feet only got numb sometimes, and after being in therapy, they kept getting worse and worse. She thought that they had been getting worse all the time, and that the therapy hadn't helped, but my guess is that the therapy had made her have numb feet constantly.

I always think of symptoms as being people's friends, not their problems, because 1 think of symptoms as communication channels. However, as with most communications between people, the purpose and the outcome is often forgotten. Symptoms, like people, don't always realize the difference between what they intend to communicate and what they do communicate.

This woman was brought into my office by a very conservative counselor from a place in California where you have to be rich to qualify to live. The counselor explained to me how she had done family therapy with this woman, and the woman now had a perfectly happy family. The counselor had thought that the woman's numb feet had something to do with family interactions. But since she had worked through all the family difficulties, and the symptom was still there, something else must be going on. So they thought, as a last straw, they would try hypnosis.

The poor client was sitting there dressed in a sweatshirt and pedal–pushers. She wasn't an unattractive person, but she appeared to have worked very diligently to make herself look unattractive. There she was, sitting next to a very well–dressed forty–year–old woman therapist,' who was saying things to me like "Her family problems are solved." Every time the counselor said that, the client didn't say anything, but her nonverbal response was dramatic. Her face would go asymmetrical and her breathing would become shallow and rapid. I thought "Hm … something is going on here."

So I looked at her, and said "You've come to me with numb feet … and your therapist says … this has nothing to do with your family problems… . Your therapist believes … your problems have been solved … and your symptom persists… . Your doctor tells you … this is not neurological… . He says the problem is not a physical one … but it is in your head… . Now 1 know … and you know … that the problem is not in your head… . It's in your feet because you can't stand on them. … If you stood on your feet… without numbness … you wouldn't need … this therapist … or that doctor . . , because that's the reason you've come here… . Now I don't want to talk to you . , . because you've failed utterly to cope with this problem… . You haven't learned to stand on those feet … by yourself … without numbness… . I want to speak to your feet directly."

If you take somebody from Middle–class America and say something like that to them, they get weird. The difference between hypnotic communication and ordinary verbal communication is that when you use hypnotic communication, you don't care about the content. You only pay attention to the responses. I keep saying "Don't pay attention to the content, pay attention to the response" If you do that, you can say anything, and communicate with people in a way that no one else can.

Then I shifted my eyes and looked down at her feet and said "Numb feet, I know you have something important to tell us." That therapist looked down at the woman's feet, and the woman bent over and stared at her feet, too.

I said "Now, I know … that biologically … the right foot is the 'yes' foot … and the left foot is the 'no' foot. … Is there something that you want to say to me?" The "yes" foot moved, and the woman and the therapist both gasped. I said "All right. Is there something that you've been trying to tell this woman for years, and she hasn't understood?" The "yes" foot moved again. I said "Would you be willing to tell her is a new way?" The "no" foot moved. I said "Have you noticed that this way doesn't work as well as you would like it to, and that the price is too high?" The "no" foot moved again. Her feet thought that what they were doing worked just fine.

Then I said "Would you be willing to try another approach anyway, if it worked better?" and the "yes" foot moved. So I said "All right, feet. If you like this idea, what I want you to do is to remove every ounce of numbness. Restore complete and solid and firm balance. And only at the moments that you need to communicate, I want you to become numb. But I want you to do a more thorough job. I want you to become numb from the tip of the toes to at least a foot above the knees. And then when you no longer need to communicate, go back to full balance. Because the way you communicate now, she doesn't know when you are communicating and when you are not, so she can't understand what you are saying. Even though she obeys, she obeys when she doesn't need to. And she could obey more fully, could she not?" And the "yes" foot moved. Then I said "Begin now."

The woman said "My feet aren't numb!" She picked her foot up and she looked at it, and she moved her toes. She stood up and she could balance. The therapist said "Now, I don't want you to get too optimistic, because sometimes these things don't last" and the woman got numb all the way up to her knees, and she fell over. She lifted herself up into the chair and said to her therapist "Don't tell me that!" and the numbness went away.

Now, her symptom became a teacher for her. When she left my office and went home, she was delighted. She cleaned the house and did things she hadn't done in a long time. When her husband came home, she told him the good news, and said "Why don't you take me out to dinner to celebrate?" He said "I'm too tired. Why don't you just cook me something." She responded "Well, OK" and the numbness began to creep up her legs. She said "No, I think we'd better go out" and the numbness went down.

Her numbness became her best friend for quite some time. It became a teacher. When a symptom becomes a teacher for you, it becomes an ally, because there is nothing in the world that can't be made useful in some way.

If you think of psychotherapy, hypnosis, and medical science in general as making war on symptoms, you will be very limited in what you will be able to do. Fighting with her own unconscious mind is something the client doesn't do very well, and your conscious mind won't be able to do it much better.

A long time ago, before I became an official hypnotist, I had a relative who had a tremendous problem with her weight. She was a member of Weight Watchers Anonymous and she did all kinds of things like putting signs on her refrigerator. What impressed me about her was that she always bought food so she could resist eating it. There was always food in the house to not eat.

I remember that one time when I was just a kid and didn't know much about things, I went to the supermarket with her. As we were walking through the supermarket, I was kind of bouncing along behind her. She was putting lots of things in the cart that she wouldn't eat. One of the things she was getting was a half–gallon of ice cream. I asked her why she was getting the ice cream, when the day before she'd gone to so much trouble to not eat it. She said she was getting it for me.

I told her 1 didn't like ice cream, and that she didn't need to get it for me. She took the ice cream out of the cart and tried to put it back in the bin, but she couldn't do it. She said "Well, maybe your mother would like some." I said "No, my mother doesn't like ice cream, either." So she started to put it back again, and then she said "Well, you're going to have some friends over tomorrow." I said "No, I've changed my mind." She almost set the ice cream down, and then stopped again. She searched her mind, trying to put the ice cream back. I reached over, took the half–gallon of ice cream, and put it back down in the bin. Then I looked at her and asked "What's the matter?" She said "I don't know. I think I'm leaving somebody out."

I remember being struck by how confusing that comment was. It didn't make any sense to me until years later. She had left out somebody in her life—herself. She was a professional housewife who had a house that never got dirty, because nobody ever dirtied it. Her husband worked seventeen hours a day, seldom came home, and refused to talk business with her because he thought that was impolite. However, there was nothing left to talk about. They had no children. She didn't have a car, because her husband didn't think that she should learn to drive; it wasn't safe in California. So she had an empty house with nothing in it, and no one to talk to. One might say she was empty.

I wish I had known then what I know now—that there is an unconscious purpose behind behavior. The purpose docs not need to be meaningful in the sense that Freud thought it did. When I was first interested in psychology, fool that I was, I took a couple of courses at the University. One of those courses was called "Interpretation of Interpersonal Documents." We were going to learn to interpret things the "real" way. In that course, I discovered that people attach much more meaning to behavior than there actually is. Behavior doesn't have that much meaning, but it has a tremendous amount of purpose, and I want to demonstrate this to you.

Reframing

How many of you in here know how to do refraining already? What I would like to do, both for those of you who do not know what reframing means and for those of you who think you know how to do it, is to give you a way of doing reframing with the unconscious mind. The way we usually teach reframing in seminars, it is a way for your conscious mind to communicate with the rest of you about something you want to change, and to generate new and more satisfactory behaviors to choose from. Today I want to teach you how to use reframing as a way of communicating directly with someone's unconscious without using her conscious mind as an intermediary.

The way we're going to do reframing today will be a little bit unusual, because you are never going to know what you are working on. The person that you work with is not going to tell you what she wants to change. She is not even going to allude to it, and in fact she herself may not know what it is. We are going to do this by setting up an unconscious signal system. Rather than talking to people's feet, you arc going to talk to something else.

I) Selling up Unconscious yes/no Signals with the Unconscious. Before you can do the reframing part, you need to be able to set up a yes/ no signal system, so that you have a way of getting feedback. There are many ways of going about this. One way is to use what are called "ideomotor responses." Whenever a person moves some part of her body without consciously doing it, that's an ideomotor response. Traditional hypnotists use what are called finger signals. They have one finger lift for "yes" and another one lift for "no." F.rickson had a tendency to use arms —to have a whole arm move up relatively involuntarily. But you can use head nods, skin color changes—any signal that is nonverbal in nature and is something that you can observe.

Remember that unconscious movements are slow and relatively jerky. If you are using finger signals and your partner lifts her finger up quickly, the way she would if you just asked her to lift her finger, you say "That's the wrong mind. I am not interested in that mind."

The conscious reframing model that is in the book Frogs into Princes is designed to use the client's conscious mind as a messenger.

She notices responses internally and reports what they are to you.

Rather than using the client's conscious mind in that way, this afternoon I would like you to go through a procedure of learning to set up ideomotor responses so that you can see the "yes" or "no" responses. The way you are going to do that requires that you first substantially alter somebody's state of consciousness. You can alter her state in one of the ways that you have already learned. You figure out what would be a sequence of experiences that would lead your partner to be in a very altered state.

When you are working with the person, you might tell her to sit there and as she sits there, remember a time that she took a long trip in a car. She was driving down the highway—perhaps it was nighttime, perhaps it was daytime. Perhaps it started in daytime and worked its way towards evening. And as the dusk began to fall and she moved down that road, she began to notice the vibration in the steering wheel, the hum of the engine, the repetitive movement of visual objects rushing past her. The din of experience … as you moved on … and on … through the evening. And as you did so … you became more and more relaxed … and you told yourself you had to stay awake … this was very important… . But you felt very tired … and you might look at a clock … once … and look at it later … and feel as if an hour should have passed … but only minutes had gone by. … Sometimes you would appear to daydream for a second … and twenty or twenty–five minutes would have gone by. …

All of these descriptions … that you can use … will lead your partner more and more into an altered state… . And as she goes into that altered state … and begins to relax … and become even more comfortable … then I want you to begin …to suggest to her … that she can use her unconscious mind … as a resource … a resource that she can learn from … and communicate with … and really have an experience … which is one that will be satisfactory to her… . And that the only thing which is necessary … to build good rapport with her unconscious … is to have a channel of communication… .

Sometimes the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind by movement … . It might be movement … of relaxation. … It might be that your head nods … up and down … slightly … to communicate "yes," and back and forth … slightly … to communicate "no." …It might be that a left arm … very slowly … begins to lift up … as a way of communicating "yes" and a right arm … lifts up slowly to communicate "no." …It might be that your right foot twitches … involuntarily …to indicate "yes" … and a left foot twitches … involuntarily …to communicate "no." … It might be that you look to the left … to communicate "no" … and you look to the right to communicate "yes." … Only your unconscious mind knows which it will be… . And if it should be that one of your hands is going to lift up … or one of your feet is going to move …it doesn't matter which it is at all. … It only matters that the choice that you make …is appropriate …to you . , . because your unconscious mind knows more about you … than anyone else… .

Now, you can then ask the person to unconsciously choose … what she would like to use as a "yes" signal … and watch what happens… . If you don't see anything … take your time … deepen her trance … and suggest other alternatives … until you find one… . Because some people choose to say "no" by moving an index finger … and "yes" by lifting a whole arm… . And I know that someone who does that … can allow their unconscious mind … to lift a right arm … off their thigh slowly … perhaps all the way up to their face … so that the person who is working with them … could never miss that signal… .

Now, it requires that you be astute when you do this … because very, very often … the signals will appear to be incorporated … into a conscious movement … and when that occurs … you don't want to miss it … do you? It's so easy for people …to miss signals… .

Now, you may get a signal … that you see once … but it doesn't appear … to come a second or a third time… . Just because you ask

a question … doesn't mean that someone has a way of answering it unconsciously… . Because sometimes questions can't be answered "yes" or "no."' … So try to ask questions initially that you can be sure … there is a "yes" or a "no" response to.

I want you to pair up and try this. First induce an altered state, and then lead the person into answering questions with an ideomotor response. If the person literally does not give you any signal and has trouble doing ideomotor responses, you might want to help her. Remember, never define anything as a success or failure. Leave it ambiguous as to when you are asking her to use one channel as opposed to another, and leave it ambiguous as to which channels you are paying attention to, so that it's hard for her to tell where you are getting the signals from. If you set up something that is limited and she fails at it, it may convince her that she can't do it, when in fact she probably already has succeeded. But she didn't notice that success; she only noticed when you defined something as failure,

I would like to instruct every unconscious mind in here that if you get the idea from the person who is working with you that you are failing, you are wrong. It's the other person who is failing. The fact that you got that idea is an indication that she didn't give you enough choices so that you could respond easily and appropriately.

Sometimes it's very difficult for people to do ideomotor responses because it's a new thing for them. If they are sitting there and you are not seeing any responses, very often you can tell them (He turns to a woman in the audience.) "Sally, I'm reaching over and I'm lifting up your left arm. And I'm not going to tell you to put it down any faster than you really relax comfortably and completely and learn to allow your other hand to float up involuntarily. So that hand will go down slowly while you think pleasant thoughts … and allow all the weight to drain out of the other hand . . , so that one hand goes down … only as fast as the other one begins and continues to lift up . . , and no faster. That's much too fast—slow down. Only as fast as the other hand learns to move involuntarily… . That's right …. Take your time… . Let the other mind do it. … Slow down… . There it goes… . You are learning now … really learning… . Enjoy it. … That's right. … All the way up, let it … all the way up… . Learn to allow your unconscious mind to make the movements and the changes … and allow that to continue, one moving one way … and the other moving the other way… . And you can continue that until you've learned to do this perfectly."

Hypnosis is a learning process. There's no way to fail unless the hypnotist allows someone to define something as failure. If you define the situation so that failure is not possible, it won't be a problem. If you continually give people the experiences and the internal responses that can serve as the foundation to build learnings so that they can have choices, you will do them the most service. That's true of any learning.

You can allow that hand to go down, now, Sally, and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Now, I know that each and every one of you in here can learn to go into a trance, and you can learn to get anything you want from trance states. But if trance states arc typically a time when you fail at things, that won't be the case. Traditional hypnotists have always done themselves a disservice in that they've asked people to do things that they weren't already doing. I don't do that, because I think it is unfair to them and it would make my work harder. I always allow people to do what they are already doing by giving them a lot of choices. I allow them to respond in ways that are most natural for them, and then slowly use that to teach them to do something else in an altered state. You can begin with simple things like movement, and extend that all the way to making pervasive personal changes.

OK.. Find a partner, induce an altered state, and set up a nonverbal yes/no signal system. The signals can be responses other than just movements. You might have her blush for a "yes" signal and pale for "no." Or she could relax for "yes" and tighten up for "no." If you try a range of possibilities and don't notice a response, say "I would request of your unconscious mind that it provide me with an obviously recognizable signal that I can use validly as a "yes" response. Would you provide that for me?" And then you sit back and observe. If you see it, fine. If you don't, you say "Please make it more obvious for me. Because I desire to be instructed by your unconscious mind and to be fully respectful of your needs, I need a signal system that is unequivocal and unambiguous." Your partner will generally come up with some responses that you can see. Take about twenty minutes to do just that much with each other. Then come back, and I'll give you more instruction.

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Many of you have told me that it was a lot easier than you thought it was going to be. Many of you, as I walked around the room, were succeeding brilliantly without noticing it. One of the problems with doing anything that deals with unconscious activity, is that very often things are really obvious. I noticed someone staring at his partner's fingers and asking questions, and the partner was nodding her head "yes" and "no." He was focusing on her fingers, and he kept squinting harder, as if somehow or other that was going to make the fingers lift higher. You have to understand that very often unconscious responses, since they are not meaningful, have a tendency to be very blatant. But if you look only in one place, you may miss them.

2) Identifying the Pattern of Behavior to be Changed. Now that you've established yes/ no signals, I want you to put your partner in an altered state again and have her identify some pattern of behavior that she engages in but doesn't like. Now, consciously she may think "Ah, smoking" but unconsciously she may identify something else. It doesn't matter what she thinks she has identified, because I want you to tell her unconscious to scan through all the things in her life that cause her problems and pick one that is of utmost and vital importance to her well–being.

When her unconscious mind has selected one, have it give you a "yes" signal. You will be guaranteed by these instructions that if she consciously picks something trivial like smoking, her unconscious can pick something more useful. Habit control is the most trite application of a learning tool. It's important, but it is not nearly as important to your well–being as other things. There are many patterns that occur in your life which prevent you from having intimacy with people, spontaneity when you are moving through the world, or the ability to learn from other people and enjoy them. There are patterns like that which are pervasive—throughout everything you do. A byproduct of that pattern may be that you can't control your smoking or that you wake up at four o'clock in the morning and have to eat pecans.

Once I worked with a man who did that. He woke up at four a.m., and if he couldn't get pecans, he couldn't get back to sleep. It didn't matter where he was; it didn't even matter if he changed time zones. It changed time zones too. It was a very sophisticated thing. This person, by the way, was a clinician.

The problem was that he would travel to places where you couldn't get pecans, he would take pecans along when he went to foreign countries, but sometimes he wasn't allowed to bring them in. And that meant he would wake up at four o'clock in the morning. Being clever, he learned to go to bed at nine o'clock at night and get up at four o'clock in the morning. However, his wife didn't like that much. It made life dull.

Now, I knew that the behavior he told me he wanted to change was only an example of a much more important and pervasive pattern. However, I know that working with an example is one way to work with the pattern, so I just went ahead with reframing.

So in the next piece, I want you to first put your partner back into trance, reestablish a yes/no signal with the person's unconscious, and then ask her to identify, both consciously and unconsciously, a significant pattern of behavior she wants to change. You can label this pattern X or Y or something arbitrary like that.

3) Separating Positive Function from Behavior.

a) Now you can go right through the standard refraining model. First you say something like "I want you, Joyce's unconscious mind, to turn the finger signals over to the part of her that makes her do X. And when that part has full control over the finger signals, both fingers will lift up so that I know." You always use the ideomotor signals as a feedback mechanism.

b) The next question is very important. You ask "Are you willing to allow her conscious mind to know what it is of value that occurs when she does X?" This is a yes/ no question. If you get a "yes" say "go ahead and let her know, and when you've done that, then allow that "yes" finger to rise, that "yes" blush to occur—or whatever the signal is—so that I know you've informed her." You are always monitoring things. Use the yes/no signals not only as answers, but as monitors.

By the way, it doesn't matter if you get a "yes" or a "no" response to the question "Will you let her conscious mind know the useful purpose?" It doesn't matter because you already have what you wanted to accomplish: communication on the subject. If you go in and ask "Are you willing to communicate about this?" it might say "No." And if it says that, then you are stuck. Then you have to come up with some other scam.

If you ask a father in family therapy "Are you willing to change your behavior in relationship to your son?" he might say "No." But if you say to him "Do you love your son?" he'll say "Yes." If you ask "Do you really love him?" he'll say "Yes" again. If you then ask "Do you love him enough that you would be willing to make changes in your behavior so that he could have a happy life?" you won't find many fathers who will say "No" to that.

The reframing procedure I'm teaching you is very similar to that. You make it very easy for the person to respond in the way that you want her to by presupposing everything that's important.

So I presuppose communication. If his unconscious says "No, I'm not willing to tell the conscious mind" it's already communicated with me. I say "Then are you willing to figure out for yourself exactly what you consider to be the most useful aspect of this behavior?" You see, all

1 want is the communication. It doesn't matter whether the response is "yes" or "no." Who cares if her conscious mind knows? Even if her conscious mind knew, it wouldn't help. Sometimes knowing gives an illusion of security, but informing the conscious mind is not profoundly useful in and of itself. What I want is communication.

Equally important, I want to make a distinction between the behavior that he doesn't like and its useful purpose. This separation is also presupposed by my question. I don't ask if there is a useful purpose, I ask it his unconscious part is willing to communicate what the useful purpose is. If the unconscious part is not willing to communicate its positive function, I say "Fine" and just go ahead. The important distinction between the behavior and some useful purpose has been made. This gives me lots of flexibility in making changes. She doesn't like the behavior, so I find some positive purpose which it serves. This opens the door to creating new choices.

4) Creating New Alternatives,

a) As soon as the conscious mind knows the useful purpose, or the part identifies for itself what it is, the next step is to generate alternative ways to accomplish the useful purpose. You can simply ask that part if it would be willing to go into the creative resources where people dream and manufacture ideas—you can describe anything which has to do with the manifestation of new choices, rearranging things, or creativity–and get some new ways to accomplish this positive function other than the one it is using now. Totally reassure the part that it does not have to accept any of these choices, and that it does not have to give up the old behavior. It can simply go in and get a whole plethora of other ways of accomplishing the same positive intention.

b) When you get a "yes" tell it to go ahead, and to give you a "yes" signal again when it has gotten ten new choices. If the conscious mind knows what the pattern of behavior is and the function it serves, then you can allow the conscious mind to know about the new choices. But there is no need for the conscious mind to know about the choices.

I want you to do just that much, even though it may not make much sense to you. You first ask her to pick a behavior that she most wants to have more choices about. Then you essentially say "Separate the behavior that you are using from what it is supposed to accomplish— what its purpose is." Then you say "OK, now that you have separated those and you know the difference, I want you to go into all of your creativity and come up with ten new ways to accomplish this purpose.

You don't have to use them. There's no commitment here to change anything. Just come up with ten ways that you would be able to accomplish the same purpose."

When the person signals you that she in fact has the ten choices, or that she only got eight, then stop. Bring her back to the waking state. OK, try that much.

* * * * *

In the piece that you just did, the basic thing that you arc trying to accomplish is to get somebody to learn unconsciously to separate behaviors from what those behaviors accomplish. If a behavior is a way of accomplishing a particular outcome, once you've made that distinction you can easily get the person to begin to generate other possibilities—three, ten, fifty ways of accomplishing the purpose other than the problem behavior. You want her to end up with ways which are as immediate, as effective, and as available as the way she is using now. If you do this, typically it is not that difficult to begin to induce very pervasive change.

If you think only in terms of changing a behavior, like smoking, you don't have much room to move. You can either smoke or not smoke, and it's very difficult to get people to not do things. If you back up and work in terms of the positive function of smoking—for instance relaxation—this gives you a lot more flexibility. There are many ways a person can relax.

People sometimes try deliberate symptom substitution, but they usually get into difficulty. For example, take a person who unconsciously wants to feel satisfaction, and the way she achieves that satisfaction is by eating a piece of chocolate cake. Replacing eating with painting a picture is not going to work very well, because it is a lot easier to get a piece of chocolate cake than it is to paint a picture.

It's a lot easier to smoke a cigarette to relax than it is to go to Mexico. Smoking may not relax you as well, but it is much more immediately available. Unconsciously you don't really make the kind of qualitative distinctions that you might make philosophically. You might consciously decide that it isn't nearly as satisfying to eat chocolate cake, because then you have to regret it afterwards, and it detracts from the rest of your life. You might decide that if you took up a hobby or you found something else to do, that would satisfy you more. However, if what you try to substitute to give you that feeling of satisfaction is not as immediate and as available as the chocolate cake, you'll cither go back to the same pattern of behavior or you will find something else that is easily available.

Now, sometimes when you find something else that is as immediate, you find something that is worth having. But often people quit overeating and begin to smoke. Or they quit smoking and spontaneously gain weight. Or they give up some habit that gets in their way, and they end up doing something even more destructive to them. So it's important that you have a way of evaluating the choices that you select.

5) Evaluating New Alternatives.

a) I'm going to ask you to pair up again with the same person and continue with the next step. Put her back into the altered state, reestablish whatever signal system you were using, and then ask her to go through each of the choices, and to evaluate each one in terms of whether unconsciously she believes it is at least as immediate and effective and available as the way she is now using to accomplish the positive function. Whatever the intention behind the behavior is, will these alternative choices work just as effectively to accomplish it? Each time she identifies one that will, allow the "yes"signal to occur, so that you can count the number of choices she unconsciously selects. You want to know how many choices she unconsciously believes meet that criterion. If you get ten, you are in good shape.

b) If you get less than three acceptable choices, have her go back to step four and generate more until she has at least three. If you only have one choice about how to do something well, that's not much of a choice. That's where most of you are now with whatever you are dealing with. If the only way you can get immediate gratification to satisfy yourself is by overeating or yelling at your children or whatever it happens to be, you don't really have a choice. If you develop only one more possibility, you still don't really have a choice. All you have is a dilemma.

If you have three possibilities, in addition to the one you don't like, then you are into the Land of Selection and that's really what choice is all about. So I want you to have her generate at least three possibilities that unconsciously she will accept as being as immediate, as available, and as effective, at accomplishing that particular purpose.

6) Selecting One Alternative.

a) Now, once you get a signal from her that tells you she has three, then have her unconsciously select which of those new ones to try out. You don't want her to select the old one, so the best way is to bypass that possibility by presupposition. You ask her to select which of the new ways strikes her as being the most effective and the most available in satisfying whatever purpose she has, and to give you a "yes" signal when she has made the choice.

b) Then ask that unconscious part of her if it would be responsible for using the new choice instead of the old one for three weeks to evaluate its effectiveness. If she discovers it will not work, then she can try out the other two, or go back to the old pattern. Going back to the old pattern of behavior doesn't constitute failure, but is simply a signal to generate more possibilities, perhaps at night while she dreams and sleeps, perhaps in a daydream.

One of the things I've discovered in my work with people is that when they go through usual therapeutic, hypnotic, or medical procedures in order to change, they often begin to change less spontaneously than a person normally would. When people fail to get the outcome they want, they begin to build the generalization that change is difficult and they can't do it, rather than simply taking no change as an indication that the choices they developed were not adequate, and that it's time to find even better ones.

When you get that part to take responsibility for trying a new choice, ask it to give some signal if it discovers the new choice is not good enough. Then have the part use that as a signal to generate a new choice that's even better, It could do this in the process of dreams, or fantasies, or just totally at the unconscious level. An inadequate new choice becomes a signal to build new learnings rather than an indication of failure. Does that make sense? It's a really important principle, even if you don't do hypnosis. When you change people, always define anything that might be considered a failure as an indication that it's time to expand. That's a much better overall learning than any specific change you could give someone in psychotherapy. If somebody comes in with numb feet, and you build in that learning and help her make the numbness go away, you teach her that if the numbness comes back, it's time to do something. It doesn't mean that therapy didn't work, or that she failed.

Sometimes a therapist tells me she used a procedure with somebody and that person changed for six months, but then the same old problem came back, and the therapist doesn't know what she did wrong. It strikes me that the therapist must have done something really right to get it to last that long. Even if the change only lasted a week, she might have done something which was very appropriate. What she missed was taking what she did that was appropriate, and using it as the basis for knowing what to do next. A symptom is like a barometer; it tells you when the choices you have are inadequate for your being able to cope and respond in a way that is appropriate for you.

Stress can also be considered a barometer for when you are not handling your behavior appropriately. Once I worked with people who were in what was called "The Stress Clinic." I thought this was an interesting name for the place—kind of a metaphor. They were attempting to help other people reduce the amount of stress in their lives by learning relaxation techniques. But what they failed to do in that clinic with their clients and with themselves was to define stress as something useful. They defined itasa disease that had to be cured, instead of as a useful way of monitoring when your way of dealing with problems isn't working well. Stress can be an indication that it is time to sit back and use the relaxation techniques and that now is an opportunity to begin to think of more creative ways to cope.

I would like you to get back with your partner and have her unconscious select the choices that will really work, and then select one of those new choices to test for a limited period of time. If the choice doesn't work, it tries another choice or begins some behavior that will generate more choices. If it does work, she keeps it, and that alleviates the need for the unwanted pattern of behavior.

7) Future–Pacing. If you get total verification at the unconscious level that your partner is willing to accept the new response and use it, then without even knowing what the problem is, tell her to go into, a fantasy of being in the situation where she would be most apt to respond with the pattern of behavior that she doesn't like, and surprise herself delightfully by trying out the new behavior. Have her unconscious mind notify you either "yes" it's working or "no" it isn't. If there is any way in which the new choice doesn't work or has harmful side effect?, have her unconscious give you a "no"signal, and then havener' go back to generate more choices. I'd like you to spend about twenty; minutes doing this, so that you can take what you did previously and bring it to a conclusion..

Reframing Outline

(1) Set up yes/no signals with the unconscious.

(2) Identify a pattern of behavior to be changed. Ask her unconscious to select some behavior, X, that it doesn't like. Ask it to pick something that it thinks is of utmost and vital importance to her well–being. Have it give you a "yes" signal when it has identified one.

(3) Separate positive function from behavior.

(a) Ask her unconscious mind to turn the yes/ no signals over to the part of her that makes her do X. Either ask that part to give you a "yes" signal, or a "yes" and a "no" signal simultaneously, when that has occurred.

(b) Ask "Are you willing to allow her conscious mind to know what it is of value that occurs when she does X?" If "yes," say "Go ahead and let her know, and when you've done that, give me a 'yes' signal." If "no," proceed.

(4) Create new alternatives.

(a) Ask that part if it would be willing to go into the person's creative resources and get new ways to accomplish this positive function other than X. (The part is under no obligation to accept or use these choices, only to find them.)

(b) When you get a "yes," tell it to go ahead, and give you a "yes" signal when it has ten new choices.

(5) . Evaluate new alternatives.

(a) Ask that part to evaluate each new choice in terms of whether, unconsciously it believes the choice is at least as immediate, effective and available as X. Each time the part identifies one that it believes is, have it give you a "yes" signal.

(b) If you get less than three, recycle to step (4) and get more choices.

(6) Select one alternative.

(a) Ask the part to select the new way it considers the most satisfying and available in achieving the positive function, and to give you a "yes" signal when it has selected.

(b) Ask the unconscious part if it would be responsible for using this new choice for three weeks to evaluate its effectiveness.

(7) Future–Pace. Ask her unconscious go into a fantasy of trying out the new behaviors in the appropriate context. Have her unconscious notify you either "yes" it's working or "no" it isn't. If there

is any way in which the new choice doesn't work or has harmful side effects, recycle to step (4) and create new choices.

Those of you who already know the reframing procedure in Frogs into Princes will notice that the procedure we're offering you today has slightly different steps and a slightly different order. The basic technique is the same, and you will accomplish the same things when you use it.

Discussion

The generalization that underlies the re–framing technique is that when things aren't the way you want them to be, you can change them. Find out the purpose that you are trying to achieve, the outcome you arc working towards, and then generate more choices. That is a worthwhile learning no matter what you're doing, and every inch you get closer to it wilt be in your best interest,

When theripists work with clients and the therapist notices that a procedure is not working. it simply is an indication for her to vary her behavior. As I walked around the room this afternoon, I noticed that some of you forgot to control the tempo of your voice, and you kept bringing people out of trance instead of putting them in. One man in the back of the room was doing beautifully until his voice begun to rise. As his voice went up slowly in pilch, his partner kept coming out of trance and trying to force herself back in—the mark of an overly cooperative client. It has been my experience that all clients are really very cooperative if they are prodded with the right stimulus.

Once had a client who came in and sat down said "Nothing ever works with me. There's nothing you can do that will ever work and I know this already." And I said "All right, I'm going to do something that will make you stay in that chair." I opened my desk drawer and took out a piece of paper. I wrote on it, and folded up the piece of paper. Then I looked at him and said "Now, you feel so heavy you feel compelled to stay in that chair, and everything you try to do will be in vain, because every motion you make will keep you in that chair." The guy immediately stood straight up. I opened the piece of paper and showed it to him. The paper said "You are standing now."

"There was nothing profoundly important about what I did. However, it convinced him that I could make him do things. In his case, that was very useful, That's very rare. Most people don't need to be convinced of that. If you create a contest in which whatever response you want from a client is appropriate, it will occur naturally.

A funny thing happened years ago. 1 had a student who failed at everything. He was a compulsive failer. I soon discovered that if I defined a particular success as the most likely failure, he could go in and succeed with people, and then come out and say "Well, it didn't work." His client would change, and the student would never notice it! I would tell him that the most likely way to fail with this person was to have X happen. I made sure X was a change that would be very useful to the client. He would work with the client and "fail" every time with precision. He succeeded consistently at failing in exactly the way that I specified.

Any rigidity in behavior allows you to do things like that. The ones I'm describing are outlandish rigidities. But if you think about your clients, most of their rigidities are fairly outlandish, too. It is only a question of establishing a context in which their natural responses are the ones that will lead them where they want to go.

There's an old gestalt technique to use when the client says "There's no way in the world that I can think of anything that would be helpful." You look at her and say "You're right. You could never do it. You are an absolute failure; you could never think of anything that would be helpful, not even the smallest thing." Typically she will then respond "Well, there is this one little thing." That's part of the natural polarity response of many people.

Some people, however, will respond in the opposite way. I once saw a gestalt therapist work with a client who said "I don't know what to do." The gestalt therapist said "Well, guess." The person said "I don't know. I'm a lousy guesser." And the therapist said "You can never guess anything that's appropriate." The client's face began to droop and she looked pathetic. If you use that gestalt technique with someone who responds congruently, you will only convince her that she is a failure. If you notice her response, you can utilize it to lead her where she wants to go. So you need to notice what kind of response you are getting, and vary your behavior in order to get the response you want.

When you do reframing using nonverbal yes/ no signals, you don't need to worry what response you get, because it doesn't matter whether you get a "yes" or a "no" response. Whatever response you get on any step of reframing simply tells you what to do next. If you tell her to get new choices, and she gets them but the choices are not good enough, that only means she needs to go back and get more.

If she keeps doing it and she can't get ones that will work, then have her redefine the context. If you had her go to her creative part that manifests dreams and dream up new ways, and those ways aren't good enough, then have her go to "the brain center that creates all devious behavior." You can make up anything. Act as if it is real, and it will be.

There are thousands of people in this country today who have a "parent," a "child," and an "adult" in their behavior. They weren't always that way, but they are now. The only clients I ever saw with those behaviors were ones who had been in Transactional Analysis. That is not a criticism of TA. It's a compliment about the flexibility of humanity to create anything, as long as someone else acts as if it's real.

The TA therapists who have come to me for private help always had difficulty with their parts. They couldn't do adult things and have childlike fun doing them, because those are separated in their psy–chotheology. That's a byproduct of their belief system and their psychotherapy.

It seems to me that rather than having a gestalt topdog and underdog that fight, a psychoanalytic unconscious that tortures you wantonly, or a TA parent and child that don't mix very well, or any other aspect of your personality that leads to limitations, you should make up a psychotherapy for each client in which all the parts flexibly generate choices for coping. I want you to have choices. The parts that I make up for you are creative parts that can do anything. I make up an unconscious that is concerned and caring and willing to work on your behalf, because I don't want parts of you that have limitations. You are too good at doing that already.

If any of you want to know more about how to do reframing in a different way, read Frogs into Princes. In the last chapter of that book we do reframing with someone as a demonstration and answer a lot of questions. We also have a book Reframing: The Transformation of Meaning that presents several models of reframing in great detail.

You don't need to put someone into a formal trance in order to do reframing. However, it can be fun as a variation. The basic steps of reframing can also be done in the context of a normal conversation. The only difference is that you need to be more observant to notice the responses you are getting. In a normal conversation you can get the same unconscious responses, but they usually go by more quickly and that makes them harder to notice.

Let me tell you a funny little story that's an example of how you can reframe someone in a normal conversation. Last year I was visiting a friend in Southern California. I was in a liquor store buying a couple of bottles of champagne for a party we were going to have at his house.

In the liquor store I noticed a little old alcoholic woman. It's quite easy for me to pick out an alcoholic by muscle tonus, skin tone, posture, and breathing, even when she's not loaded. I'm sure all of you who have spent time noticing the difference between alcoholics and non–alcoholics also find it easy to make that distinction. She was short, and although she looked ancient, my guess is she was actually about 65. I nodded to her and smiled and went about my business. I knew the woman behind the cash register, and we made a couple of joking remarks to each other and laughed. This little old lady also laughed and made some comment which was actually pretty funny, and I laughed too.

The old lady turned to me as I was leaving and said "You don't happen to be going up the hill by the Post Office, do you?" I said "I'd be delighted to give you a lift home. I'll wait outside in my car."

She came out, got in the car, and we started driving. As she sat on the seat next to me, she was wringing her hands and looking over at me furtively. It was obvious to me that somehow I'd tapped something inside of her. Finally she said "Why do you drink?"

I did my best to keep from laughing, because she was obviously wondering why she drank but making a referential index shift. I said "Well, personally, I drink for taste. I drink very fine wines, and I drink champagnes. I don't particularly like the taste of whiskey, so I don't drink whiskey, and I drink beer when I'm at the beach and it's hot." And then I said "But that's not really the question you want to ask me. The question you want to ask me is 'Why do you drink?' " That was such a good match for her experience that she burst into tears.

Crying wasn't useful for me, and it wasn't useful for her, either. I looked outside and saw a dog walking along. I pointed at it and exclaimed "LOOK! IS THAT YOUR DOG?" just as a way to get her to stop crying. Because of the urgency in my voice, she responded congruently to my question. She looked out, then looked back at me confused, and said "I don't even have a dog." But she had stopped crying entirely, which was the point of the maneuver.

Then I told her a story. "Well, you know, that dog reminds me of this little dog that I knew—a very small dog—that lived in San Francisco. This dog believed that nobody in the world understood it. That's what the dog told me, and the dog was almost right. Because it was true that almost nobody in the world really understood her. And the dog didn't realize that there is a big difference between no one understanding it and almost no one understanding her." She burst into tears again.

We continued driving, and soon she said "You're right, the question is 'Why do I drink?' "

"And even that is the wrong question" I said. "Your whole life you've been asked that question, and you've been asking yourself the question 'Why do 1 drink?' Everybody's been saying 'Why do you drink?' but you've been made a fool of. Not only did you ask me the wrong question, but you've been asking yourself the wrong question for the last 30 years. Everybody around you has been asking you the wrong question, and they've made a fool out of you by focusing your attention on that question, because it's not the right question."

I pulled into her driveway. She looked over at me, and first she said "Who are you really?" I just smiled. Then she said "Well, are you going to tell me what the right question is?"

"Well, I'll tell you under one condition. The condition is this: after I finish telling you, I'll reach over and touch you on the shoulder. When you feel my touch on your shoulder, you'll get up, walk out, go into your house, and begin to find answers to the question I give you. As soon as you know what the answer is, you'll call me." And I gave her my friend's phone number.

She said "OK. I agree." So I said "Well, the question is not 'Why do you drink?' the question is (slowly) 'What would you do if you didn't drink? "

Immediately her whole demeanor changed. Different expressions began tumbling past one another on her face. She went through breathing, skin–color, and posture changes. That was precisely what I'd wanted. She'd never considered what else she'd do if she didn't drink. She went into a fairly deep trance, and I let her sit there for two or three minutes, and then I reached over and touched her on the shoulder. She roused a little bit, got out of the car, and went into her house.

Five minutes after I got to my friend's house the telephone rang, and sure enough it was this woman. She said "Is that really you? … I just wanted to tell you that you saved a life this afternoon, 1 was going home to commit suicide. But I decided I just didn't know how to answer that question, and I want to tell you that. I don't know what it meant to you, but that is the single most beautiful question in the world."

I said "I don't care whether you like the question or whether you believe it's the most beautiful question in the world. That's not my interest. My interest is in the answer to that question. And you call me tomorrow with several answers to that question."

At one point in the conversation she used a perfect idiom. She said "Well, I just felt like I was going down the drain." And I said to her "People don't go down the drain. Other things do!" And sure enough, when she called me the next day, she'd dumped all the booze in the house down the drain. I was there for two weeks, and I know she didn't drink again during that period of time,

I consider that a really interesting example of conversational reframing. There wasn't a wasted move in the conversation on either my part or her part. And what made it work, of course, was my ability to notice the sensory–grounded responses I was eliciting, and her ability to do that as well. She was quite sensitive to minimal cues and so forth. I suppose a person who is about to commit suicide would be, since this is their last time around.

In this example I skipped most of the steps I asked you to go through in refraining. However, the essence of what I did was the same kind of symptom subsititution — "What would you do if you didn't drink?"

One of the big advantages of hypnosis is that people's responses are amplified and slowed down. There's nothing you can do with a person in trance that you can't do with a person out of trance, as far as I know. I'm able to induce every deep trance phenomenon in the waking state. However, hypnosis slows the person down enough so that you can keep track of what's happening, and stabilize states long enough to be able to do something systematically. To do it in the waking state requires sensitivity, speed, and flexibility. With hypnosis, you stabilize a person in a particular altered state, so that she will stay there long enough for you to be able to do something.

Woman: In general, when do you use hypnosis—with what kinds of problems?

When I feel like it. Seriously, that is the only distinction I can figure out that makes hypnosis more relevant than something else. I started doing hypnosis for only one reason: I got sick of listening to my clients talk. I was so tired of it that I was becoming ineffective as a therapist, because I was not paying attention and responding to them in a way that was useful. I was responding to them out of boredom.

So I began just zapping them into a trance and finding out how little information I could work from and still give them what they wanted. Then the whole process of therapy became interesting again. Now I use it intermixed with everything else as a way of coloring what I do, mostly to keep me interested. I know 1 could get the personal changes more quickly and methodically, but for me, to sit down and do formal reframing is a boring task. Even though it's fast, it's laborious, because I have done it too many times. If I do something too many times, I don't want to do it anymore.

Hypnosis is a way of doing things in a bizarre and unusual way. Now I mainly create alternative realities with hypnosis. I create realities other than the ones that a person lives in—for instance, one in which she is a unicorn, because unicorns can do what she wants to be able to do but thinks she can't. I regress people to a younger age than when they first had to wear glasses and have them keep child–like eyes and grow up, as a way of working with myopia. It depends upon what people want. I just go for it in whatever way I think would be interesting.

Man: I'm becoming more and more interested in giving up my glasses and having normal vision. Could I do that using hypnosis? Do you have any astigmatism? Man: Yes. My left eye's really bad.

Well, that makes a difference. So far I haven't been able to do much with astigmatism. That doesn't mean it can't be done; I just haven't figured out a way to do it yet.

Myopia isn't too hard to deal with, because nearsighted people are just squeezing their eyeballs too hard. When they try to see something, they squint and strain, and that results in improper focus and blurred vision. All they have to do is learn the meaning of the word "focus." That's not really very difficult. William H. Bates developed a way of doing that years ago, and wrote Better Eyesight Without Glasses. It's just that people don't use it.

Do you know that optics is the only field that has ever claimed to be closed? If you read the literature from the 'forties and 'fifties, opticians thought there was nothing more to discover. Now it's opened again. Recently there have been some whackos who blew the field apart completely with light fibers and lasers and holograms. However, earlier introductory texts actually stated that the field of optics was a completely closed science! They claimed proudly that they knew everything that could be known, and that theirs was the only closed science.

The behavior of most modern eye doctors is still based on the idea that optics is a closed field. Most eye doctors have a very strong and very limited belief system about what is possible. Corrective lenses were originally designed to correct your eyeballs. Originally they gave you one set of glasses to wear for about three days, and then a weaker set for another three days, and so on, until your eyes got better. Then you gave all of the glasses back to the doctor. They don't do that anymore. Now they sell you one, and you keep it until your eyes go one way or another, and then they sell you another pair.

Man: So how about myopia? You say your cure for myopia is teaching people how to focus. How do you do that?

The way I go about that is to regress them to a time before they first wore glasses. Then I test their eyes, to make sure that they did not have myopia at that age. When I bring them back to their present age, I leave them with "child eyes" and grow up everything else from the eyeball out. I don't know what that means, but I've done it with a lot of people and it has worked.

I discovered this method when I did age–regression with someone who wore glasses. We used to do weird hypnosis groups where we just went around and zoned everybody out. I had age–regressed a man who was wearing glasses, and as he got younger, he couldn't see anymore. He was regressed to five years old, and he said "Hi there. I can't see anything. Why do I have to have this thing on my face?" and he reached up and took his glasses off.

I became curious, so I gave him a fairly standard eye test with his glasses off. I didn't have an eye chart, but there were letters on a poster on the wall, and I asked him to tell me what the letters were. He didn't know the names of the letters, so I had him draw them for me. He drew whatever he saw with squiggly lines. His writing was just like a child's. Then I brought him back up to be an adult and gave him the same test. Without his glasses he could no longer tell what the letters were. I regressed him to five years old, and he could see again. That was spontaneous. I gave no suggestions for that to occur. When I brought him out the last time, I gave him these instructions: "Now your eyes are going to stay five years old, and the rest of you is going to grow up." That's all it took for him to be able to see.

Woman: Did you do that all at one time?

Yes, during one evening. The results lasted for about two months, and then slowly his eyes started to get bad again. That's when \ started using reframing to find out what his purpose was for having blurry eyes. It turned out that over the years he had learned to do lots of things by having blurry eyes. Ordinarily he had what we call "see–feel circuits." When he looked at something, he instantly had feelings about it. Having blurry vision stopped the sec–feel circuit. During a time of stress, if he couldn't see something unpleasant, he wouldn't have the unpleasant feelings. I had to give him other ways of interrupting see–feel circuits, to take care of the secondary gain that came from having blurred vision.

Man: That's difficult with contacts. I wear contacts and I can't just take contacts off in times of stress like I could glasses. So I've learned how to defocus with my contacts still on.

You have an interesting presupposition, which is that you have to blur things somehow. You're assuming that in times of stress you don't want to be able to see what's going on until you can cope. It seems to me that times of stress are times when it's particularly useful to be able to see clearly. As soon as you have effective ways of coping, you won't need to blur your vision.

As I said before, years ago Bates came up with eye exercises to improve vision. For the most part his program was very successful, although it took time and was a lot of work. The main drawback was that the Bates program didn't deal with secondary gain. So if you were diligent and exercised, you could wipe out the only way you had to do something useful. That part of you would have to come up with a new way. It's a lot easier to change if you don't have to overcome your own internal parts.

Woman: Could you use reframing for weight problems?

That's definitely a heavy subject. Ambiguity is very important in hypnosis, you know. Obesity is no different than most anything else. You can do it with reframing.

Woman: Well, 1 haven't had much success. I've done reframing and clients have lost weight, but then they haven't been able to maintain their new weight.

Well, think about it, There is something which makes it more advantageous for them to be fat than to be thin. One possibility is that none of their responses will work as a thin person. The choices that they have available as a human being work as a fat person, but not as a thin person. If you grew up your whole life being heavy, you were never

the fastest runner. You were never the first one chosen to be on

your

track team. You weren't the first one chosen to be a square dancer. There are lots of experiences that you didn't have, which constitute the basis for knowing how to respond as a thin person.

If this is the case for your clients, you could create an alternative childhood for them—one that contains experiences which serve as a basis for responding in new ways as an adult. I do that with most people in whom I make radical changes.

In what I just said, I'm making assumptions about what the second ary gain is. I would use reframing to find out which part gets her to get fat again. I would find out what it does for her, and then I would know what experiences to provide.

One very nice thing about hypnosis is it gives you the ability to create alternative history. Erickson's story about the "February Man" is a good example. Erickson had a woman come in who didn't know how to bring up children and be kind to them and be a good parent, because she hadn't had one. She had been raised by governesses. Erickson went back into her personal history and appeared every so often as the "February Man" and gave her the experiences she was missing. Those experiences then provided her with the basis upon which to relate to her own children.

Hypnosis is just a tool. You can do just about anything with it. It's a tool to create any context or any response. But you have to know what response you want in order to be systematically effective.

Woman: I have a question about dealing with smoking. Could you regress somebody to a time just before they smoked and then reframe her to go the other way? She decided to smoke at some point, so could you reframe her to make some other choice?

Yes, and then she'll end up having total amnesia for ever having been a smoker. That's a slick move; however, you have to be very careful when you do things like that. I've done that with people. I've hypnotized them and removed their knowledge of ever having been smokers. I have regressed them to before they smoked and then given them an entirely different set of experiences. The problem is that other people in their lives began to think they were nuts.

If you do this with someone who has just moved to a new city, it doesn't matter, I did this with a client who was married, and when she got home, her husband offered her a cigarette. She said " I don't want one of those." "All right" he said, "You quit, huh?" She looked at him and said "I never smoked." He said "Don't give me that. You've smoked for twenty years." "I never smoked in my life!"

Woman: You could give the person amnesia for those conversations, too.

You could, but if you do it that way, you have to keep building on the change. You have to have her go into an amnesic state every time somebody says "Oh, you used to smoke." She will eventually begin to become confused and disoriented, because so much of her experience is in the amnesic state. She has yellow stains on her teeth, and she doesn't know where those stains came from. She asks her dentist, and the dentist says Smoking stains. She says "But I've never smoked." The dentist says "You're kidding!" Your client says congruently "No, I've never smoked." The dentist then writes a journal article about this new phenomenon.

You have to be somewhat graceful about how you do these things. I did it one time to try it. It worked very well, but the ripples that resulted from that change were a bit disastrous.

Man: Couldn't you include in the instructions that other people will assume that she has been a smoker? You would instruct her not to be too disturbed by that, just to ignore it.

Yeah, I did that with the woman I told you about, but it became disturbing for her anyway. I said "People will act bizarre and unusual about you, but you'll take it with a grain of salt and figure that they are just confused." But she began to become upset about how many of them were doing it. She thought the whole world was going crazy.

Woman; So what do you do now instead?

The simplest way is to just use reframing. You don't even need to put people in a trance; you can just use standard refraining. It works perfectly. Then you put them in a trance to remove the physical addition.

Woman: How do you remove the physical addiction in a trance? Direct suggestion.

Woman: Do you say "You are no longer addicted?"

No. That isn't direct suggestion. That's dumb. I'm serious. If you say "You will no longer have the physical addiction" you haven't said how. Some of your clients will be flexible enough to find a way, but most won't. You need to build up a context in which they can respond that way easily, If you do it too directly, you won't get the response very often. If you say "You will no longer want cigarettes" you're less apt to get it than if you say "Cigarettes taste unpleasant." You're even more apt to get it if you have the thought of smoking a cigarette be unpleasant. Better than that, you have them be totally proud every time they refuse a cigarette, even though they really do want one. You can create contexts in which the response is a natural one.

Usually I remove the addiction in this way: I go in and verify— either through finger signals or verbalization or head nods—that the unconscious knows what feeling accompanies the physical addiction. Then I ask the unconscious to spontaneously connect that feeling with another set of sensations, like pleasure or delight or curiosity, each time the feeling occurs. That way they'll end up doing something other than smoking.

You can use reframing with smoking and other drug addictions, obesity, and most other problems people want you to cure with hypnosis. You can reframe them first to solve the problem, and then hypnotize them in order to satisfy their request for hypnosis. You can make reframing a prerequisite to doing hypnosis. Rather than challenge what they came in for, hypnosis, tell them that you're a very special hypnotist. Explain that you're very thorough and don't want to use hypnosis to do anything detrimental, so you need to make lots of careful checks first. Then you go through the standard reframing. "Before I can put you into a trance, there are certain things I have to know. Go inside and ask if the part that is responsible for this pattern of behavior… . " If you act as if reframing is just the preamble, they'll hurry through the reframing so that they can get to the "real stuff."

After they are completely changed, you say "Now we can begin the trance. Close your eyes… . "Then you go through any hypnotic routine you want to. Afterwards they'll tell everyone "Hypnosis worked!"

Reframing is the simplest way you can get change in many symptoms. However, I'm not always for doing things simply; I'm for doing them artfully. Once you've done five smokers with straight reframing and you know you can get results that way, then begin to do it more creatively. Do yourself and your client a favor by doing it in a different and bizarre way. Do reframing in trance and take her to the Goddess of Cigarettes. Have her burn a package of Marlboros at her altar or something. Sometimes all you have to do for smoking is put the person in a trance and say "What I want your unconscious to do is find the most creative way for you to stop smoking without even knowing that you've done it." And sometimes you have to do a lot morel

People keep wanting to learn to do hypnosis so they can stop people from smoking and do weight control. When people ask "What do you do with smokers?" sometimes I say "Hand them a book of matches." Hypnosis is much too elegant a set of tools to think about as something that you use just for weight control or for smoking. That's like buying a Ferrari to go to the grocery store. There is something repulsive to me about using a really elegant set of tools in a trite way. Smoking and weight control are important, but the way you use (hypnosis to deal with a smoker is idiosyncratic to the person. What's much more important to me is to learn hypnosis as a set of skills, so you can use it idiosyncratically for anything.

Man: I did reframing in trance with a man on smoking, and got a lot of resistance. First he burst out of trance, and then he became a little kid. He started wiggling his feet and—

In NLP we have a principle that says "There is no resistance; there are only incompetent therapists." I mean that literally. I do not believe that there is resistance; there are only unskilled therapists. That shouldn't be taken critically. That should be taken as follows: every time you begin to encounter "resistance," you are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to delight yourself. If you say "Aha! I have done something which is incompetent, so now I am going to surprise and delight myself by doing something else¹' you will continually improve. If you think "He's not ready yet" he may change, but you will be stuck.

There's no resistance if you utilize every response. If somebody spontaneously goes into any state, utilize it. If he becomes a little kid, tell him to enjoy himself, If he comes out of trance, you can say "And what can I do for you now?" To be an effective communicator, all you have to do is respond appropriately to whatever spontaneously happens. If a person comes out of trance and you ask yourself "What did I do wrong?" that isn't an appropriate response. No formula works perfectly every time. People aren't willing to do anything rigidly. All kinds of strange things happen.

Once I put a man into trance, planning to do standard reframing. I said "Lift your right index finger for "yes" and your left index finger for "no" — and the guy went "Pur–ple!" At that moment, if you don't have patterns for utilization, you are stuck. I said "That's right, pur–ple\" I just fed it back to him in the same tonality and tempo. Then he said "Au–ra!" So I said "Pur–ple! Au–ra!" I continued "Now we'll take this meaningful message … "and I gave him some bizarre set of instructions for utilization. 1 had no idea what he was doing.

When he came out of trance, he reported to me that as I told him to lift up his "no" finger, he became engulfed in a big purple aura. The more he was in the aura, the more he knew that he was making some change. The aura was somehow or other saturating him and changing him. Who knows what that was about. Some purple cloud came down and changed him before I could get around to it.

If I had interrupted the purple cloud, I would have really gotten stuck. Instead I just went along with it, and it did my work for me.

I've had people who go way down into trance while I am doing unconscious work, and they are doing fine. Suddenly there's a pause, and they come all the way out of trance. They look at me, and I just sit there and look back at them blankly and wait. They look around and then all of a sudden they go back in. I don't even say anything; I just wait. When people come out spontaneously, I'm fairly patient and let them give me something to respond to. A lot of people are floaters. They go in and out of trance. So when they come out, 1 just wait, and then they will go back in, and 1 can continue. Then later they may float back up again. If you ask people to maintain an altered state, you are asking them to do something artificial. You have to be fluid in responding to their varying states.

Man: Could you use reframing for psychosomatic symptoms like headaches?

Reframing is great with psychosomatic problems. You have the option of using the symptom itself for a yes/ no signal. If the symptom is a migraine, for instance, you can have it hurt more for "yes" and less for "no."

Man: A lot of physicians' wives come to see me with psychosomatic symptoms. The symptoms don't do anything for the wives—the physicians just sneer at them and don't give them any attention or do things for them. It's hard to find a secondary gain.

You've already made an assumption about what the secondary gain is: that is has to do with getting attention. In the cases like that that I've done reframing with, the secondary gain has never been to get attention from the husband. It's usually a way of making a fool out of the husband. It's a way to keep the husband from being too pompous about being a doctor, by presenting him with an illness he can't treat.

They must give doctors courses in being pompous at medical schools. I meet lots of different kinds of therapists. I meet programmers from computer firms, and they are really different from each other. But most doctors have a really standard set of pompous analogues. Not all of them are pompous, of course; there are always exceptions to everything. But as a class, I don't know what they do to those poor people.

Man: If you spend two years interning, following other doctors around, it will make you pompous. It's modeling and mirroring. Susan: I've got a cold. Can you use hypnosis to take away a cold? A man came to me with a cold that he'd had for six months, and I made it go away. But his unconscious specified exactly how long it would take to go away. He'd had it for six months, and his unconscious wanted two days to make it go away.

Susan: I've only had mine for three days.

Well, I'm not going to take the time to do it now, if that's what you are asking. But I'll certainly give somebody else a set of procedures to do it with you. Is that acceptable?

Susan: Yes.

Who wants an interesting task? Woman: I'll do it.

OK. Do the following sequence. Put her in a deep trance and send her conscious mind away. There are several ways you can do that. You can send her conscious mind back to some pleasant memory. You can have it walk down a long tunnel and come out at the end in a place with gardens and fountains where she can swim, and then close the door so she doesn't eavesdrop unhelpfully. Set up a feedback mechanism so that you know when her conscious mind is there, and when it's not. You could have one of her fingers be up when her unconscious mind is there alone, and have it go down when her conscious mind returns. Use something like that so that you have feedback.

Then I want you to ask her unconscious if it would be willing to remove the cold, carte blanche. Get a "yes" or a "no." If you get a "yes" ask it if it will be willing to do so right now. If there is any hesitation whatsoever, whether you are using verbal or nonverbal signals, then go into the reframing format and find out if the cold serves any function whatsoever. If it does, come up with new ways of accomplishing that function. Get the unconscious to specify exactly how long it will take to make the cold go away. You do this with yes/ no questions too. You ask questions like "Would you be willing to take it away in one hour?"

In addition to that, as you bring her out of trance, overlap her into situations that will take care of all the physiological parameters of the cold. Overlap her into an environment where her cold symptoms would disappear spontaneously. If she has body aches, overlap into a hot tub or a whirlpool. If she has a drippy nose, take her into the desert where everything gets dried out. Find out what symptoms she has before putting her into a trance, so that you'll know where to overlap her to when you bring her out.

Woman: Where would you overlap her to in order to take care of a sore throat?

That's a good question. Where does a sore throat go away? What do you do to get rid of a sore throat? Woman: You gargle with salt water.

What are the odds of having a sore throat when you get out of the ocean after swimming in warm, tropical, salt water? About zero. If you actually went swimming there with a really bad sore throat, you might make your cold worse eventually. But if you go swimming in the ocean, especially if you go where there are some good–sized waves, chances are that all the salt water around will dry out all your membranes.

If you ever get a runny nose, and you can't get to the nose sprayer, or you don't want to get addicted to nose sprays, you can do something very simple instead. Nowadays there are some very addictive nose sprays on the market. They are more addictive than cigarettes. You can watch people in drugstores furtively going up to the counter and buying boxes of nose spray. It's really bizarre. All you need to do for a simple, non–addictive alternative to nose spray is to buy one of the nose–spray bottles and pour out all the nose spray. Then you make a salt water solution, put the cap back on, and spray the salt solution in your nose. That will work as well as anything else to dry out your nose.

Woman: Could you use the procedure you just outlined for a stomachache or any ordinary psychosomatic problem?

Yes. Put the person in a trance and do reframing first, to make sure that you give her alternatives if the problem is functional. Then do overlap for each symptom that the person has, as you bring them out of trance.

Susan: My cold is better–not entirely better—but while you were talking, it already started going away.

One time I got somebody's poison oak to go away on the spot as a demonstration. 1 put him in a deep trance and explained to him that poison oak is a mistake. "It's a mistake" I said. "Allow me to tell you the story of antigens and antibodies. Poison oak rash is a response to a plant to protect you from the danger of it, when the plant isn't dangerous. And then you get all this stuff over your skin, but it is your body responding. And it's just a mistake; and when you make mistakes, the best policy is always to go back and clear them up." Within two hours that person didn't have a trace of poison oak, except for little red marks on his skin in the places where there had been open pus wounds.

It is amazing what you can get away with if you are congruent. People frequently send us their "impossibles" to work with. We got one client who had neurological damage that impaired his ability to walk. We referred this man to one of our students, David Gordon, since we don't have a private practice anymore. The man brought lots of X–rays and records to his first session that "proved" that he was unable to walk normally. He hobbled in with a walker, sat down, and showed David all of his records. David did a few things, and sent him out.

The next time this client came in, David remembered something he had seen me do effectively with somebody, and tried it out. He told that man the story of the plasticity of the human brain. You should read neurology journals; they have the best metaphors of all. All of science is a metaphor. Plasticity means that one part of the brain is able to take over the function of another part. They've documented that this actually occurs. If a child learns a language, and then at the age of four gets his language hemisphere cut off, he will learn language again in the other hemisphere, even though that hemisphere wasn't supposed to be the one to learn language. If the part of your brain that moves your index finger gets destroyed, you can learn to move your index finger with another part of your brain. That's what plasticity is all about.

David put this man in a trance and explained how you could grow new pathways, and also use different pathways to recreate a function that has been blocked by injury. He told about studies which indicate that about 90% of the brain is not used. These are total lies, as far as I can tell, but he told them well. And since science documents that these lies are actually true, David referred to various journal articles while this guy was sitting there in a trance.

Besides direct explanations of central nervous system plasticity, he told more general metaphors about finding new streets to drive on when you're driving across a city and you come across an area where the streets are all torn up for construction. Then he gave this man's unconscious rather direct instructions to rewire: "Discover exactly where the damage has occurred, and check adjacent nerve pathways which are either uncommitted to other functions, or which may be recommitted safely without interfering with other functions, until you have restored the functions of the damaged area."

Whether that man actually grew new pathways or no., I don't know. But he got up and walked out normally after the session. Given the human being was to make whatever changes were necessary to be able to walk normally. Whatever that scientific metaphor was a metaphor for, the appropriate response was to get up and walk out. That's the way I think about designing everything that I do. We've also been successful in using this method with other clients who have standard medical evidence of neurological insult and trauma. Man: Is that what faith healing is all about?

I don't know. Is that what neurology is all about? You are asking me a question about verification of reality. It's probably all wrong. I don't know. Faith healers present a context in which the logical response is to change, and they do a much better job of it than most therapists do! They do a much better job than most of our students, because they have convinced themselves, so they are more congruent.

I did a faith healing one time. I walked into a religious meeting and looked holy. All the people stared at me; finally I communicated to them that I had this thing with God. I told them I'd had a moving experience where God had made me a healer with these hands. I convinced the people in this group, and healed some of them. I don't know how they .actually healed themselves. All I did was provide a context in which they could respond appropriately, and since I didn't point at them afterwards and laugh at them, they stayed healed and their lives were changed.

These stories are designed to show you that there is some mechanism within people that is capable of doing these things, but it needs to be convinced, it needs to be motivated, it needs to be communicated with, and provided with a context in which to respond.

Otherwise it won't respond, because it doesn't care. Whatever that part is, it doesn't limp, it doesn't itch with poison oak. If it did, it would go ahead and take care of the limping or the itching. But if you provide a context in which it can respond appropriately, it will.

This is what we accomplish with all our NLP tools. Reframing is just a context for people to respond to by changing themselves. That's all anything is, as far as I know.